Yet nevertheless … later on, when I was a young man, I often visited the place in order to imagine Tildy’s last night as vividly as I could, and on one of these occasions, over the door to the steps that led to the rooms upstairs that were rented by the hour, I discovered the picture of a hussar.
It was the photograph of the German crown prince wearing the uniform of the Danzig “Totenkopf” Hussars, a color print, evidently cut out of a journal and set in a cheap mahogany frame with no glass.
He sat his mount with his legs extended, with long thin tube boots casually stretched into the stirrups, with fully slackened reins. His horse was long-necked, with spidery legs as in the engraved portraits of earlier derby victors, idealized to the point of caricature: with its neck flexed to the point of overbent, and its barrel showing a shark-like taper, its small head reaching past the loose reins into the landscape, saying nothing. The prince looked lost on this horse: aloof in the saddle in his Attila-cape, which was as festooned with knots and braids and tassels as a Turkish crescent — and, above all, his fur-trimmed collar, which seemed too tall and too tightly strapped below his chin, made him look like something between a gingerbread horseman and an organ grinder’s monkey. The prince’s alarmingly narrow and overly long face was turned completely toward the viewer. From beneath his ponderously heavy fur cap, adorned with the pirate skull and crossbones, the prince’s gaze was gentle and calflike: shy, intimate, tender and surprised, exactly as if he had emerged from the depths of a fairy tale or risen from the fabled waters of some unusual form of existence to appear in this strange world of humans — a child of the Merman and Mermaid Rushfoot, sticking his head out of the pond’s reedy overgrowth, curious but hesitant, uncertain whether to dive back into the water or jump into the lap of the unfamiliar creature suddenly standing before him, asking for love.
The enchanted aspect of this fairy-tale calf had a somewhat repugnant effect that called to mind Professor Feuer’s neck straining out of his Byronic collar — the sight of which once led Uncle Sergei to note that while people of other nations are moved by the sound of the songs they sing, the Germans are moved by themselves singing. The crown prince seemed silenced forever, as if by a spell, but there was something offensive about his desire to communicate in such a tender, familiar way, by jumping right into one’s lap. It seemed like a betrayal of his princeliness; it suggested that he wasn’t entirely without a self, that he wasn’t one hundred percent the Crown Prince, that his unassailably superior surface could be marred by the impurity of being human. As a result, even the ultimate expression of his princely character — his undeniable elegance — seemed oddly fake, becoming a gesture somewhere between escape and devotion, between the self-renunciation of pride and that of love, which clung to him like a kind of secret need. What was imploringly shy and vulnerable in his forget-me-not gaze seemed painfully intensified by the overly tall collar of janissary-like splendor, which seemed to crown all the braids that joined at the breast of the cape: he looked like a child in carnival costume who has been shaken out of the happy magic of the disguise by some brutal event.
Neither then nor today can I believe that it was mere coincidence that Tildy’s last night and the love that made him human took place beneath this picture. The more I studied it, the more it seemed to be a vanishing point, the place where all the lines of my hero’s story converged. And I studied it with a degree of thoroughness I had retained from my childhood. No matter how passionately serious and conscientiously we pursue our later occupations, nothing can compare to the patience — and therefore the evenhandedness — we show during childhood, in the raw process of assimilating the world. Childhood is pious in the true sense of the word, because to be pious is to be patient while gaining awareness. As children we refused to let go of what we observed until we had completely assimilated it. This was not a logical process but rather some kind of metachemical one: we grappled with what we saw, grappled with ourselves in our attempt to understand, we took the time to absorb what we observed, in an act of layered copying that left it intact and whole, but nonetheless dismantled it into its constituent elements. And so it remained deposited within us, in a different aggregate state, a kind of labile composition of molecules, until some stimulus — some related image, a sound, the tone of a similar voice — precipitated a kaleidoscopic cascade of corresponding images. It was always an act of musing, in the true sense of the word, when we observed something, focusing all our senses on the secret essence that all connections and all things possess.
With some pain I recognized in the photograph of the German crown prince our hussar, albeit distorted, caricatured to fairy-tale proportions, but for that reason eloquent — a revelation of his essence. I glimpsed once again the lost poetry of our childhood and realized what had brought about the loss: our defense against the despair that lies at the root of existence, a defense undertaken in the spirit of Czer — nopol, of the world, against the threat of the void. My eyes had begun to see, they had ceased dreaming in the presence of the dreamed; they recognized their vision as fantastical and now smiled at it with the envy of the impoverished, and opposed it with the weapon of the poor: irony.
I also saw that this impoverishment had been bequeathed to us along with what was German about our childhood dream — that peculiarly German fairy-tale quality, bewitched and enchanted, split between dream and nightmarish reality. Our reluctance to view Tildy as a German matched our unconscious struggle against what was German within ourselves. We were more deeply related than we wanted to admit to our comrades-in-arms, the caterpillars that exploded into fire butterflies, and we were closer than we would like to their self-destructive being, so full of despair. We had seen their other face in the hussar, and were forced to recognize it as the figment of a German fantasy, which was dashed not so much by the contemptuous reality of Czernopol but by the worldly-wise smile of Prefect Tarangolian.
The curtain of darkness that had fallen after Tildy’s shooting of Năstase, and his subsequent disappearance into the twilight, now rises on a new scene, when his eyes meet the eyes of the streetwalker at the side of the drunken Professor Lyubanarov, in the smoky half-light of the Établissement Mon Repos. I never made the effort to find out what had driven him there. With the conscientiousness that for years bordered on an affliction, I gathered what information I could about his last night, I never thought to look for a reasonable explanation for that. The most obvious was that he followed Professor Lyubanarov to that place. But this — like all obvious things — was misleading. Where else could our hussar have met those eyes, and where else could he have met his death than here, under the picture that surrendered its meaning to me? He met her eyes in an unguarded moment — when they were observing him. He couldn’t know that she was very shortsighted. The unfathomable enigma found in all eyes that are wide open and set far apart was magnified by the veil of her myopia, and that must have affected him as it did every other man who met her gaze directly. Between these eyes, the base of her nose seemed a little broad in relationship to the fine tip and the delicately flared nostrils — so that she looked short and childlike. The girl had turned her doll’s face in the potlike hat toward Tildy, from the side, in a gesture of lazy curiosity born of boredom. She only understood Ukrainian, and although her attention was openly directed to the room and the men who were drinking and roaring, she made an effort not to appear impatient, out of a kind of professional courtesy, as long as she was afforded a place at the table of the enormous drunkard Lyubanarov, where she entertained herself attempting to decipher the effect of the professor’s speeches — German interwoven with snippets of Latin quotes. The high collar of her coat was snuggled against her cheek, with its shabby yellowed bit of ermine fur. Her young girl’s mouth, smeared with lipstick, was slightly open, in an expression of the gentle, almost tender irony with which one listens to the sound of boastful words in a foreign language.