She looked at me. “I want to ask another favor of you. As the sole heiress, I inherited not only the ring you saw but the complete contents of my stepparents’ apartment. Everything else my uncle possessed — a modest bank account, a few securities, a share in a house, in a word, the remnants of a great fortune, he left to the Armenian Church. I’m very happy; it would have embarrassed me to receive a penny of it. Just the fact that he paid for my education at the convent and later in Germany — quite apart from countless other tokens of generosity — always made me feel, under the covert circumstances, something of a fraud. I have always had a bad conscience that my family concealed our Jewish faith from him. Naturally my aunt made no attempt to have me baptized; she simply let it be assumed that I was a Christian. And perhaps we were in our hearts, but not by right. I often found the conflict hard to bear and was more than once on the point of confessing everything to my priest, then suffered all the more afterward for not having done so. I saw myself as a criminal, not so much before God and my new faith, you understand, but before this wonderful, noble man, to whom I had so much to be grateful for, whom I loved as a father.
“Now to my request: can you understand that I cannot go alone to the apartment? There are the usual things to be done — go through the possessions, make an inventory, pack things up. To be honest, I feel unable to manage alone and know of no one else I might ask. Because of the years I spent in Germany I have grown away from the few friends I made here in my childhood, and of my present acquaintances you are the only one I dare impose on.”
Again I was tempted to ask her why, but it hardly seemed the right moment. “May I now buy you a cognac?” I said instead. “From what you tell me, I’m sure we shall find all manner of exquisite beverages in your uncle’s flat. We’d better get in training.”
The apartment was in a high-rise building not far from Biserică Albă. “How strange,” I remarked. “I lived round the corner until not very long ago, up there, on one of the roofs. I probably passed your uncle and aunt on the street many times without knowing that sad circumstances would bring us together one day. By the way, there must be a Russian garden restaurant around here somewhere, with a girls’ chorus that starts caterwauling every evening on the stroke of nine.”
She didn’t know it. “My stepparents moved here only a few years ago,” she said. “These buildings are quite new. I wasn’t here often — not because they kept me away or anything but they were so happy together that I always was a little shy. I felt I might intrude. They were like the lovers in David Teniers’ painting, sitting on top of the hay wagon gazing into each other’s eyes, oblivious of the emperors and popes being crushed to death under the wheels below; the Weltgeist itself spun a cocoon around their love.”
As she said this, Miss Alvaro smiled the little smile that was so becoming to her. I could well imagine her as the prim pupil of the Armenian sisters. The line of her neck was simple and lovely, expressing a modest but defiant pride.
The apartment was on the sixth floor of a building that conceded nothing in hideous barrenness to the one I had lived in myself. We went up in the lift, and Miss Alvaro said, “It’s a wonder it’s working. I’m afraid this too had something to do with my uncle’s premature death: nine times out of ten he had to walk up.”
We got out, and again she dipped into her blouse to extract the bunch of keys; I turned my head to hide my smile, as I wondered that her uncle hadn’t guessed the origin of his womenfolk from such characteristically careful traits, but then again, as with their physiognomy, perhaps Armenian girls had this in common with Jewish girls also.
She opened the door and we stepped in. It was a typical immigrants’ flat: a mixture of old and new junk, purely decorative, impractical pieces salvaged from the ruins of former prosperity standing side by side with the banal indispensables of day-to-day life in incongruous equality, creating that atmosphere of improvised coziness which one suffers gladly only in the comforting knowledge that it’s temporary. I had seen the same combinations in the dwellings of Russians who escaped the Revolution with nothing but what they could carry in their two hands. At second glance, I realized that many of the objects here were of some value, however, even though everything was either faded or chipped, and some pieces ruined completely. The modern, practical articles and gadgets had been chosen carefully from the middle-price range, not quite top quality but not quite rubbish either; the housewife’s dream — but a nightmare in taste. It was obvious whose hand had sought these out. Miss Alvaro’s aunt must have found in them a perfect outlet for her domestic zeal, and the noble old Armenian had obviously given her her head. Everything was clean and pedantically neat; nevertheless, as we stood there for a moment, I became aware of the odors of dust and musty materials, of biscuits moldering in hidden tins.
All the doors stood open: hallway, living room, bedroom, kitchen. One couldn’t see much, for the shutters were closed and the windows covered with heavily embroidered but decrepit curtains. Miss Alvaro crossed and opened a French window facing to the west, and raised the shutters. The sun had just set. I recognized my lavender-blue sky, paler now, colder, less sentimental. It had been late summer when I lived in the neighborhood. Now it was late autumn. Golden leaves fluttered down from the trees along the Boulevard Bratianu. Miss Alvaro trembled slightly. And for a few moments we both stood there looking out, breathing deeply, rather like divers, I thought, before braving the deep; but then the city below had much in common with the mausoleum behind us, much the same mixture of modern supertransience and flea-market curiosities. For all its Art Nouveau villas and futuristic glass-and-concrete buildings, Bucharest was as Oriental as Smyrna. The Occident, with its many-splendored towered citadels, was far away, there where the sun, dipping in, blood red, from the swamps and steppes and scrawny settlements of the east, would now only be prewarming the slate and copper roofs before melting them with its farewell blaze.
Miss Alvaro squared her shoulders and turned to her inheritance. “My aunt always spoke of their possessions, especially the furniture and glass and china, as though they were priceless. I’m afraid I’m no judge,” she said. “I only want to keep a few things for myself, things that are easily transportable. I’ve no intention of setting up house in the near future.”
On closer inspection it appeared to me that her aunt hadn’t boasted; there was a French baroque chest of drawers, an early English grandfather clock, a pair of octagonal Turkish tables with superb inlays of mother-of-pearl, silver and tortoiseshell. The rest was run-of-the-mill stuff: mahogany cupboards; a cumbersome fin-de-siècle bedroom suite, expensive at the time, no doubt; hanging flower baskets; a portable phonograph; a radio. Brocades, gold-thread embroideries, and cashmere shawls were spread everywhere, giving the impression of Oriental luxury. Everywhere too there was evidence of former opulence, surfeit: several solid-silver but aggravatingly incomplete sets of cutlery, dishes and bowls and trays of chipped enamel, fragmentary cloisonné, French and Viennese porcelain sideboard pieces, Bohemian cut glass, but each piece minus a spout, a lid, a handle, with the edges serrated, traces of glue.
I took down one of four leatherbound books with gold stamping that were standing squashed in between pulp novels and department-store catalogues on a bookshelf; it was an edition of Choderlos de Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses, early enough still to be signed only “C. de L.” Between the pages were a number of religious bookmarks; “Holy Brigitte, Holy Anthony of Padua, pray for us … ”—tokens of penance for disregarding the Index, most likely.