Aunt Paulette said nothing.
“I understand,” said Uncle Sergei after a while. “She is not doing well? She is always hungry?”
“Yes, she is hungry.”
“Oh-là-là,” said Uncle Sergei. “But this hunger is very hard to still. Very expensive. The games I play are for kopecks.”
“You sometimes see a doctor, by the name of Zablonski or some such?”
“You are speaking of Madame Tildy?” our mother said, not without a certain edge. “Have you seen her?”
“Yes, I went to visit her,” said Aunt Paulette with unabashed nonchalance.
“To visit her?”
“Yes, the day before yesterday. There was already someone else there as well. A certain Herr Adamowski, an editor from what I understood. He was performing magic tricks.”
“He was doing what?”
“Magic tricks. He pulled a sugar-egg out of his nose, and other unappetizing and boring things. Card tricks, too. You should avoid him, Sergei, if you run into him in one of her circles. He’s better at it than you. You can recognize him by the fact he has a clubfoot. And a monocle. Both are hard to miss. Incidentally, Tamara Tildy seemed to be thoroughly amused by the man. She was practically bubbly, witty and charming. And the old Morar woman was lurking like a spider. When you look at her she closes her eyes and smiles. Her gold teeth are so bright you have the impression the sun is rising.”
“She waits on her, from what I hear,” our mother said.
“I think they sleep in one bed, if you can call what I saw a bed.”
“It’s horrible,” our mother said. “By the way, children, you haven’t been outside all day. Go play in the garden until Aunt Paulette calls you in to do your homework.”
If someone had told us back then that Aunt Paulette would wind up marrying Herr Adamowski, and then only after she’d been his mistress for a long time and under circumstances very embarrassing for all of us, we would have considered it the product of an unsound mind. We once spoke about it with Madame Aritonovich.
“What’s so hard for you to understand,” she said, “about your aunt falling for this man? Tamara Tildy fell for him as well.”
“And?”
Madame Aritonovich smiled. “Didn’t you ever notice how fascinated Paulette was by Tamara Tildy, from the very beginning, the same way you were fascinated by Tildy?” Except she was fascinated the way one woman is by another, through constant secret comparison, relentlessly lying in wait for the moment when she might emerge triumphant. She was younger and more beautiful, and that made her envy all the more bitter — that gives it an edge right away … You understand what I mean, Tanya, don’t you?”
Tanya didn’t answer.
“Of course,” the rest of us said. “And we could have understood it if she had taken Tildy away from her when he came back. But not this clubfoot, this salon-buffoon.”
“Tildy!” said Madame Aritonovich, almost disdainfully. She looked at Tanya. “You know what I mean, yes?”
Tanya still said nothing.
“Wait until you are twenty-five,” said Madame Aritonovich. “Live with relatives when you are young, beautiful, and at the peak of vitality but unable to move freely. Your expectations from life have been curtailed. Meet a man you find repulsive in every way — physically, mentally — but who has conquered the woman who makes you uneasy, because you sense that you have something in common, if nothing more, or nothing less, than a seed of the same despair. What will you do? You take revenge for this despair that she has beaten you to. You will want to hit her where it hurts the most, on account of your own despair … I don’t expect you to approve, I only expect you to understand … Ah, but sadly you weren’t in my school long enough, you little titmice, back then.”
The platitude that “You never can tell” could be aptly applied to the short time we spent in Madame Aritonovich’s Institut d’Éducation, and we could count ourselves lucky that we didn’t know back then how soon we would leave it. Because we were happy there, apart from a few very mundane childish worries — minor aches that later struck us as ridiculously trivial, though at the time they seemed as bitter as any sorrow yet to come.
One of those early pains, which I alone experienced, was responsible for our friendship with Blanche Schlesinger.
For a few weeks we had tried in vain to get to know her. But she was as retiring and shy toward us as she was toward all the others, and, moreover, we felt awkward and embarrassed by our attempts to approach her, and especially by our poorly feigned casualness. This was a technique we had picked up from Solly Brill, and to us it seemed a wonderful way to overcome embarrassment. But while such spontaneity was second nature to him, we were never to fully master it, not even later on. Nor did it work in the least bit with little Blanche. When her large, knowing eyes met our own, when we saw her sad smile that seemed to say “Don’t try to disguise anything, don’t put on an act, tell me what you want from me and I’ll do it if I can, if it isn’t too loud or garish,” we were stopped in our tracks, succumbing instantly to a sensitivity against everything garish, loud, or direct. For we had seen, often enough, how just one excessively familiar word or overly intimate gesture could cut to the quick, wounding a person where he was at his most vulnerable, at the core of his personality. And having to watch Blanche’s eyes grow a shade darker, or her smile turn more sadder, while knowing that whenever things remained unsaid that should have been stated hardly helped us overcome our shyness — well, it only made things worse.
I feel a little embarrassed when I say “little Blanche,” for although she was probably younger than we were, we never had the feeling that we had to patronize her, or that we even could. She was superior to us in every respect. Just like Solly Brill, and for the same reason: she was thousands of years ahead of us — the superiority of an older race.
We had no reservations when it came to treating Solly, who was a head shorter than we were and almost two years younger, as a superior being. His verdict on Blanche was, incidentally, absolutely matter-of-fact: “A whimsical creature, the Schlesinger girl”—and here he was right—“but intellectually anemic. Not worth talking about.”
So we contented ourselves with greeting her from afar, with a short nod and a quick glance, both conveyed in embarrassment, leaving us even more embarrassed because we knew that she was still observing us with her big eyes. And then the day came when she spoke to us.
It was during Fräulein Zehrer’s German class, which usually passed sluggishly, unless it was fraught with the kind of tension that made us refractory and unleashed all the bad habits children are capable of when pressed into a stupid and unenlightened educational mold, although it should be noted that Fräulein Zehrer was hardly the fossilized schoolmarm people are inclined to blame for the shortcomings and taxing boredom of school. She was healthy and red-cheeked, relatively young, blond, even bright. But her unconcealed disapproval of Madame Aritonovich’s pedagogical views and methods — which were never presented as a program but simply derived from her unique personality — made her contrary, and thereby inept. She taught in protest, and her protest was as much against Madame Aritonovich as it was against ourselves. Alone among the teachers employed at the Institut d’Éducation — mostly mousy old spinsters or kind, grubby old men — she had trained for her profession and had fallen victim to various modern ideas. Her ideal was most likely a German Waldschulheim—a boarding school in the woods with lots of sun, enormous windows, where the walls were adorned with the students’ artwork and where the children sat outside in a meadow, singing chorales in a circle — the idyll, in a word, of a kindergarten teacher. The very building that housed the Institut d’Éducation, a dilapidated private home where the only equipment was the barre in the ballet room, must have been repugnant to her. Her revenge took the form of teaching us with a matter-of-factness and thoroughness that suffocated us with boredom. My guess is that Madame Aritonovich probably realized all this, but kept her — or possibly even hired her — for pedagogical reasons, namely to provide contrast, following the only principle she ever did put into words: Children should not be spared anything.