The one thing that might save us is a new heresy that could topple all the ideological institutions, all of the churches, all of the political parties, all of the nations of our wretched, barbaric world.

– Milan Barajano, in an interview conducted during the filming of In the Shadows of our Ancestors

 

On the hill above the city sat the ruins of an ancient castle, and I would occasionally bring girls there to walk with me in the evenings.  The castle had fallen or else had simply been abandoned centuries ago, and it existed now only as a scatter of evocative remnants: a crumbling wall of primitive masonry along the site’s southern flank, a raised bed of flattish stones which had once sat underneath the keep, and, most castle-ish, the hobbled remains of a cylindrical tower whose disassembly had been abandoned only partway through.

The hill was fairly tall, but its summit was easily accessible, less than an hour’s walk from the city’s central piazza.  A series of outdoor steps followed the hill’s rise, and these sections were not particularly strenuous, so that the castle site was heavily trafficked in the summertime, both by tourists and local visitors.  The stream of this traffic began to flow shortly after dawn, ebbed in the heat of early afternoon (the place was often empty at the siesta hour), and then swelled in the evening as the air grew cooler.  In the run-up to sunset, the atmosphere was festive: people uncorked bottles of wine and passed around paper cups (a kiosk that sold beer and laid out the rudiments of a beer garden in the form of a handful of plastic chairs and tables also did brisk business here), families posed for photographs, a portable radio or cassette stereo might be brought out, and the sound of music drift above the hubbub.

The castle site sat on a small promontory which jutted towards the city, and from this high up, the view it afforded of the city and its environs was impressive:  One’s eye would first be drawn to the buildings of the historical part of the city, which centered around the central piazza and the ivory cube of the mayor’s building that rose out of it.  The apartment buildings that framed the square were painted in pale, pleasant pastels: carnation pinks, canary yellows, dawn-bright blues, their slanted tile roofs a deeply-kilned ochre or a charcoal-dark grey.  About the piazza, grim, granite churches weighted down the scene like stones at the corners of a picnic blanket.  The roofs of some of the other finer buildings that surrounded the piazza, the overturned half-barrel that surmounted the opera house, the ribbed dome of a basilica, were colored a sumptuous verdigris, and out of this pleasing arrangement of intersecting planes of color there rose various spires, chimney shafts, bell towers, and cupolae.

The apartment buildings that spread out from the square were painted a conservative beige that shone gold in the late afternoon, reddened in the evening as the sun set, purpled with the twilight, resolving finally into a powdery grey slate as night fell.  Dark trees interleaved themselves amongst these buildings, a huddle of these trees indicated a municipal park, and as the city stretched outward these trees grew denser, the buildings thinned.  Beyond the city, the druidic woods, which extended towards the horizon as a complected field of black and variously shaded dark green, out of which the newer housing developments, brutalist apartment blocks lumbered like castaway giants.  These woods, their far reaches, made me think of the films of Barajano, those long, still shots of rain falling in primeval woods.  They existed, these woods, it seemed, only in this part of the world, and the sight of them brought to mind arboreal rites, the interstices of forest cover lit by pagan fires.

One made the ascent to the castle through a wooded park of larger and smaller trails that criss-crossed the hill, large sections of which had been terraced to accommodate the multiplicity of gravel paths, and then united at the summit.  On the descent, it was not difficult, abetted by the advancing crepuscule, to find a secluded spot to kiss without the possibility of being discovered, and I was very pleased with myself at that time that I had been able to devise out of the raw elements of this city an effective romantic program whose final leg led from an alcove formed by the trees of that darkening hill to my room at the boarding house on B___nyv street.

 

  Vira

 

My landlady was a stout, diamond-haired woman in her sixties and her home was the only free-standing house at the end of a row of apartments on this street, which led to the city center.  The house was well-appointed, bore a lifetime’s accumulation of furniture, maintained spotlessly, with enough rooms to accommodate a clique of permanent boarders as well as a rotating cast of tourists in the summer.

On my first visit to her place (this was during the waning days of the summer tourist season, and I’d found relief from the heat of the street in the cool, dark hallways of her house), Vira had shown me the rooms with the practiced, confident air of a seasoned hostess, moving and speaking like the docent of an under-visited museum, the script of her tour excitedly given, as though it was the highlight of her day, her words flying quickly as I nodded along with the best impression I could muster of comprehension as she enumerated the various merits of the house:  central heating, hot water available at all hours, a spacious backyard garden, etc., etc., without, it seemed, any awareness that I might have some difficulty in parsing her quick, colloquial Varrenian.

There was really only one major issue that I was especially concerned about, but the subject took some delicacy to broach, and as we advanced up and down a series of pine-floored hallways and she showed me the living room (a little dark and cramped, cluttered with glass knick-knacks) or laid out the terms of the board (breakfast and dinner included in the rent, a little bit extra if I wanted to take lunch at the house), I wracked my brain with how to approach the question, the difficulty lying in being forced to think across two axes: what to say, and then how to translate it, while also keeping the barest appearance of comprehension as she explained to me when I should come for dinner or speculated aloud to herself whether it would be possible to bring a television into my room.

“Yes,” she looked at me solicitously, stopping mid-sentence to do so, catching through the preparatory shift in my body language that I was about to ask her something.

“Would it be possible,” I stumbled a bit in forming the Varrenian subjunctive, unpracticed in the language, “to invite friends over?”

“But of course!,” she replied.  “This house is your home in our country.  And your friends can stay overnight if they need to.  Now, the trams stop running at midnight, but we have two lines that run out here, one on the corner of K___ian street, and the other at …”

When she gave me this reply, it was as though I had been trying to disentangle a very complicated and deeply woven knot, and Vira had swooped in to slice the thing clean through, as unperturbed by it as any other question about what kind of food was to be expected at breakfast or the status of spare keys, smoothing any trace of discomfort over by gliding effortlessly into a discussion of the tram schedule.  Later on, I would come to understand that her grandmotherly looks belied a view of and experience with sexuality that was more modern than anyone would have thought, but that she so quickly understood that a young man might want to bring a girl over to his place of an evening rendered me almost blushingly speechless.

The room that she showed me was small but neat, and contained three pieces of furniture: a modestly-sized bed, a wooden writing desk laden with drawers, and a large, wooden wardrobe, stuffed in its lower compartments with heavy blankets.  In compensation for its modesty and size, the room had the luxury of a window that overlooked the house’s backyard, and in looking out over the summery patch of greenery that extended from the house, as she showed me the room, I adopted a stance I would repeat many times over the course of my stay there.

When Vira showed me the lock on the room’s door, she took great pains to assure me that it was only for the sake of privacy that the door had a lock, and that I should not feel obliged to use it (the lock), or to take its existence as evidence that I should harbor any feeling of suspicion regarding the other boarders.  She emphasized that “we only have good people here,” and as such, I should feel secure in my possessions, and could feel free to leave my room unlocked if I wished!  Only (she explained), yes, some of her boarders, perhaps coming from places where there was more crime, where people could not be as trusted or trusting, felt the need to have a lock on their door, and, while she herself did not ever feel it necessary to lock a room in her own house, who was she to judge if someone else did?

This talk of “good people” was, I would come to decide, characteristic of her, and later on I would be able to garner from my experiences with her speech a collection of parallel phrases, which would go some way in forming my view of her:  “the good politicians,” “the good foreigners,” to which phrase she quickly added “like you!” leaving me both flattered and bemused, and finally, a phrase which would be relevant to me: “good girls,” which occurred in sentences of the form, “You have such good taste, you only date good girls.”

During the time that I lived in her house, I also thought in a very binary way with regard to people, but my binary was divided by the question of conventionality.  It was this question that cleaved the world in the most consequential way for me at that time, and it was this question: whether or not a person was “conventional” that determined my friendships and romantic relationships, and which would also guide the choices and decisions that I made, so that, for example, if I was on the fence about whether to take the fish or the chicken, I would attempt to cast the question in terms of the conventional choice and the unconventional one, and settle on whichever seemed closer to the latter.  In the case of Vira, that she had no qualms about my bringing girls over to my room should have been ample evidence to place her in the unconventional group, but her talk of “good people” and so on, so drove her into the camp of the conventional that at that time I couldn’t help but see her only in this way.  This prejudice against her was not diminished by the other ways in which she seemed to express an irredeemable conventionality:  I winced whenever she sing-songed the propaganda from state television:  “Thank goodness for the monarchy, or we would end up just like the Moravians!”  (In this period, Moravia had fallen into civil war, and the state news showed bloody bodies in the streets of besieged cities, guerrillas in balaclavas denouncing the ceasefires that their own representatives had negotiated and pledging to carry on the fight, artillery pieces lugged into the hills.)  Of the anti-monarchial protestors who occasionally cropped up in the capital, she leveled the formulation taught to her by state media:  “irresponsible agitators.”

Of course, in this instance, I made the conventional choice, which was to take the room, and this hypocrisy was also characteristic of myself at that time.  In doing so, I would learn that the terms of the room and board at Vira’s boardinghouse were even more generous than she had initially described to me, that in addition to three home-cooked meals a day, housekeeping was also included in the laughably small sum that I paid her each week to stay there, and Vira would enter into my room at, it seemed, purely random (and hence unpredictable) intervals to change the sheets, sweep the floor, and right the (in my mind) charming disarray that I let the room fall into.  The sheafs of paper and stacks of notebooks that I had scattered with geological haphazardness on my desk, she would set into neat stacks in the (to me) repulsive approximation of a government clerk’s desk.  The spill of books that I let linger on the floor by my bed she stacked in size order on my writing desk, and the hand’s grab of prophylactics that I’d lazily hidden underneath these books, I would later find, to my horror, tucked discreetly in the desk’s upper drawer.

 

*

 

I’d come to the city on an academic post, teaching Amarguese language at the Varrennian National Cultural University, the largest and, I believed, most prestigious institution outside of the capital.  A two-year contract seemed a slice of eternity, and I felt a kind of anticipatory dismay that I would be thirty at the time of my contract’s expiration.

I’d imagined naively that I had finagled my way into the position on the thinnest set of credentials, had crowed to my friends about my feat when I received my offer letter, and gone so far as to daydream about recounting the story years later (fast-forwarding through my stay in the country, which was for me, prospectively, an unknowable but, I was sure, adventurous blur), where I would portray myself as a sort of picaresque hero: Once in my late twenties, I tricked one of the national universities of a foreign country into giving me a paid post as a professor…, not realizing that the university of an impoverished eastern country might be desperate for any warm body to round out the vampiric ranks of its aging professoriat and would hire more or less anyone foolish enough to accept a salary paid in the form of icy dorm rooms and meal vouchers. (It was the squalidness of the faculty dormitory, with its rust-streaked communal bathrooms that had driven me to seek out Vira’s boarding house.)

