“How can you be so indiscreet as to tell me that!” she said to us, indignantly.
12. Aunt Paulette Calls on Madame Tildy, While Papa Brill Visits Old Paşcanu
ALTHOUGH Widow Morar had attached herself so closely to Madame Tildy that she was living with her and hardly moved from her side, she was still not entirely lost to us.
Of course all the furniture in the Tildys’ house had been pawned, and the house had been acquired by another owner, but Madame Tildy kept living there for the time being. So Widow Morar stayed in our neighborhood and visited us — meaning, us children, and no one else — when Tamara Tildy was taking a nap, or when she had been sent by Madame Tildy on a mission that brought her to our house.
“I’m coming to you, my little ones,” she said, with closed eyes and a golden smile, “to no one but you, because you have no part in their disgraceful behavior, trampling on my mistress and slinging mud on her and laughing cruelly because she’s suffered such a fate. In all other faces I see scorn, but not in yours. We are living in an empty room, and no one will take her. She doesn’t have a blanket, and she’s always cold, she can’t help being cold, even with the sun at its warmest, that’s how refined and delicate she is. I have to take her in my arms to warm her up; I hold her like my own child. They took away her brushes, they were made of gold with the finest marten bristles, she can’t use any other, her hair is as delicate as a spiderweb and any other kind of bristle tears it out and makes it stand on end and spark and burn with every stroke. This makes her cry — is her hair supposed to mat away into elflocks? So I comb it with my fingers, I put each hair in order. But my fingers are hard and tough from all the hard work I’ve done my entire life, a widow all alone with three sons, mouths forever hungry, a challenge for a poor woman to fill. My hands are heavy and clumsy; she frequently loses her patience and hits me. She flies into a rage and throws herself on the floor and curses the major, who plunged her into misfortune, or else she’s perfectly still and holds her head at an angle as if she were listening closely and says to me: What do you think, is it nice where he is? I sense that it’s a nice place, she says, that he’s happy, yes I can feel that he is happy. Why does he get to go where I belong? Why is he in a place where there is peace and not me? Don’t you see that he betrayed me? Now he is where I should be, among all the others who are allowed to dream, who smile at each other and don’t even realize they are speaking, because they don’t need any answer, they don’t see whether a face returns their laughter or not, they don’t see any face at all. After all, they have themselves, they enjoy hearing their own voices, as if someone else were speaking to them, and they’re happy to hear that this other person says exactly what they want to hear and how they want to hear it; they have this person say happy things and bad things, let him curse and rage and are happy that he does exactly what they want; they are delighted. They ask him something and hear him ask the same question and they already know the answer, but they don’t want him to know their questions and answers, and so they ask faster and faster, and still he’s always quicker than they are, and they hate him and they get angry and shout and throw themselves on the floor to escape and roll around on the ground to shake him off — like your husband, Morar, when he wanted to drink death from his rifle. But you suck and suck at the cold iron muzzle and death doesn’t come; in order to die you have to let go a shot that erases your face, and this is what I am afraid of — so she tells me — I don’t want to be without a face, you hear, I don’t even want to be dead without a face, I am afraid, you hear, it’s horrible to destroy your face, even dead people need a face. I am afraid … And she clings to me and whines and yammers. That’s what I came to tell you, because you asked me what it meant to lose face. She doesn’t want to be without a face. I’m telling you this as a great secret, I won’t talk about her with anyone else, because the others spit on her, they’re full of scorn because of her misfortune, but you, you know better. I just rushed over to tell you that, because I have to get back to her, she sent me to fetch poison for the dogs she can’t feed anymore and who whimper for him all day long. No other man is to have them, and because they’re going crazy with worry we’re going to kill them, we’ll mix the poison in some ground meat and feed it to them — here, you see? The very best meat, almost four pounds. They almost chased me out at Dobrowolski’s when I told them we needed it for the dogs. Nothing to eat themselves and she cheats people so she can feed her dogs with roast meat, they cried. That’s the way they are — they don’t know a thing. They don’t know that this is the last blessing this earth has for the poor animals, and they curse you for giving it to creatures who are marked to die, because people are cruel and don’t understand anything. But they go on bathing their arms in blood up to their elbows and hacking the smoking flesh into pieces. They don’t know. That’s what I came to tell you, not the others, who don’t understand a thing.”
“And what about him?” we asked. “Is it true that he is happy?”
“If she feels it then it must be true,” said Widow Morar, smiling with her gold mouth. And he was. We later found out that it was true.
“You are surprised, even indignant, because they didn’t release Tildy long ago,” said Herr Tarangolian. “Permit me to say that for the moment it’s best for him to stay where he is. You can be assured he is being treated with the utmost consideration, with great courtesy and tact. The head of the institution, Dr. Kobylanski, is an unusually reliable man. And he has found in Dr. Schlesinger someone who can attend to Tildy with great sensitivity …”
“Yes, but none of that excuses the fact that a gross injustice has been committed, that it was all completely unwarranted!” exclaimed our Aunt Elvira. “You can’t just pack a man off to the asylum because he makes you feel uncomfortable.”
“My dear friend, if you had to decide his case, would you send him home right now?” asked the prefect, with an ironic look.
“You don’t expect us to believe that they’re keeping him there out of kindness, do you?” asked Aunt Paulette, the youngest.
“I don’t expect you to believe anything. I only said that he is being treated with consideration and tact.”
“So he has no idea what’s happening outside the walls of his confinement?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“But that’s even more horrible, if that’s possible! Isn’t anybody thinking about his poor wife?” Aunt Elvira was outraged.
“On the contrary, everyone is thinking about his wife.” Herr Tarangolian seemed to enjoy the general silence that followed his words.
“Permit me,” he said after a while. “Could he be of any help to her?”
“That’s not the question. But at least he ought to be given a chance to try.”
“Unfortunately that’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible.”
Herr Tarangolian shrugged his shoulders and busied himself with his cigar.
“Won’t Major Tildy demand accountability when he’s dismissed?” asked our mother. “A man of his character will consider this the worst thing that could be done to him, obstructing the performance of his duty.”
“Demand accountability from whom?” asked Herr Tarangolian.