“Bullshit!” Pepi Olschansky spluttered, “lady … lady … she’s nothing but a bum-beater, that’s all. I’ve never seen anyone better equipped to become a schoolteacher. She has a way of looking at a man that’s more sobering than castration. I’m always expecting her to chide us about our dirty fingernails or the way we hold our forks. If Duday Ferencz were to go up to her and say in his beguiling Hungarian way, ‘Miz Alvaro, eet would geeve me great pleasure to screw the ass of you,’ she’d simply look up and answer, ‘Dear Mr. Duday, you surely mean you’d like to screw the ass off me, at least I hope you do; you’re mixing up your prepositions and adverbs again, and in so doing you completely alter the meaning of the phrase and express a desire to perform an act of sodomy on my person which is generally confined to pederastic relationships. So if, as I trust, the heterosexual method is more to your taste, I suggest that until such time as you have grasped the finer points of our language you’d do better to avoid risking embarrassing misunderstandings and stick to straightforward, basic phrases such as “Miss”—not Miz—“Miss Alvaro, how about a fuck?” ’ ” We all burst out laughing, and the matter was settled for the time being.
A few days later Miss Alvaro was to cross my path directly. Pepi and I passed through Cismigiù park on the way back from our walk one morning and stopped by the chestnut tree in front of our temporary home; its fruit was thumping to the ground. I stooped and picked one up, peeled off the knobby skin; the nut was shiny and immaculate—“Rather like me when they took off my cast,” I remarked to Pepi.
“It doesn’t stay that way, unfortunately.”
The Löwinger house, which dated from the mid-nineteenth century, was distinctly rural in style, one-storied with a tin roof. It stood facing the road, a narrow courtyard alongside.
Just as Pepi and I entered the yard, Miss Alvaro emerged from the front door and the little brown dog scampered out between her legs, spotted us, and shot forward, yapping furiously, recognized Pepi, gave a howl, and shot back again. For fun I threw the chestnut at him. I hadn’t actually intended to hit him, had thrown the nut high, but the dog must have seen the movement of my arm, for he accelerated wildly and ran straight into the missile’s trajectory, taking the blow squarely in his exposed rectum. He was even more surprised than we were and let out a scream as though Lucifer himself had raped him. Pepi and I roared with laughter.
Miss Alvaro marched up and planted herself in front of us, glared at me with her big brown eyes, shook her head slowly and incredulously, and said, “You? How could you do such a thing? I would not have thought it of you.”
I was very embarrassed. Olschansky came to the rescue: “That’s his hunter’s blood coming out,” he said maliciously. “Didn’t you recognize it from the precision of the trajectory?”
“Nonsense,” I said. “It was pure chance; I didn’t aim at him. I’m very sorry.” And, although I had no liking for the dog, it was sincere.
Miss Alvaro said no more and was just about to turn and go when we heard Iolanthe’s voice through the open kitchen door: “Oh, do stop laughing, you silly goose,” and out tumbled the servant girl Marioară, doubled up with laughter, her hands to her face, wiping away the tears. When she looked up and saw me, she controlled herself long enough to say, “I’ll never forget that for the rest of my days, never, never,” and doubled up again. Her beauty surpassed the superb autumn day, and as she drew a deep breath, straightened up, and gazed at me again, I knew that her door would not be locked that night. Pepi knew it too. He said “Two birds with one stone.”
With which Miss Bianca Alvaro also got the message. She turned on her heel and left.
So I was all the more surprised when two days later she spoke to me. “I should like to ask something of you. Will you come to my room for a moment?”
We were alone. She dipped her hand inside her blouse, pulled out a bunch of tiny keys hanging from the chain about her neck, opened a valise, and took out a case wrapped in silk paper. When she’d finally unwrapped and opened it, she held it out to me. “I should be very grateful if you were to tell me whether this ring is valuable or not. I inherited it, but have no knowledge of jewelry. I come from a very poor family. I’ve heard of such things only in fairy tales.”
It was an unostentatious piece, no more than a setting for a single stone. The stone, however, was huge and green; if it were a genuine emerald, it would be worth a little fortune.
“I know nothing of jewelry either,” I said. “The best thing to do is to go to a jeweler and then double the price he names you. He’ll think you want to sell it and start the bidding low.”
“Would you do me the favor of coming with me?” she asked. “I’m from the provinces, a village near Kishinev, and I don’t know another soul here in Bucharest I could ask.”
I went with her not to one but three different jewelers. The values they quoted varied only slightly and were much higher than I had calculated. This seemed to confuse Miss Alvaro greatly, but she remained reticent. “Thank you very much,” she said, as we parted in town — she had already made it clear to me that morning that she didn’t want Löwinger’s to know about our undertaking, for she had asked that we leave the house separately—“thank you very much, you were as friendly and cooperative as I expected of you.”
This drove me to the brink of forgetting my manners. What on earth gave Miss Bianca Alvaro the right to “expect” anything of me at all? What standards had she applied to me and my character, what yardstick of behavior was I obliged to live up to? I for my part gave her no second thoughts whatsoever. By now, I had summed her up and knew which pigeonhole to pop her in. Iolanthe had not been wrong in calling her a lady, but the veneer of her acquired graces couldn’t hide her background from me: a drab little Jewish girl from a village near Kishinev — that she was indeed Jewish now seemed fairly certain; Pepi had been prepared to bet on it from the beginning. I couldn’t have cared less one way or the other — at all events, I knew her sort. They were a dime a dozen on every village street, all over Rumania; they spent their childhood skipping among mounds of horse dung and flocks of gay sparrows, warbling Hebraic words of wisdom in Jewish schools, chewing Mr. Löwinger’s marbled pens and poking their ears and noses with ink-stained fingers, disappearing then to the next town. They returned gangling, cheeky, precocious, and self-confident a couple of years later, unfurled little red flags, and chanted socialistic marching songs; then they went off again. The next time they came back they were unrecognizable — polished, poised, coiffed, and manicured, lugging doctorates on their proud shoulders; they dug themselves in and became dentists, high-school teachers, professors of music, and God only knows what other intellectuals, married similar solid burghers and produced streams of progeny, teaching them to speak refinedly through their noses, packing them off to the Sorbonne to get equipped the better to meddle with the course of the history of civilization. I had witnessed pretty near every stage of these developments in the Carpathian village where I came from, and surmised that Kishinev could not be so very different. And whereas Miss Alvaro no doubt regarded me as the epitome of a smarmy, once-velveteen-suited, governess-tutored youth, cutely twittering away in French, when the time came, my undivided attention to horses and hunting restricting my vocabulary to a fund of some three hundred words — but not hesitating to entrust me with her priceless heirloom! — I on the other hand couldn’t help seeing in her the snotty-nosed Jewish guttersnipe we were always in danger of running over when driving through the dusty village streets. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her she could think, say, or “expect” what the hell she liked of me for all I cared as long as she left me in peace.