I was vague to Vira about what it was I did at the university (to my credit, the university was also vague about what it was that I was doing there), and through this vagueness I may have inadvertently caused to expand her estimation of me, so that, for example, at a first dinner whenever a new boarder arrived, she would introduce me as “our resident scholar,” explaining that I was “doing important linguistic research at the university,” leaving me to beam like a cow-licked grandson.  I was nominally attached to and sponsored by the university’s philology department, but the department’s administration was evasive about what my research program should consist in, and suspecting that trying to pin this question down would lead to awkward conversations for both parties involved, I left the matter unpursued.  The other professors guarded their classes jealously (I understood why later), and I was relegated to teaching a single section of Amarguese conversation, which met twice a week and in which, I had to do little more than prod my students along with a few prompts during the occasional lull in the conversation to shepherd us through the hour.

What I had, then, was a vast hoard of free time, which seemed an obscene luxury in Vira’s house.  On those days when I had no classes to teach, no business at the university, when Vira bade me goodbye as I set out from the house after breakfast, I felt a little bit like those tragic husbands who, after being sacked, still put on a suit every day (“Have a good day at work today!”), still march out with a briefcase (“Don’t forget to take your lunch!”), to put on the appearance that they are still employed because they are too ashamed to inform their families that they no longer have any gainful dealings with the world.

In spite of the fact that Vira’s hours were constantly occupied (or perhaps because of this), she seemed to be possessed of a constant, beatific serenity and moved about the house — her house — with a tireless, humming energy.  Her hours were devoted largely to the kitchen, waking at some indeterminate hour while I and the other boarders still existed in a state of sleepful oblivion to fire the stove and prepare pancakes, oat porridge, and coffee for her boarders’ breakfasts, and staying there through noon to begin preparations for lunch and dinner, her only excursions from this post made to sweep the hallways or do the laundry, her only rest a lonely post-prandial siesta in the afternoons, which would give her the energy to mount to the kitchen in preparation to cook our dinner.

This serenity of hers was married to a solicitousness that combined the professional hyper-courtesy of a maitre d’ with the almost suffocating concern of a grandmother.  If I so much as hesitated when she asked me, “Are you hungry?” (if, say, I’d stumbled upon her sweeping in the hallway in the afternoon), I was sure to find, moments later, on the dining room’s majestic oak table, a heavy plate laden with cold cuts, dense, dark breads, sliced peppers and tomatoes tossed with onions and vinaigrette into a quick salad.

“How was work today?” / “How were the students today?”, she would ask me when I returned to the house in the afternoon or evening.  And because these were conventional questions, I could give only conventional answers. 

“Oh, quite good,” I would say, instead of correcting her misprision by admitting that I hadn’t taught a single section that day, nor had had any dealings at the university, that while she had toiled in a state of near constant work, I had spent my day as freely as a rentier or a vagrant.

 

 

Vira’s solicitousness extended to my relationships with women.  Out of a grandmotherly instinct towards the possibility of procreation or a maitresse d’s habitual discretion, she failed to do anything that would endanger my relations with the girls I brought home, including, what I would have feared most, mentioning to any of these girls that they were not the first that I had brought over, going so far as to tell one of them once, “I’m glad that he found you, he seemed so lonely.”  If I brought a girl over whom I’d snuck in overnight, I was liable to find her laughing over coffee in the garden with Vira in the morning, charmed by this matronly force.

Hard to know what to read in her expression when Vira smiled at me, the maitresse d’ in her seemed to prevail over all other aspects of her personality, she was the soul of discretion, although I detected in the looks that she gave me a wryness that was both indulgence and chastisement, encouragement and a finger-wagging disapproval.

Although she was my landlady, I seemed to always come upon her in a physical arrangement that deleveled our relationship, that put her in the cast of servility:  stepping past her as she mopped the hallway that led to my room, or seeking her out in the kitchen where she was rolling out dumplings, and a slight hesitation in my body language prompted her to ask me:  “Yes!  Tell me what you need.”

Later on when I tried to correct the dilettantism that I had so well-cultivated in my youth, and I began lingering in the sections of bookstores devoted to books about correcting the mistakes one has made in life (so many!), I would find repeated the assertion of the psychological principle that action, behavior, drives personality, that in acting a certain way sufficiently numerous times, a person adopts the thought patterns, the mindset, that correspond to that pattern of actions, and in a similar way, because I was always running into her at a moment when she was doing something for me, poised in a servile state that was closer to washerwoman or private cook, because the physical form of our relationship took on that form, if only momentarily (but repeatedly), our relationship strained itself in that direction, as slowly, but as surely, as a heavy-headed flower directing itself towards the rays of the sun, and this may have compelled her, whatever her personal feelings, whatever her compunctions, into aiding me in a womanizing that a woman of her age and generation should naturally have disapproved of.

Partly out of a desire to understand her better, and partly out of simple boredom, I studied the photographs in her living room.  A stern-faced, square-jawed man with a sweep of thinning hair could have been none other than her late husband Yanosek, whom she would occasionally invoke in an affectionate diminuitive, “If only my Yashik could see this…”  In another, a buxom, curvaceous blonde in an evening dress, stunningly beautiful, and as voluptuous as a fertility goddess.  The smile was the same, the serene beam that emanated from her countenance the one I saw wishing me a good day at work every morning.

 

*

 

Summer evenings we would dine at a long wooden table set in Vira’s backyard, where she cultivated peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, their leaves punctured by insects.  At the house’s maximum capacity, these dinners comprised nine, ten guests (at these times, a serving woman came in to assist with the cooking). 

Although otherwise temperate, Vira would occasionally indulge in a tumbler of the moonshine that was brought in by guests or her family — the source of this moonshine was always “the village,” evidencing that beyond the generation of Vira, there was a further rank of forebears who worked the lands, fermented potatoes and wheat, distilled their mashes in primitive stills, into which were thrown fennel, nettles, willow bark into a resultant drink that was both tonic and inebriant — and speak with a freeness that momentarily felled the walls that separated her from us as our landlady.

One evening in a discussion of the film director Barajano, I heard an exclamation in a remarkably Vira-like voice, “I met him!  He kissed me!,” but surely too loud to have been our Vira, until I looked over (she was sitting a knight’s move away from me, on the opposite side of the table, and a pair of seats over) and saw her eyes glistening with dreaminess and drink. 

This evening we were hosting, inter alia, a young married couple, about my age, who were spending a few days in town as part of their summer holidays before they continued on their tour west to the mountains, and I was eating quickly in preparation for a date, tucking into a plate of roast chicken and peppers stuffed with spiced bulgur, waiting for the potato dumplings to come round.

The couple had taken an interest in me after Vira had introduced me as “our resident scholar,” and peppered me with questions that I answered hastily between bites, conscious that I had to be at the central piazza in less than an hour.  By this time, my competence with the language had been much improved, and I could between answers, toss off the occasional “Would you kindly pass the dumplings?” or “If I might take another piece of chicken here,” as I hungrily devoured my meal.

“What was the source of your academic interest in our country?”, the husband asked me as I reached for a tureen of gravy (Vira had whisked the dumpling broth into a roux, into which she had added the drippings from the baked chicken, and then reduced into this mouthwatering sauce), and I replied that I’d always admired the films of Barajano, that the country portrayed in his films always seemed so lovely, so romantic, and this had been the seed of my desire to see the country.  Even this evening had a cinematic quality that reminded me of a scene in Towards the End of a Life, where the family ate dinner together outdoors on a similar summer evening.

“Yes, he’s a national treasure,” said the wife.

“Absolutely,” I said absentmindedly as I squinted to the far end of the table to see if, yes, the little jar there contained the pickled chestnuts that I liked so much, and indicated to one of the far diners that they would do well to pass it over.

Our conversation must have rippled towards Vira, and I imagine some exchange occurred which had prompted Vira’s outburst:  “Now what are those young people speaking about down there?” / “Barajano.  You know, the director.” / “Ah, him.  I met him!  He kissed me!”

Certainly this declaration deserved some elaboration, and I was scooping myself a generous portion of the fragrant chestnuts when she began her story:

“Well, this was many years ago when I was living in the capital, which was still only the provincial capital because we had not yet won our independence.  And when I first came there, you could go to the labor bureau to find a job — it wasn’t like today where employment is so difficult to come across; everyone had work!  Anyone who wanted it could find work, and it didn’t matter if you were just a girl from the village, there was no prejudice.

“They asked me:  ‘What are your skills?’, and ‘What would you like to do?’, and at first I went white as a sheet because I had no skills!  So I lied, thinking that I was being very tricky!, and said I had had some experience as a secretary at the village bureau and perhaps could do some work along those lines.

“And the clerk told me, well there is a position, and they are looking for a young woman.  There was a movie producer who needed a secretary, and would I be interested?

“And I said, yes!, I could do that, even though,” she lowered her voice as though invoking a conspiracy, “I had never had any experience in such work. 

“This producer was a Mister H___bev, and I worked for him for about three years and learned the movie business from him.  Well, during the time that I was working for him, that was during the production of In the Shadow of Our Ancestors, and Mister H___bev and Mister Barajano were meeting every week to plan out the production and the budget and everything involved.

“Mister Barajano, why he looked just the way he did in the magazines.  You know, with that crew cut of his, and with that very intense stare, and he never smiled.  And that was how he would always look at me whenever I saw him.

“Until one day he looked at me and said something like: ‘You, I must have you,’ and he came right up to me and grabbed me, and he kissed me, right then and there!  Well, I pushed him right off me, and I said to him, ‘Mister Barajano!  You may not treat me like this!’  And he was a married man!  Because at that time he was married to the actress Marah Sharapín.”

“A pig,” the husband in the young couple assessed.

“They do say that artistic men are more promiscuous,” his young wife declared philosophically, “that the creative gene seeks out variety in all things, including women.”

“That is no excuse.  He grabbed her!”

Vira went on:  “Well, he said all the things that a woman would want to hear.  That I was beautiful, that he could not stop thinking about me.  And he grabbed me and kissed me again, and I said ‘No!’ and I pushed him off again.  Truthfully, I was not afraid of him.  I told him that whatever he wanted, he must treat me like a lady first, and we could begin a conversation from that starting point. 

“So he took me out to a restaurant, and he offered me so many things.  He would give me my own apartment in the city, he offered me an acting job, not a starring role, not immediately, but he could find a minor part for me that could give me a break into the industry.  And I knew, because I had worked in the movies for a year already, how important that was, to have a break.

“And if he had offered to make me his mistress without an acting job, you know I probably would have said yes.  He was handsome!, he was a genius!, he was Barajano!, but it spoiled things when he suggested that there should be an exchange.  A great man’s mistress, I could be that!, but I couldn’t be a whore.”

