By the time we encountered the girl Mititika Povarchuk, she had entirely lost her face. Hers was a doll’s mask, its beauty displaying all the cheapened and distorted features of some banal fashion, not one of them unique.
But when she met Tildy, her mask was presumably still full of the promise of countless faces. According to the fashion of the times, she kept her face framed between a nearly brimless hat that was pulled far down, and a high, flattering collar that reached up nearly to her cheeks. Her pot-shaped hat seemed to enlarge her head and shrink her body, and as a result her rigid mask of makeup gave her a childish appearance. She wore her hair short, with two curls under her hat clumsily and coyly teased across her temples. Her narrow shoulders were hunched together as if they were cold and seeking warmth in her collar, and her eyes seemed timid, lost, and distraught, appealingly bashfuclass="underline" her doll-like appearance concealed a nymph poised for flight. But then again she was all siren — dangerously and even triumphantly aware of her own allure. The timorous way she clasped her collar beneath her chin called to mind a woman attempting to cover her breasts when surprised naked. Her elbows angled sharply into her body, pressing her garment to her skin so that it offered no protection. Her dropped waistline hardly suited her knee-length skirt; it lengthened her torso and shortened her hips, and what was meant as a mincing step on her very high, thin heels was clumsy and ponderous despite all her svelte enthusiasm, and made her look like a wingless bird with a human head. On top of that, her hands were unusually ugly. They must have suffered frostbite at one time because they were bluish-red, with brittle, chapped skin and ruined cuticles, from which her long, painted nails grew out crooked, like claws. Her voice, too, was raw, cackling, and shrill. She was Ukrainian and hardly spoke more than a few words of any other language. The rough, thudding speech came as a surprise from her mouth, which despite all the makeup was still that of a young girl, so that at first she was difficult to understand.
Thus everything beautiful about this girl was offset by something ugly, and what was undeniably attractive — and that was limited to her figure — was also banal, because it was too much merely in vogue: she was too young, too poor, too uneducated to have a feel for quality. Her jewelry was tawdry and cheap. But it is an old theatrical insight that the best effect is achieved with the paltriest means, and I can only imagine that many women with everything elegant at their disposal except a brilliant sense of style must have secretly envied her, however much they may have disparaged her showy shoddiness.
People mockingly called her “the American girl,” because she claimed to be the daughter of an elegant man who had been forced to emigrate to America on account of some scandalous love affair but had managed to make a fortune worth millions, which she would someday inherit. I never made the effort to discover how much truth, if any, there might be to that claim. Because among all the phantasms we paint on the cell walls of our existence in an apparent effort to expand them and break through to greater things, it is the image of a secret, high-born ancestor that vouches for the nobility of our own character. It is a metaphor, the most obvious interpretation and reinterpretation of our sense that we are of different blood than the masses, or even a pious representation of this, which aims to legitimize the feeling of special distinction through the grace of one’s birth. If we still had gods, those among us with a need to feel extraordinary could claim divine ancestry.
I have imagined Tildy’s meeting with this girl no less often or thoroughly than his path to the asylum, when he was followed by Frau Lyubanarov, and in some mysterious way the one never fails to strike me as a paraphrase of the other: two scenes from a ballet about the proximity of death in which the dancer-like figures of life and death have been reversed: the one scene consisting of constant motion, taking place within the empty nothingness of insane visions, against the translucent, petrified tumult of colors of the autumn countryside, culminating in the violence of animal-like copulation and a killing without death; and the other a motionless set piece, a study in forlornness — three figures sitting, stiff and ailing, amid the vulgar carnival of a seedy dive, while intense love pours forth from them in barbaric beams, like the jewel-studded halos of Byzantine saints.
The dive, which fate, in its merciless staging, had chosen as a backdrop for this final picture, was called the Établissement Mon Repos and was a holdover from Austrian times, frequented back then by the excessively bored lions of the garrison. Since those days, however, the place had turned shady and somewhat slimy. Apart from a regular clientele of pimps and smugglers, it hardly attracted anyone — at best a few traveling salesmen from the louse-ridden hourly hotels of the neighborhood, and stray packs of drunken students, as well as the paymasters, veterinarians, and staff sergeants of the new regiments, who brandished their sabers and rattled their spurs, boasting and roaring while playing at being officers.
Heralds of a new age had arrived in the grottoes of crude provincial merriment, and the grotesque twist of the Charleston challenged the supremacy of the waltz: rubber-limbed Negroes with large, raftlike feet — only their outlines moving stealthily in a world of reversed light as in a photographic negative, the tortoise-colored Moorish scalps merging with the nighttime umber, so that above the hard chalk-white of the high collars could be seen only the milky half-moon of teeth and the perforated full moons of eyes shimmering like the luminous numbers on a travel clock, and hands invisible when dangling from the sharply turned-back, flapping cuffs — then popping into view when they splayed across the silver sea-horse saxophones like spiders crawling through a shaft of moonlight. Amid the poisonously colored cocktails and liqueurs, against the self-important typeface of the yellowed police regulations pasted next to bouquets of garishly colorful paper flowers at the tarnished mirrors, in the deceptive light of the fly-specked milk glass lamps, above the cracked, faux-marble counter with the constantly dripping and oozing nickel taps, and among the shabby, matted plush of the seating booths, the dubious world of pugilists and flappers was revealed in all its seediness. But at the Établissement Mon Repos, along with the coarse clientele came something tangibly rustic. At the bar they had set up an iron grate for the snacks known as zakuski, something to bite into while drinking hard liquor. Braids of garlic and red peppers hung from the lamps, and the syncopated jangle squeezing out of the curved funnel of the gramophone was drowned in the coarse, throaty rumble of Romanian curses. The crude toughness of the godforsaken province was colliding with the victory parade of the moderne, and as an abandoned trading post is quickly reclaimed by the jungle, the ineradicable peasant merriment spread over the vestiges of former half-elegance. The only difference between the Établissement Mon Repos and the countless Jewish taverns and coachmen’s inns of the disreputable neighborhoods was its shabbily pretentious name.