The eyes that had been lifted by remembrance landed upon me when she spoke this final word, and it quieted the table when she said this, so that I felt a little bit self-conscious as it rendered audible the sound of my mastication.

“So, I told him no.  I was afraid to say no to him because I didn’t think anyone could say no to a man like him.  But you know what?  He was a gentleman about it.  And he respected my wishes.

“And that is the story,” she declared smiling at us, “of how I almost got to be an actress.”

“Why, Madame Vira, what an amazing life you have led!”, the young wife declared.

The husband furrowed his brow.  “I suppose I’ll never watch Barajano’s movies in the same way again.”

“Oh and he was such a terrible kisser!  Not like my Yashik!,” Vira declared smiling.  “If only he had offered me the acting job without an exchange.  I might have taken it.  Could you imagine me as an actress?”

She put her hands at her hips, craned her neck into a three-quarter profile, a caricature of a movie-star pose (a photograph flashed in my mind).  And we laughed, a little bit inebriated by the tonic of Vira’s sudden turn of humor.

“Acting is a skill, you know!  You have to go to school just like anything else.  And work hard and apply yourself.  And many great actors start off very young.  By then, I think I would have been too old to learn, probably.  Maybe I said no because I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of the cameras.”

“I think you would have been a lovely actress, Madame Vira,” the young wife countered.

“And it wasn’t only that.  When I was young, I thought that there were different kinds of people in the world, and I felt too simple to be the kind of person who could have an affair like the one he proposed to me; I was just a girl from the village.  I was so inexperienced and naive, and I thought that even to be Barajano’s mistress I had to be a different kind of person, that I had to be more sophisticated, or more ‘artistic’ or more of a ‘bad girl.’  But now I think that I was wrong about things then.  Now I know that anyone can be anything.  There are no classes and no types.  There’s only what you decide to do at any moment, and a person can decide to do whatever they want.”

She took another swig of moonshine, and there was a touch of brazenness to this gesture, as though it were the first thing they taught you in an acting class.

“Only, maybe you make some choices in your life, and when you are older, it’s harder to take back those choices.  And people might see you in a certain way.”  She burped lightly, her hand moved to her upper chest, once again she was no longer looking at any of us, content to gaze at a point in space that was both far in the distance and deep within herself.  “Not knowing that you were not always the way that you are now.  And it’s hard for them to see that a person is really very many people, and can never be only one thing.

“And why, when you see the person that is in front of you, what you see may not be the truth of that person, but only what they are at that moment, which is often very distant from the person they have always have been, or the many other people they have been and could have been.”

She looked at us, unafraid to reveal that a sheath of moistness now clouded her pale eyes.  “But look at me, now I’m sounding like a philosopher, like a professor, just like our Mister ___,” and here she spoke my name.

 

 

I would end up being late for my date that evening, and the recrimination that my lack of punctuality engendered spoiled not only the remainder of that evening but my relationship with the girl in question.  As I wandered the central piazza feeling a little bit drunk and a little bit lonely amidst the crowds (it was the height of the summer tourist season) of nighttime revelers, evening strollers, buskers and street performers, I thought of Vira, laughing a little and shaking my head to think that Barajano, who existed for me only as a photograph in a magazine, or a line of credits over a rush of dark trees: A film by Milan Barajano, had once propositioned the very woman who now cooked my dinners and laundered my underwear and bade me goodbye every morning with the wish that I should have a good day at work, and from that day on, although I still never saw her face clouded by distress or melancholy, I would, at odd moments, if, say, our voluble hostess was quieted by a momentary shift of the dinner conversation’s center of gravity away from her end of the table, find in her countenance, a wistfulness that is the last remnant, the final stage, in the life of a human regret.

 

Madelỳna

 

One of the perquisites of my job at the university was that the philology department furnished me with a tutor who gave me private lessons in Varrenian language several days a week.  It was through Madelỳna that I learned why it was that the other professors at the university were reluctant for me to take on (as I would have done happily) the burden of their Amarguese language classes.

“It is corruption.  We must make exchange for our marks.”

We were sitting at an outdoor cafe on S___chek street.  This was a cobble-stoned lane that was among the oldest in the city, a narrow street hemmed by ancient stone maisonettes converted to restaurants and cafes at street-level, its weathered charm most compelling in the evenings after the sun had set, as it had, just, when she spoke these words, providing the upper reaches of their stone facades a burnished autumnal coloring. 

“Do you mean that you have to give the professor money just to pass a class?, or only if you have bad marks?”

“In principle, only if you have bad marks.  But in practice, everyone must pay something.  For example, you can not attain a ten, and it is no matter the quality of your work.  Even if you write a paper that is a ten, you will get a nine.  Or an eight.  So you must talk with your professor.  And then, if you make exchange, it can become a ten.”

Madelỳna was herself a student, then in her third year at the university when she had volunteered to become my tutor (an unpaid position that she’d taken, partly, it seemed, out of genuine curiosity towards a foreigner and partly to decorate her CV), and for this reason, I trusted her when she spoke on matters like this; she had first-hand knowledge of at least half of the transaction that she was describing.

“How much?”

“It depends on how badly you need it and how poor your marks are.  But let us say…,” and here she gave a figure that when multiplied by a classful of students and then further multiplied across a term’s worth of classes (I began to do the math in my head) could, I figured, just barely keep a person and his family fed.

I’d always found there to be an air of poverty about the professors at the university.  This was best exemplified by the case of Professor K___ynk, who, stooped, hollow-cheeked, vaguely mole-ish, dressed perpetually in a threadbare grey coat that must have once been brown, looked as if he’d been recently been liberated from a death camp — in reality, it was an occupational hazard, years of submergence in the Nachlasse of obscure esoteric hermeneuticians, that had robbed him of his vitality, as radium poisoning might slowly sicken a chemist.  Even among the younger or more energetic professors at the university, I encountered alarming flashes of penury.  In the philology department’s faculty lounge I came across, one afternoon, a professor who I had up till then quite admired eating a lazy meal of crackers and an oily substance (a tapenade of crushed anchovies?) out of a tin, crumbs spilling messily about the soiled cloth napkin that he was using as his plate.  A flood of cockroaches could not have engendered in me the same shuddering feeling, because the sight of this middle-aged man hunched over his food tin brought to mind visions of societal collapse, bombed out cities, smoldering metal-barrel-fires, battles in queues for cabbage rations.  The mise-en-scène of the university, its florid mouldings, the stately orders of its colonnaded facades, a faded fresco painted round the domed ceiling of the central foyer (soaring, scrolls-bearing putti), only highlighted the contrasting poverty of its occupants, as if we were the murine inhabitants of a diminished medium aevum, scuttling amidst the ruins of the last golden age.

I also considered the calculation in the converse.

“But that means you’d have to pay…,” I spoke a sum that I had calculated, “a term, just to get by in school.”

She smiled at me, laughing, set down her cigarette.  “You see how fucked up things are in this country.”

Although her hairstyle changed with the seasons, I tend to picture Madelỳna, when I conjure up in my mind specific scenes like this one, our conversation that evening, in the style she wore when I first met her.  Madelỳna’s chestnut-colored hair had begun for me as a conservative straight bob, grown to shoulder length, falling straight as drapery.  Like her style, her looks were very conventional, and although it would have been easy to call her pretty, I think that few people would have said that she was truly beautiful.  Besides a broad forehead — more fetching than it sounds, and also her most fetching feature — and vulpine eyes that I found alternately ironic, acquisitive, and imperious, she had no particularly distinguishing characteristics, and if I had crossed her in the street, or at the university, before we met, I do not think I would have noticed her.

“Of course there are always some sluts,” she muttered under her breath in Varrenian, “who sleep with their professors so they don’t have to pay.”  (The Old Varrenian word for “girl” has pejorated, as tends to happen in most languages, into a word meaning “prostitute.”  I’ve chosen to translate it here into a word that gives a better sense of what she was trying to say.)

This frank assessment of the state of her country was characteristic of the attitude in all of our conversations about Varrenian society or politics.  Politically, she was as independently minded as any young person would be expected to be.  Although she had as low an opinion of the the anti-monarchialists as Vira, she shared with them a contempt for the king, whose reign she regarded as illegitimate.

“Of course, the king is the ultimate source of corruption in this country.  It is because he feels he must buy his legitimacy.  In this way, he allows his ministers to steal from the people.  Really, it was a mistake to attempt this project of the monarchial restoration.  You see how one man’s weakness has poisoned an entire nation.”

She took another drag from her cigarette.  “But what is it that we can do?”

 

 

Our initial meeting would have befit a spy movie:  Arriving at a precisely chimed hour at the sweeping marble steps that rose from the foyer of the university’s main entrance, on the first day of the school term, I saw advancing towards me a young woman, in heels!, dauntless in her step, in a march that seemed inflected with demand, and when she saw me, she spoke to me in crisp, accented Amarguese a sentence that is, according to some philosophers of language, a tautology:  “I am Madelỳna.”

After our introductions, she led me to an isolated classroom with a window that looked out on the park in front of the university, a broad, chalk-dust-peppered blackboard, a little sink whose white basin was streaked with rust (the professors were in the habit of cleaning their blackboards with a large sponge), a sturdy, bare teacher’s desk.  This then, would be the room where I would receive my tutorials in Varrenian language.

Having never studied pedagogy and being herself capable of extraordinary feats of concentration, study, desk-sitting, Madelỳna stuck to old-fashioned methods of instruction: lugubrious grammar drills, the rote memorization of voluminous, branching vocabulary lists.  Under my taskmaster’s watchful eyes, I advanced grudgingly through our textbook, a densely printed tome lacking in pictures (something I would have liked to complain to her about, but didn’t, for fear of seeming childish).  With its hard-backed chairs, the hieroglyphic scrawls on its blackboard, our little Room 215 was like a kind of prison cell out of some avant-garde play.  Steely in her self-discipline, Madelỳna did not falter or pause whenever I acquitted myself poorly in a grammar exercise or a vocabulary quiz, instead she marched on to the next lesson with the same unflagging energy that she’d brought to the previous chapters.

The most desirable aspects of particular women are always wasted on the wrong men.  I think of the philosopher who confessed in his memoirs that “to fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments,” a desire which he nevertheless was unable to consummate (alas!) in his lifetime.  A scan of the classifieds of most metropolitan newspapers is enough to confirm that this is not a meanly apportioned preference, but having grown up without a governess, raised in the kind of modern liberal household where corporal punishment was disfavored, I never developed a taste for subjugation, and it has never kindled in me any other feeling than displeasure.  Had Madelỳna lifted a ruler (the physics professors had left leaning in an angle against the blackboard,  a meter stick, presumably, to draft their diagrams), I would have cowered merely in fear of physical pain, instead of a sublimated ecstasy.

Which is to say that there was no fine frisson of sublimated sexual energy to Madelỳna’s domination over me on the afternoons we spent in that classroom, merely its dismal actuality.  But as asserted by the great social novels of the last century one and verified by the psychological experiments of this one, the conditions and experience of imprisonment abase both the prisoner and his jailer, and the tortures that she was made to inflict upon me in my confinement (“And now, we will conjugate the verb ‘to run’ in both its perfective and imperfective aspects and in the past and the present tense.” / I run.  I ran.  I am running.  I have always been running.) in Room 215 began, after a time, to drain us both of our morale.

Natural then, that cracks should have formed in the rigid structure of our formal relationship, out of which seeped laxity, casualness, and the possibility of fellow-feeling, an easing at our breaks, where she offered me a cigarette, as a suddenly compassionate executioner might to a condemned man (a coughing fit after my first drag made her realize that I was not a smoker), some comments on the weather, not unlike those exchanged between a superannuated prisoner and his longstanding warden, after the years have weathered the possibility of antagonism.  Because I saw that it entertained her for me to do so, I began to talk, about my life, about the professors that I was working with, or, if not with, then at least alongside, the petty trials of my day.  I discovered that, besides a little girl’s love of officiousness, she had also a little girl’s love of gossip.  And I made an effort to mentally record every act of academic pettiness that I came across in my time at the university.  I started asking her about her weekends, she began to ask me about the girls that I was dating.

“And do you have a girlfriend?”

Only children and foreigners have ever asked me this question.  By doing so, she had brought in the first drill to the ice that was already thawing over our relationship.  I told her that I didn’t.

“And what do you think of Varrenian girls?”

This question was difficult to answer because I hadn’t formed any definite thoughts.  It’s difficult for me to generalize on scant evidence, and I have always been impressed by the confidence with which historians and travel writers can levy their judgments about a place or a people, and not until later in life did I decide to air my prejudices, letting my judgments land as they may.  I’ve always felt, across whole fields of human experience, that I have ended up tromping only the obscure corners, and comparing my notes with others, I was apt to bite my tongue, none of what they said matched my own experience.

It is a question (“And what do you think of our women?”) that any man who has travelled will encounter.  Over a period of years, as I travelled eastward, this question recurred, in the mouths of different speakers, bashful, envious young men; sly, winking grannies.  It is universally acknowledged that a young man is perpetually seeking women, and because this desire is the desire against which all others are measured (and, probably, found wanting).  Flattering myself, I imagined, when I was asked this question, that they might view me as a kind of barbarian prince, clad in ermine and greased leather, just stepped out of a longship to declare that I intended to take a wyf.

But what could I say, being so unsure of whether my impressions were linked to an accurate view of Varrenian women, and the question was so different in the mouth of Madelỳna than in the mouths of others.  Because, it was, in a way, a question of “What am I like?”  In light of a question like that, posed by a woman, would any answer do?

“They’re very beautiful.”

“Yes,” she said dreamily, lingering at the end of that word in a self-satisfied sibilance that was half sigh of pleasure.  “Here live the most beautiful women in the world.”  Let these words be painted on every borderpost of every nation.

“Well?  And what else?”

“Well, I suppose that Varrenian girls are a little bit old-fashioned.  Girls follow their roles very strictly here.”

“It is true,” she sighed.  “We are not liberated in this country.  There are many among my classmates who wanted to come here to the university only to find a man.  It is very backwards.  Imagine that you have come here, to a fine an institution as this and your one goal is to find a man!”

This question, about Varrenian girls, united her two primary interests, an outspoken patriotism and a natural curiosity with respect to relationships.

I asked her if she wanted to take our lessons elsewhere.  “But where?,” she asked, and I told her we had the whole city at our disposal.

 

*

 

In the fall, a band of veterans began protesting in front of the mayor’s building, demanding the payment of their pensions, which, the government, evidently, had been failing to disburse for months.  The protests began modestly, with more emotion than organization, a thin crowd holding placards, chanting intermittent slogans, they gave the square a sense of liveliness, of bustle, that the end of the summer tourist season had caused to diminish.  When their demands went ignored, the erstwhile soldiers redoubled their efforts, taking command of the entire northern portion of the central piazza, refusing to leave, their protest evolved into an encampment.  Bright blue tarps were set up into makeshift tents, and metal barrels converted into fire pits, the flames of which flickered in the evenings with a warm, seductive promise of violence.  The mixture of men in fatigues, old army jackets gave the thing a motley feel, as if this were not only a ptotest, but also carnival, and, perhaps, a species of performance art.  I remembered Madelỳna’s words when she explained the situation to me:

“Here, no one pays taxes, and even if you pay your taxes, they will be lost.  In the days of the Union, before the restoration, there was a full pension for every soldier.  Now they are saying that the pension was stolen, by the king or his minsters.  The ministers say that it was the director of the pension who stole the funds.  The director of the pensions says it was the ministers.  Probably, they are both right.”

“What you must understand is that things truly were better in the time of the Union.  We had a true leader then, Hazyk.  The king fails to control those at the commanding heights of the economy, and from this we have inequality.  He fails to control the rapaciousness of his ministers, and from this we have.”

But surely, I protested, she couldn’t be feeling nostalgia for the time of Hazyk’s regime.  After all, he killed thousands.  Not only his political enemies, as would have been natural for any dictator but anyone who could have had the opportunity to supplant him, including the greater part of the Varrenian intelligentsia.

“Yes, what you are saying is true.  But Hazyk was a revolutionary, and the change he wished to make, which was to transform the Hrvonians, Moirovians, and Varrenians into a single people, required revolutionary tactics.

“In order to build a nation, it is necessary to destroy the old one.  The old memories must be destroyed, and they are here.”  Here she tapped her temple.  “He was a true revolutionary.  Do you know the myth of the nation of slaves who, upon liberating themselves, wandered for forty years in wilderness to find a new homeland?  When a people are created, they must wait before they settle.  It is so that the people are remade.  The old generation dies off, and with it is the old way of thinking.  If they began as a nation of slaves, then they must be made to forget what it was like to be slaves.  The communal memory must be destroyed, and a new memory allowed to take its place.  But now in days, we haven’t the time for that.  Now, the revolutions are so much shorter.  The demand is for us to change, and immediately.

“What Hazyk did was merely to accelerate the pace of a necessary change.  Many people had to die in that process, but whether fast or slow, it was a process that he believed must take place.  Any ruler who wants to rule in his own lifetime, after a revolution, must make drastic changes like this, and that includes, yes!, even killing many people.”

If that was true, did that make Hazyk a monster?  Couldn’t it be argued that, I assayed, whatever the value of his end goals, to have arrived at them, by such brutal means, he had, at least, sullied himself, and perhaps, sullied also the cause, however noble, of Varreni-Moiraivian unification, that he had supported through these methods. 

To which she responded that, to be a great man, it sometimes fell responsibilities as these:  to carry the mantle of darkness, to shoulder the burden of moral ambiguity, and achieve through darkness what was otherwise impossible. 

 

One of the reasons the protests became a topic of conversation between us was that Madelỳna and I passed by it almost every day for a time, as we walked from the university to the Cafe Altas.

“Where shall we go today?,” I would ask her whenever I came to pick her up at the university.

“And how about the Cafe Altas?”

This Cafe Altas was a restaurant and patisserie that sat on the main piazza.  It was more than a century old, with wood-panelled interiors and floors draped with velvety imported rugs, it had something of the aspect of a hunting lodge (which, to be fair, I’ve only seen in the movies).  After a time, we settled into a ritual where I asked her this question every time I came to pick her up at the university, and though the answer hardly ever changed, she made the suggestion as if it had just occurred to her (“And how about…”). 

Although a fanatical dieter, and obsessive about her weight, she could not subsist, as many of the young Varrenian girls I met seemed to, solely on a diet of coffee and cigarettes; a visit to the cafe was always an excuse to get dessert.  I’m not naturally very fond of sweets, but she knew that I would always accompany her a slice of cake or a cup of pudding, and sometimes, in friendship, a willingness to come along may prove to be a more important than any affinity of personality, values, or interests.

“You will never guess what happened to me yesterday,” I might say as we walked to the cafe.

“You have fallen in love with a new girl!  Hmmm,” she pointed a ruminative finger on the lower bank  of her right cheek, “I will bet that it was the girl from the cinema.”

“Am I that predictable?  [here, she nodded her head aggressively] I’ll tell you about it when we sit down.”

“Oh, I’m very sure that you will,” flashing me an ironic smile.

She took her tea in the Varrenian manner, with several cubes of sugar alongside the addition of anise and cinnamon.  Furthermore, with respect to our desserts, although I was contented with only three or four bites (“You see!  You like just to to taste!”), Madelỳna was a brutal completionist, eradicating the traces of her desserts with the totality of ancient generals razing cities that have defied their demands for capitulation, as if it was necessary not only to level the pastries, but to extirpate the crumbs lest any memory of anti-Madelỳnic defiance be communicated with the world.

And afterwards, she might say something like:  “We were so bad today.” after surveying the chocolate-streaked plates we had eaten from.  I nodded with the closest approximation I could muster upon my face of a look of dismay, although, really, I didn’t consider much of a sin to have consumed a bit of cake. 

I did feel some compunction in having become my tutor’s enabler, but I lacked Madelỳna’s capacity for disciplinarianism.  This was the only way in which she was weak-willed, in the womanish way that she complained that her sex stereotyped to be, and perhaps it was the single time that she would have needed — or desired — for a man to step in, I had failed in my duty.

At times she would ask for my tea cup, after the leaves had settled, and in reluctant acquiescence to her superstition, I would hand it over.  I used to ask her early on if she saw anything of note, but I learned to let her conduct her analysis in peace, silently appraising my future without commenting on it because she was reluctant to make a prediction that could be truly verifiable.  She was a fanatic of the question of personality, and she demanded more than once to be reminded of my birthday so that she could divine my star sign and consult my horoscope. 

“Here, take this quiz!,” she might command me, and then proceed to pull out one of her gossip magazines.  As the princess smiled at me, from the cover of Spot!, I was subjected to a series of multiple-choice questions of increasing personal intimacy.  This magazine, Spot!, was a combination gossip rag and magazine for teen girls.  Every week there were quizzes — to assess one’s personality, the compatibility of a prospective relationship, the health of an existing one, how long one could expect to wait before finding one’s next boyfriend (“For you,” she amended the quiz’s gendered orientation, “we will say, how long until you find your next girlfriend.”).

Or she might tell me something like:  “I read an article in here that talked about what kind of man you should date, depending on their nationality.

“So, for example, if you want to find a man who is tough, they should be so-and-so, and if you like men who are very romantic, they should be so-and-so.  Do you know what they said about Amarguese men?”

“But I’m not Amarguese,” I would protest. 

“They said that if you want to find someone who is funny and has a sense of humor, you should date an Amarguese man.  But they also said that Amarguese men can be frivolous and immature.”

“You told me that my jokes were terrible.”

“And that is because you are not truly Amarguese!  And besides it is true that you are quite frivolous.”

“Well, thank you for your honesty.”

“It is not a crime to be this way.”  She laid a conciliatory hand on my arm.  “It is your archetype.”  Questions of personality reduced for her to the question of archetype.  In the recondite system of personality types that she had developed, synthesizing a number of books of esoterica, genuinely scientific psychological theories, and magazine personality quizzes, one’s archetype was not only a broad way to categorize personality, but also, a quasi-mystical force, bound up with the stars, that controlled one’s destiny.

“Your archetype is determined by your nature and your affinity.  You see, I am fundamentally a romantic archetype.  And for that reason I shall suffer much in my lifetime.  You, you are not a romantic.  There is no tragedy in your life.”

Besides my birthdate, or my teacups and coffee cups, she sought to know my blood type, the relative lengths of my fingers, my birth order relative to my siblings, what dreams I had had since the last time I saw her, had she had the opportunity, she might eventually have sliced me open at the navel, just so that she could inspect the entrails. 

To be fair, she admitted that the tea leaves might be nothing more than superstition (although she had a very strong intuition), but everything else, she insisted, was a matter of science.  Why, the proteins on the surface of the different blood cells had differential effects on the stimulation of hormone production, and the length of the ring finger was a measure of uterine testosterone levels.

Hoping to scandalize her, I offered the measurements of another extremity.

“That is not necessary,” she responded with practiced equanimity, sipping her tea.  “Most of the penis is inside the body, so it would be impossible to determine its actual size by only measuring the outer part.”  When she said this, I could only roll my eyes, this business of the ‘outer part’ and the ‘inner part’ of the penis was so patently absurd that I didn’t even bother pursuing mocking her about it.  And yet, years later, reading a book in which this fact was expressed off-handedly, I learned that the penis is indeed partly an internal organ, and she had been right all along.

As for girls, she demanded photographs of my prospective paramours.  If I was able to provide them, she would say something like:  “She is a logical, introvert type,” or “She is an intuitive, extrovert type.”  I asked her how she could be so sure she could assess their personalities from their looks alone, and she explained to me that the proportions and distances on a person’s face were a measure of personality.  Her assessments were usually solemn and pessimistic:  “I predict you will not be happy together.”

 

 

Besides girls, politics, Madelỳna had one final affinity that she wished to impose on me, which was films.  She was as snobbish a cinephile as you could find, and insisted that we watch Barajano’s complete works, a project that we undertook in the university library’s viewing room over a several-week period in the winter.  “It will be educational for your Varrenian language,” she justified herself.  “And anyway, what else do you have to do all day?” 

Barajano’s great film was the In the Shadows of Our Ancestors, a sprawling, four-hour long epic, in which the varezh, a kind of feudal lord or baron, of the barony of Mareshgal in the far west frontier of the Varrenian realm debates marching with the Varrenian king to resist the invading Garamdi army.  Knowing that the coalition forces that the Varrenians have organized to contest the Garamdi incursion onto the continent would be no match for the Garamdi host, he speculates on the nature of duty — to a king, to his people, to himself.  Amidst hunts, walks through the [primeval] woods, he debates at length with his adviser on these topics.  It is the woods that are eternal, in this film, human beings a temporary blemish on the landscape.  Water drips from the edges of pine leaves in exquisitely long close-ups.  The tops of these trees sway under the moonlight.  The movie’s final act, a nearly forty-minute long recreation of the Battle of the Plain of the White Hill, in which the combined coalition armies of the Varrenian kingdom, the Moirovian duchies and the Hrvonian principality are gloriously annihilated at the hands of the Garamdi Grand Army, is, arguably, the high point of Varrenian cinema.

For a war movie, it had also for its time, a frank treatment of sexuality.  The Varrenian king was portrayed as an effeminate, indecisive pansy.   A controversial scene finds him emerging shirtless from his bedchamber with a tow-headed male paramour.  On the question of King Reopoldus II’s homosexuality, the historians I spoke to were divided.  “A rumor propagated by the Garamdi to emasculate their subjects,” a professor of history at the university explained to me, when I broached the subject with him.  “Of course he was gay,” Madelỳna asseverated.  “If you look at the portraits of him, you can see that he has exactly the facial structure of a suppressed romantic type, with elements of diminished masculine energy, which is the hallmark feature in homosexual men.”

The Battle of the Plain of the White Hill was filmed with the aid of tens of thousands extras levied from the far corners of the Union — the Garamdi soldiers ethnically Garamdi Moirovians (only the front line), outfitted in oriental armor, the mountain peoples of Synigor, ethnic Hutzis.  Barajano’s thirst for scale was unslakable.  Miners were brought in to swell the ranks of the infantry, factories closed early and universities and high schools raided for able-bodied or able-bodied-looking young men, the commissariat, having commissioned the film for the thirtieth anniversary celebration of the founding of the Varreni-Moirovian Union, had handed Barajano a blank check, and he used it with the prodigality of a pharaoh constructing a tomb.  For a week in the summer of the movie’s filming, the combined forces of the ersatz Varreni-Moirovian coalition and the Garamdi host comprised the sixth-largest standing army on the continent.

An ancient general surveying the assembled ranks of an immense army he was leading in a campaign against a foreign country is said to have been brought to tears by the sight of the great number of men that had been gathered before him.  “Why do you weep, my lord?” an adviser asked him, shocked by the sight of his commander’s tears.  “I cry,” he is said to have responded, “because by this day’s end, what I behold before my eyes will be gone, and in one hundred years’ time, not one of these men, nor I, shall be alive to remember this day.  How ephemeral is every moment, how insubstantial each hour!  Who among us, or among the gods, could take even a second of this day, the sights I see now, the warmth of this sun, and store it, as in a bottle?”

Barajano had the benefit of film, and his accomplishment was to do what no general had done before him, which was to save his army for posterity.  The mistake he made was to spend a full five years editing his film, personally, and this proved too long for his work.  The commissariat, urging him on, brought in a parallel set of editors, and the aging director’s disputes with the government assistants who had been assigned to help him only served to further delay the film’s late-stage production.  When the dictator Maresh Hazyk died, and the monarchy was restored, Barajano was ordered to recut the film.  By this time, the aging Barajano was too tired to effectively fight upon the ideological battlefield that his film had become.  The result was an artistic massacre.  The king’s lines were redubbed, and any mention of his homosexuality awkwardly excised.  The scenes of the Varrenian king fleeing the battlefield (another event disputed by historians) were also destroyed, and the apocalyptic battle of Varrenian national identity developed, in the final cut, a farcical, almost comic quality.  These failings Madelỳna conceded to me, but I could see the original vision through the details, couldn’t I?  Couldn’t I see that this was a movie about duty, about national struggle, and the Varrenian soul?

 

 

Why hadn’t I fallen in love with Madelỳna?  There was a time when it had been possible.  Once, she had fallen asleep while we were watching a movie together.  And watching the rise and fall of her chest with her soft, childlike breathing, I felt for her a mixture of tenderness and desire that made me understand the attractions of incest.  I watched her for some time, as Reopoldus II ran from the battlefield, and as the Garamdi infantry broke the ranks of the Varrenian line and the varezh of Mareshgal charged desperately into the gap, in a doomed attempt to plug the line, and I stood up to give her a chaste kiss on the soft hair near her left temple, a kiss of the kind that would have woken up a princess, but one which did not interrupt her breathing, or which she had pretended not to have noticed, a kiss which for all I know, she never experienced, except as the faintest impression in a dream.  And this kiss was like the seal on the tomb of our love.

 

 

The arguments she insisted on making to me about the greatness of this example of Varrenian cinema, I began to see in a different light when I learned one final fact about Madelỳna.  Once, when we went to the cafe together, she’d brought out her identity document, and I saw that there was a title that preceded her name on the document.  Ei Varezhna Madelỳna zi Lovuria.  I pointed out the words to her, the Lady Madelỳna of Lovuria.

“Oh, that.  It’s just my title.”

“You’re part of the nobility!”

“Well, it doesn’t mean anything these days.”

“Then why is it on your identity document?”

“I didn’t choose to put it there.  Legally, it’s part of my name.  It’s always been written that way.” 

“But I thought the nobility had been abolished.”

“Oh, heavens no.  Even during the time of the Union, the nobility still asserted themselves.  Do you think Hazyk could have stayed in power in Varrenia without the support of the old noble families?  It was the nobility who abandoned the king and invited Hazyk to incorporate Varrenia into the Union.”

“But how could you say the king was an anachronism when you yourself are a part of the nobility?”

“I can hardly say that I support the nobility.  Anyway, it is not like we have any privileges.  I mean, really, you do not see anyone bowing to me around here.  It is just a part of my name.  I would have to renounce my title if I wanted to change my name on this document.  It would be a whole process!  In any case, I don’t think it is any harm to have it listed here.  Do you know, my ancestors fought with the king at the Battle of the Plain of the White Hill.  It would be a shame would it not, to [reject] their accomplishments by [rejecting] my family name?”

“You’re a patriot,” I [assessed].

“Far worse than that!” she replied.  “Iya shovenyst!” (“I am a chauvinist!”)

 

 

Some days, at Cafe Altas, Madelỳna would tug at my sleeve like a gleeful child, as we surveyed the desserts in their glass counter case, geometrically perfect cubes of mille-feuilles, sensually twisted kanelbulle,  and the pièce de résistance, on a separate shelf, which shone as if spotlit, a chocolate cake, frosted with a lacework of fondant, encased in a glass crystal dome so gracefully shaped it was like something out of a faerie tale, better suited for holding an enchanted rose, or a princess’s heart.  And in Madelỳna’s eyes, there shone, alongside her childish hunger for sugar, a baronic taste for conquest, something of what she was for me in the days of Room 215.  I think of the barbarian conqueror who when asked:  “Of all of the world’s sights, which is most beautiful?,” responded:  “The sight of a city that has defied my armies as its gates are opened in capitulation.”

We’d long ceased to bring our books, would speak for perhaps twenty minutes in Varrenian in a conversation that was sandwiched with Amarguese, Madelỳna looking at me levelly as I knotted myself into difficulties over conjugations and declinations.  The cafe’s waiters came to know us, and we enjoyed some status as regular patrons (I assume the best of people, I assume that they liked us).  Madelỳna’s character was such that she might lead with politics (“They say that they have found the missing pension funds, but you must this only means it was stolen from some other department.”) or gossip (“And do you know that the princess has found a new boyfriend?”).  In the midst of relating the news, she would stop abruptly, grip my forearm.  A laughing, smiling, opened-mouth gasp:  Our desserts had arrived.

Airy suncakes, crème brûlée, towering dacquoises, slices of chestnut pie, served with coffee-flavored ice cream.  Garnished with a frond of dill, or a rumpled mint leaf, draped over a daub of meringue like the fallen flag of a nation of dryads presented to an emperor at a triumph.  Proof that civilization had prevailed, the aelves had been conquered.  The lips of our dessert plates smiled at us with the self-effacing devotion of a pair of loyal retainers.  And before commencing to eat, she would look at me, her hands gathering with indisciplined hunger before the implements of destruction (how could I not have known, she had teased me once, that there was such a thing as a dessert fork?), and smile, a quick, impatient, and approval-seeking smile, as girlish a thing as you ever saw, and I was pleased because I was struck by this revelation, a sentence that I did not speak to her, but could very well have:  I knew you as a young woman, and hope to know you one day as the woman you will become, but because you brought me here now, I have achieved something which I had not thought would be possible, which is to have known you also as a young girl.

 

Biridana

 

Among the recurrent sexual reveries that I have borne with me from early adolescence into adulthood there is one that I have come to associate with the period of my life that I spent in Varrenia, during which so much of my time was spent in the company of women, and my male friendships and acquaintances were so few.  In this fantasy, I imagined for myself a world populated solely by girls and women (with, of course, the exception of myself), furnished in roughly the same mode as our world, but because it was bereft of men, softer in its complexion, lacking in hard curves, lacking in pain, as luxuriant as an evening spent in a warm bath.  I won’t delve into the specific details of this fantasy, but it should go without saying that the particulars are as prurient as one might expect.  This is, perhaps, not a remarkable male fantasy, and there are certain ancient religions in which the afterlife resembles this peaceable world of my imagination: a walled garden skeined with cool streams and abounding with tamed faunae and feminine beauty (in truth, if the proselytizers on the street led with this vision of the hereafter, I might linger a bit longer with the pamphlets).

Fantasies such as these may collect from a variety of sources, and because of this, their primary source becomes lost in a search upstream, as untraceable  and obscure as all of our more particular tastes and desires.  But this fantasy had a discrete, identifiable genesis, a single, powerful spring:  a print I came across in a book of Rhiennese paintings, that I discovered in my neighborhood lending library when I was a child.  In the painting, a Paalo Ibrino:  a woodland vale traversed by a mountain stream, from which rolled outward a riparian meadow framed by gargantuan trees, their thick branches twisted this way and that.  The sky above the scene was dominated by marbled clouds that soared above the woods like floating cathedrals, and shafts of light broke through these romantically with the solidity of stone buttresses, shunting into the dense woods.

On a space of bright, sun-favored grass on the meadow by the stream, a trio of figures, tiny, manifestly feminine, danced in a circle, holding each others’ hands, the arch of their bodies, the dynamic expansion of their limbs, limned in a way to suggest a frozen perpetual movement.  They were all nude save for an impressionistic garland-crown, and a white ribbon, affixed to nothing, which floated and curved about them, between them, as if it were possessed by an anima.

It would be difficult to overstate how powerfully this image affected me – images may have this effect upon children – how immediately a world exploded into being and then rapidly expanded, as happens at the birth of a universe, a world which was that scene, paradaisical, arcadian, in which women abounded.

Many years later, on one of those lonely days that can befall one when one is traveling, I found myself wandering alone in the upper levels of the Rhiennese National Gallery, hoping to kill the long hours of a dismal, overcast afternoon.  To my shock, I discovered in one of the galleries this very painting from my childhood, the Ibrino, the real one:  the cliff, woods, meadow and sky of the original.  I didn’t gasp when I came across it, but wanted to.  A subtle and slightly twisted feeling passed through me as I beheld the painting — here was something that had mattered to me in my youth, and it was being presented to me now that I was an adult, and I must take care to analyze the experience.  Its proportions, which had seemed gargantuan to a child sitting in front of on oversized art book, were done justice on an enormous canvas by Paalo Ibrino.  Alone of the elements of my childhood, this had item recurred, in a mature form, in my adult life.

Across the gallery, one of the museum’s security guards, a bilious, straw-haired androgyne in a rumpled suit had scowled at me, suspicious of the attentions that I was giving to this one particular canvas.  I drew closer, close enough to view the female figures up close, my nose within scratching distance of the panting’s carefully worked oils, and upon closer inspection these figures resolved to into their material reality, all the magic that they had been, the suggestion of what they had been, transformed alchemically by the confusion, desire, and yearning of my childhood mind, obscured now by what I saw them to be, truly:  a few elegantly swirled daubs of pink pigments.

 

 

“Men can fashion women out of the barest of materials.  The crude curves found in the margins of a schoolboy’s copybooks are the same ones daubed in charcoal in the caves of our paleolithic forebears.  Reverie is a more fecund propagator of female beauty than copulation itself, and, because imagination and delusion are two sides of the same coin, the material out of which we form the woman who inhabits our dreams (waking and sleeping) could itself be a woman’s face, one spotted sitting across a café or passing us by on the street.  It is women’s faces that are the supreme narrative, for they communicate, in the span of a glance, everything that is lovely, intriguing, or desirable in a woman, to wit, all that is necessary, for a man to fall in love with her.”  The words are Borin Kundra’s, a Varrenian novelist whom I will speak of later, but the sentiment could very well have been my own.

 

 

In the case of Biridana, it was she who had spoken to me first.  We’d smiled at each other one day across a cafe by the university while she was drawing in her sketchbook, and throughout the afternoon these glances increased in frequency until I decided that I should stop being coy and talk to her.  And it was just as I pressed my hands on the table in preparation to stand up that she herself stood up and walked over to me.

She told me that she was an art student.  That she was from the town of Synigor, on the Moirovian border.  That she’d come to the city a year ago to try to study at the fine arts academy, carrying with her little more than a canvas duffel bag in which she’d packed her portfolio.  The bag had been stolen at the train station, when she’d left it out of her sight for only a moment, a catastrophe.  (“Oh it was a nightmare!,” she lamented to me)  That the catastrophe had been averted when two weeks later, she received a call from the fine arts academy.  The bag had been dropped off at the academy, its contents hardly disturbed.  That the professors had found something worth supporting and the catastrophe had been a stroke of luck, because they’d offered her a scholarship. 

She fiddled with the little packets of sugar that came with our coffee as she said all this to me.  When she smiled, she revealed a fetching gap in her front teeth.  Her hypermetropic lenses made her eyes enormous.

I asked her if it was difficult to be an artist.  She nodded her head.  “Yes.  It is so very hard to be an artist.  Because to become a good artist, one must be a bad artist for such a long time.”  She looked out the window of the cafe at the passersby walking on the cobblestone street.  “And there is such difficulty in finding the subjects that one wants.”

And what did she paint?

“Everything!  Landscapes.  Still lives.  But I love, especially, people.  Portraits.  Figures.”

I asked her if she ever painted nudes.

“Oh, of course.”

Men or women?

She laughed, as if at some private joke.  Shook her head.  “Mostly,” she looked up at me, “mostly of myself.”

She asked her own question:  “Tell me, am I beautiful?”

“Extremely”

She laughed:  “If only I could believe you.  And tell me, what artists do you like?”

I shook my head.  “I’m not an art person.  I don’t really know any…,” I began, but the look she gave me seemed to demand an answer of some sort.  “Well, once when I was a kid, I remember that I loved very much this painting by Paalo Ibrino —”

“Yes!  Ibrino!  Well, you are very old-fashioned in your tastes.  Nowadays, I think realism is not so in vogue.  It's not a matter, though.  For normal people, for the people whose experience with art comes from outside of academia, I think the classic paintings are the most popular.  But art students do not like that sort of thing, at least not these days.  They always want to follow some new trend instead.  But they were true masters, those older painters.”

I told her about the painting I’d seen in the Rhiennese National Gallery.

“Oh, what a thing it is to have money!  Why, if I had money, I would travel.  I would visit museums and galleries.  It’s the best education.  The prints are not sufficient.  You must see the paintings in person, to understand the technique.  The brushstrokes, they’re only visible on the paintings themselves.  Really, you cannot see a painting in the same way after you have studied painting.”

Our meeting had that ellipsistic simplicity of romances in the movies.  I invited her to walk with me to the High Castle.  By the time that we ascended the hill, it was already late afternoon.  The breeze strengthened into a gusting wind, still a bit of chill.  The castle ruins were alive with visitors.  And we watched the sun set over the city.  Pressed for time, I tried very hard to be charming:  We kissed two hours after we met. 

 

 

“But a kiss is not a love story.  You are romantic only for the time that it can suit you,” Madelỳna said to me when I told her about Biridana.

“You’re being very quick to form a judgment about what kind of relationship I want with this girl,” I protested from across the booth at our little alcove in Cafe Altas.  “I hardly implied that I believed this kiss to be the end of our story.”  It was late in the evening, and Madelỳna and I were having cake and coffee again, and her initial demolitions was already well underway, while I had left only mouse-like nibbles at the edges of my own cake.

“But you must not avoid the larger point.  A man’s thinking is different from a woman’s.  The approach of men and women to romantic relationships could not be more different.  Look at the literature of love.  Look at who writes what.  For a woman, a love story is a novel.  For a man, a love story is a poem, a sonnet.  For a woman, every glance matters, every conversation is a piece in the puzzle of love.  For a man, it's a few lines about beauty and then some kiss, some conquest, at the end of things.  For us, the love is not a moment, only; for a woman, love is like a pattern, a habit.  Love is a permanent thing, it is a tissue around the act of lovemaking.  I am not saying that a woman cannot have or cannot desire a short relationship, a fling, but even if she has one, it must have the feeling or possibility of permanence.  Really, I think that for men, love must not last longer than a single fuck.”

“Madelỳna, who has been teaching you these words?”

She crossed her arms.  “Don't change the subject.  You always try to change the subject when you don't have anything better to say.”

“I'm pretty sure that a woman has written a love poem before, and that a man has written a novel about love.”

“I'm talking at a deeper level, about a deeper point.  Which you are trying to avoid.  That was just an example.”

“So you’re saying that men want only sex, and women suffer for it.  You're painting with very broad strokes here.”

“I do not mean to say that men desire only erotic love, and women desire only romantic love.  That is not the distinction I make.  You think I do not enjoy good sex?  That I want flowers and chocolates?  What I am saying is that for men, love is impermanent and ephemeral, and for women it must be permanent.  I do not mind an erotic affair.  I have had many in my life.  But if a man wishes to be my lover, as opposed to my boyfriend, he should be my lover for a longer time than a single night.  Or, at the very least, a single orgasm.  He should care about me beyond only the time that we are together.”

“Who says I would disagree with that?  You're levelling a judgment against me without having any knowledge of the situation.  I've only told you a story of how I met a girl and now you already have this idea formed of how I feel about her and what I want from her.  That's hardly fair.  Besides, she must be on my mind if I'm talking to you about her now.  What makes you think that I only want her for a moment?”

“You found a girl who was the perfect girl for you.  One who will leave in a few days.  So that you cannot be blamed if you leave her, because she is leaving you.”

“Ah, but how can you think that I would not prefer to have her stay?”

“Because I know you.  And I know your nature.”

“And what is my nature?”

“Have you ever read Kundra?”

“I'm the one who always changes the subject?”

“Really, you remind me of Balthus.  I am sure that you two are of the same archetype.”   To explain Madelỳna's point here, I have to briefly explain the premise of Borin Kundra masterwork, a several-volumes-long novel entitled Time and its Seasons.  True to the maximalist tendencies of fin de siècle Varrenian literature, its aim was to cover a broad swath of Varrenian society, the high and the low, following the lives of three young men:  patrician Veledỳr; the artist Ilya; and Balthus, the seducer, from adolescence into late middle age.  Balthus is something of a byword, in Varrenian, for lothario, or, more accurately, perhaps, of a man who loses interest very quickly in women. 

“I’d like to think that I’m more of a lover than a seducer.”

“But we must define what love is.  Tell me, then.  What is love to you?”

“Oh, come off it.  Do we have to have this discussion again?”

“If you cannot articulate the feeling, how can you ever be in love?”

“You don't need to say what love is to be able to be in love with someone.  That would be a ridiculous bar to set.  The human race wouldn't be able to survive if we only allowed the people who could fully articulate their thoughts sensibly about love to be able to make love.”

“What about the novel you're always going on about wanting to write?  You said you wanted to write a love story.  How can you write a love story if you can't even say what love is?”

And I have to admit that when she said this, I thought to myself:  “Well, she has me there.”

 

 

It was novels that were very important to Madelỳna and me.  I used to think, when I was younger, that novels were the most important thing in the world.  There is a sort of answer in novels, to the questions of life, and I do not mean this in the superficial way: that novels are morally instructive (which I did not believe then), or even in the less superficial sense in that they can serve as a kind of guide to understanding people.  The questions of life, the real questions, the ones that we feel and that are truly important to us, are numinous things, closer to emotion than question, are pained yearnings for meaning and comprehension.

What I think about novels is that they show us what life is; they show us life’s vast breadth, a breadth that is both inspiration and, when necessary, consolation — breadth, but also depth, to understand beyond pattern, cliche, and social convention, beyond the illusion of the senses and further illusions of our prejudgments, or of our own thoughts, what it is to be alive.  My theory, at that time, which I have not greatly modified since then, was that novels were the only form of philosophy in which the matter of life itself was the object of investigation.  The only thought that ever stopped me in my tracks was the thought, that you could only understand life by living it, and novels were the next best thing, the only form of art where it was said:  this, this is what life is like. 

I learned, of course, the wrong lesson from all the novels that I read.  What I've come to understand, as I've gotten older, is that novels are like a kind of message from our future selves, but it is a message that we are all but guaranteed to misinterpret.  And what was the misinterpretation in my case?  That novels could ever be a kind of absolution for the ways in which we are disappointed by life, that there was, merely via expression alone, a substitute value for the things of intrinsic value that we are denied in our lives.  What exists in life are our desires and their continual denial by the forces of the world, what exist are our goals and our failures to achieve them.  From the novels that I read, splendid tragedies rendered into permanent monuments of beauty, I came to believe that with words alone there could be something that could make up for the disappointments I made of my own life. 

The novels that were most important to me were the ones about youth:  the world was passion, was desire, was feeling, which is the only true religion of the young.  And I myself had thought:  this I will make my religion, this is what I will make into the source of meaning for my life, never realizing that the novels that I was reading were also a record of loss, that the things that are written down are precisely those that need recording, the parts of life, and of ourselves, that cannot survive into the latter periods of our lives.  What is lost, as we grow older, is the sensibility to the world, the ability to truly feel the world, that is the characteristic quality of youth.  I used to think that was all there was to the world:  to feel it.  I used to think that I would never stop feeling the world.  I mistook my inability to envision a future self that was ever free of the desires and pains that threatened to overwhelm my being as a guarantee against my ever becoming that self.

And I was wrong.  Thinking that I would not change in an essential way – I knew that the future would not resemble the past, but I didn't realize that my future self would have very little relation to my past and present self – I didn't bother to write down while I lived there, the things that happened to me in Varrenia, the way and ways that I felt while I was living there.  Even after I had told Madelỳna that I dreamed of writing a novel, I made no concrete steps towards the creation of one, would spend my underscheduled says wandering the streets of the city, my head swimming with words, phrases, sentences and ideas, feeling filled to bursting with inspiration, but would never bother to write down the seemingly inexhaustible collection of phrases and sentences that I had accumulated throughout the day, and when I returned to Vira's house on B___nyv street, I would think to myself, “Oh, but I'm too tired today, to do any real justice to the things that I would like to say, to the things that this city has made me feel today.  I'm sure I'll remember it tomorrow.  And even if I don't, I'll start another day, and there will be other, more beautiful phrases, other more beautiful sentiments, other more profound thoughts that I will have, in the future, and it's those that I will fill my novel with.”  I would think:  “Well those other people, those other writers have done it, have lived a life of deep feeling, and written it down – I need only time to bridge the gap between myself and them.”  And not make the necessary efforts to record my life as it was at that time, not realizing that, not only would I forget this time, but that I would lose the parts of myself that had made living this time so vivid, so wonderful, so deeply felt, that would make me feel the desire to write anything at all. 

So you see, if novels are a message from our future selves, they are something like that science fiction story where a message is beamed into the past, but the tachyon stream is interrupted, the transmission is necessarily garbled, and the coordinates that are delivered are precisely those that deliver us unto disaster.  And only in the midst of the wreckage of the did I understand the true nature of that message:  all novels can have only one essential message:  that this is what life is like, and you will lose it as soon as you experience it.

 

 

Not long after beginning work at the university, I searched for Moncref’s Amarguese-language translation of Time and its Seasons in the university’s library, but only the third volume was available among the stacks and I was forced to begin my reading of the novel in medias res.  The volume begins with Balthus’ return to the Varrenian capital after serving a tour of three years in the Rhiennese foreign legion.  Weighing whether to spend the last of his coins on drink or a woman, he’s saved by a run-in with Veledyr, his childhood friend, who finds him a post a journalist for the Varrenian Truth, the newspaper where Veledyr serves as as an editor.  Balthus writes, with the aid of Veledyr’s young wife, Memories of a Legionnaire amidst the Sands of A___kair a dazzling account of his life as a soldier on the A___kairian frontier.  Balthus’ book eventually finds for Balthus a reputation as a writer and journalist, and the volume concludes with his elevation to the heights of Varrenian society.

Balthus’s situation at the volume’s outset is, however, not promising: 

How I thirst!, thought Balthus.  The city, hot as an oven, seemed to swelter in the stifling night. The sewers breathed out their poisonous breath through their granite mouths, and the underground kitchens gave forth to the street through their windows the stench of dishwater and stale sauces.  It was one of those summer evenings in which the air seemed to be lacking. Balthus jangled the three coins in his pocket.  Enough for two suppers and no lunches, or two lunches and no suppers.  Enough for three glasses of cold and bitter beer.  But I thirst for love, also!, he thought.  Just a little bit of love shall do, he muttered under his breath.  And here came the dilemma whose horns pinioned him to the street corner we find him on this sweltering evening.  For an hour with the woman would cost him three decimes!, and even a single beer would leave him short.  So what shall Balthus do this evening?

Balthus represents, then, a prominent figure of Varrenian literature:  the picaro.  His roguishness is absolved only by an almost naïve approach towards women, a desire for amorous relations that was marked by a childlike sincerity.  He was like, then, a shard of male personality, and I wondered to what extent Balthus, who it was clear to me was an important character to Madelỳna, shaped her view of and conception of men.  And which, of course, would go on to shape her view of me.  She was wrong, I wanted to say to her, she had gotten things all wrong.

In the case of my own novel, I had begun to work on it over the winter.  I took up the task with all the earnestness and enthusiasm that naïvete can engender.  All of the fragments that I had filled my notebook with, all of the sentences and phrases and words that I had saved from oblivion — these would go into the work:  Snatches of my conversations with Madelỳna and Vira.  The images of the city blanketed in the first heavy snow of the season, and the winter markets that had sprung up and colored the town.  Tanks of winter trout had been brought up to the city from the surrounding villages for the feast of the solstice.  The protests by the veterans in the autumn, and the barrels of fire that they had used to keep themselves warm.  My memories of the summer when the city had seemed most vibrant, most fresh.  All of these were thrust onto the page, and, feeling satisfied with my expression, as though I had done a kind of purging

Nights, after dinner, I would stay up with Vira and some of the other boarders in her living room as we watched the final news telecast, which would inevitably begin with the latest updates of the war in Moiraivia.  On the old, boxy device, where we would toy with the dials and adjust the antenna, the King would sometimes give a televised address explaining why the government was pursuing this or that approach, and assure the people that all measures would be taken to stabilize the situation and to prevent the war from spilling beyond the borders of Moiraivia (Varrenian public opinion was evenly split on the question of Varrenian military intervention, which could embroil, yet all wanted an outside party, the Rhiennese, the Amarguese, to step in and put an end to the fighting). 

“Nighmare!” Vira would gasp at the sight of the destroyed skyscrapers, of schools with their ceilings sunken in, as the beleagured government forces contested a partial siege of the capital. 

When the news programme was concluded, I would look at Vira, and she would look at me, and we would exchange a kind of assessment of each other.  She would look at me a little bit embarrassedly (or so I supposed), and I would look at her back, a little bit embarrassed (or so I felt), and this ambiguous smile, mirrored on each others’ faces was the way that we left each other off in the evenings.

In my room, I would write down the things that had happened during the day.  I didn’t carry a notebook with me when I was out.  I might be enamored of a single sentence for quite some time, and it wouldn’t be until late that very evening that I would write it down.  It was pleasing to have my thoughts down, but I would see these sentences for the naked and spindly things that they were, undernourished and alone, and I wondered if they would ever amount to anything.  There was a pile of papers atop my writing desk, and these would climb and migrate into hazardous piles — in spite of Vira’s attempts to tidy them into a more sensible arrangement — and yet the growth felt undirected, gave me no sense of completion.

Some nights I would steal off into the evening, straight away after dinner, trudging in the premature darkness through the day’s accumulation of melting snow on the city’s under-salted pavements, and if the Cafe Altas was open, would step in with a notebook and scribble for a time. 

When asked what it was he wrote about, Borin Kundra once declared that “life was the only thing work writing about, the only that one could write about.”  Interpreted broadly, his asseveration is almost tautologically indisputable, and it was towards life, the life that I was living here that I was writing.  Most of all, I wanted to write about love.  Which seemed to be a topic that was inseparable from literature, inseparable from art.  Or if not love, in the abstract, then my romantic affairs concretely.  There were the girls who I met, all of whom seemed to be composed of secrets and surprises.  There was a wealthy industrialist’s daughter who had surprised me by deigning to invite me to visit her in her flat in the center and who put on a record and invited me to dance with her (she listened to old Varrenian folk-pop — we danced to the sound Sefiya Vryeneva’s singing).  Love seemed to be continually communicating to me that I was wrong to have prejudices.  And at times I would wake up in some distant district of the city, with the smell of coffee wafting in from the kitchen, and a rumpled space beside me on a bed, and feel a kind of awe at how kind life could be. 

 

 

Biridana had explained to me once why it was she felt that she could express herself only in her art:  “It’s something that I feel:  that the only way that I could show people what I mean was to draw it for them.  People think that when you draw something, that it’s merely a feeling that you are communicating.  And that is true, but to communicate a feeling through images, that is something quite difficult.  I think that some feelings exist only as images, and not as words.

Because people think that things are the way that they are.  But nothing is the way that it is!  Oh, I can’t explain it, quite.”

With her eyes shining beneath her glasses, she seemed so very earnest.  Her ideas about art were so very important to her.

“Sometimes, we don’t understand what feeling we have until we see it in the world.  It’s like the affinity that you have for old pictures.  You see in them something that resonates with you, and what it is that you feel is the dreams that people had in the past.

“Oh, but people aren’t the way that they should be, anymore.  They haven’t been that way for a long time.”

I asked her if she meant that she thought of me as someone who was old-fashioned.

“Yes, very much so.  It’s why travelled here, after all.  It’s why you won’t ever be content to stay in one place, because you’re always looking for the past.  It’s why you want to be a writer.”

 

 

I was shyer to Madelỳna about expressing my desire to write, than I was talking to her about the women in my life, who had laughed when I told her that I wanted to write a novel.  That, oh, it was a vague idea that had struck me when I had come here:  that I’d wanted to travel and to write about my travels.  And that it was silly because it was cliché, and when I said these things to her, when I overexplained, she watched me and smiled wryly.  The phrase that Madelỳna spoke to me most was:  “But that’s not love.”  Of course, part of the difficulty that we had in understanding each other was that by the word “love” Madelỳna (and I) often meant two separate things:  one, the ideal that she (or I) had of the highest possible love, and two, love as it actually occurred in real life, or something like the attempts to love.   The first kind of love was infallible. 

Her analysis of personality, as elaborate as it was, was an order of magnitude simpler than the supremely complex system that she had devised to determine romantic compatibility.  A man of such and such blood type, star sign, and intercranial proportions could only be compatible with a woman of such and such temperament, animal spirit, and .  As fundamentally elastic as her system was (its rules were hidden to me, and I reconstruct it now with the bemusement of a chimpanzee working out the chemo-mechanics of a combustion engine), it reached its hard limits occasionally (and this was where it fascinated me, because it suggested that it was not completely arbitrary), and she would declare that someone I was seeing was fundamentally wrong for me.  If I told her about someone who seemed to fall “out of my range,” she was genuinely puzzled:  “But hmm…, I wouldn’t have expected it — because your type is not artistic,” and her face fell into a scrunched thought, she looked like a confirmed theologian confronting a manifest contradiction in his orthodoxy. 

She wrote me a long letter once, explaining why it was that I shouldn’t date a particular girl.  To give a taste of what her system was like, I present portions of her letter here, with minimal editing on my part:

“Our world is the unity and interaction (struggle) of opposites. Unity and the struggle of opposites - one of the basic laws of dialectics.  We live in a dual world. Our world is divided into polar energies. This division exists in all spheres of life. That is why our world is called - the world of knowledge of good and evil. We have both centrifugal and centripetal forces (power is directed to the center). The centrifugal force is, in your case, polygamy. The centripetal force is monogamy. We must learn to control these opposite energies and stand in the middle.

“This girl is psychologically the same as you!  She does not complement you.  She is identical to you.  Now, identical connections (of the same psychological type) can be interesting between males and females of up to twenty or so years, but past that time, a person needs to find a connection of complement, he needs a dual.  An ethical intuition needs the logic of a sensing person, an introvert needs an extrovert, &c.

“You liked this girl because she is similar to you, but relationships between identicals quickly grow boring…”

The letter goes on, but you have the gist of the thing.  It seemed to me a very long way to say that my relationship with a particular girl would not work out.  It was the thrill of possibility that was the most wonderful aspect of love, which was why the smile that Biridana had cast my way had affected me so strongly. 

I had always been wrong to argue with Madelỳna about what love was, because it is true that love is many things, and the kind of love that one desires and seeks changes over time, goes on changing throughout the course of one’s life.  I was nearing thirty, and it was a different kind of sentimental encounter that I sought now:  A woman whom I didn’t know, whom I had not any reason to know, without connection to my life, who would appear in my life without preamble.  In my mind, the erotic was distinct from both the purely romantic and the entirely sexual, and the chief characteristic of the erotic was its elemental nature: what mattered was that I was a man and that this was a woman, and these bare facts were, if only at the beginning, the only features that we were aware of with respect to each other.  If we view the sexual act as a means of communication, it was the only language that I wanted to speak, a bare semantics that reduced life to its most essential aspects and ourselves to a single dimension:  the masculine and the feminine. 

And in this kind of encounter, the future had no place; an encounter of this kind existed in a world where presentism was metaphysically and aesthetically true.  There is, admittedly, something willful and naïve in an insistence on the present moment, because time does pass, because a relationship must end (or develop), but to not consider, for the moment, the possibilities of the future seemed necessary, for me, to preserve some essential element of the erotic experience.  The woman whom I wanted to meet was not just someone who was unknown to me, but ideally, a stranger in the traditional sense of the word, someone who was utterly foreign:  a woman in a village, or some maiden from a distant tribe where there was no knowledge of men — or at least no knowledge of men of my kind.  And I imagined that it was in the villages that the most desirable (to me) women lay (or so I imagined).  There, there were young women with atavistically old-fashioned names, with gestures that are learned among aunts and grandmothers (the way a woman lifts a cup or sets her hands when she is sitting), and it was these women that were most appealing to me, because they were outside of time, and (in some way) outside of reality.  It was not remarkable that, as a younger man, I had these peculiar fancies; what was remarkable was that the fancies were fulfilled, that I would wake up mornings in a distant corner of the city next to a woman or (even more appealingly) next to a rumpled bedspread where a woman had been.  At such times, I did not, and could not, imagine, anything as pure, naïve, and as lovely as the possibility of an extended relationship.

It was not true that I wanted to know nothing of the woman I was with.  Women’s lives were fascinating, but when it came to the manifestation of this fascination within myself, I was seeking breadth rather than depth.  And this led to repetition, a sort of eternal circular search, one that kept time from advancing, and the more times I ran the circuit, the less chance there would be that I would ever have to leave it. 

It was Madelỳna who became the witness of this repetition.  I told Madelỳna about all my affaires — she acted as a kind of worldly confessor.  And this was something I needed, because whatever emotions a woman inspires, we feel the most important feelings about her when she is absent, and I needed to share these feelings with someone else.  What I tried to explain to Madelỳna was that, whenever I met a girl, at a cafe, in a bookshop, that it was a smile that seemed most erotic, because it was imbued with possibility, the possibility of romantic adventure, and that far more than desire, than erotic intrigue, there was, in my entanglements with women, kindness.  The same kindness that would waft in as the smell of coffee in the morning if I woke up in an apartment in some distant district of the city.  Madelỳna was excited at times, to hear about a new woman in my life, and at other times, peevish, distressed that I was not learning the lesson that I should have been learning about the consequences of philandering.  But how could I explain to her that I did not want to learn? 

 

 

In Balthus, Kundra found a way to express the essence of masculinity, the pull of desire:

It was Balthus’ curse that he should fall in love with women quickly, and fall out of love just as quickly.  All human endeavor may be art — it is obsession that is the transformational element — and for this reason Balthus was, in his dealings with women, a species of artist also.  Indeed, in his misguided search for a perfect love with a perfect woman, he resembled those painters who devote years, decades, a lifetime, in attempting to capture upon a stretch of canvases, ever dissatisfied by their attempts, the same subject: a still life of flowers, the bell-tower of a particular village church, Synigor at dawn.  His election of subjects was as narrow:  always a waitress, or a dancer, or a shopgirl, and these subjects were always, in essence, the same subject, the same woman.  Was his seduction of a Flora or a Vilina, a Marjerese,  or a Viroshelle, any different, in principle, from the work of a painter who travels to the same mountain across the seasons of the year, rising early and trekking long distances to find the most suitable light, the most pleasing perspective, Flora, Vilina, Marjerese, Viroshelle being merely different rays of the same refracted beam of light, the eternal and unitary Woman?  Men like Balthus search for the soul of love, not realizing that this soul, though detectable to the instruments of the mind in the world of dream, cannot exist on earth where are our own organs for loving are themselves imperfect.  Because our organs of perception are not designed to see beneath our desires, until he shines the spotlight of cognition upon them, the artist does not understand what impels him.  So is a man, who does not question his desires in women…

 

 

It would be wrong to say that I saw each woman I saw as merely another in a parade of women whom I was seducing.  What I want to say is that to understand myself at that time is to understand why it was I was fascinated by the woman in question.  I still wanted erotic love, still elevated it as a supreme value in my life.  Kundra’s own view of erotic desire was ambivalent: 

 

 

A woman’s face excites me in the same way as would the sight, on a map, of the coastline of a distant country.  Those curves call to mind landscapes that are new to me and therefore pure, the gravid black dots that are cities, towns and villages evoke, through their printed names alone, the possibility of charming streets, of fascinating architecture, of people who do not know us, never have, who shall charm us and be charmed by us.  Desire has only a single valence, emanations from the single core, and it is the sexual motive, which underlies all of our higher drives.  And distant lands are as promising as the untasted days of the far future.  The cities that we live in are bleak and our lives, ruined as they are with contaminating radiation emanating from our selves, hopeless.  There in that distant land, there in that unknown woman, exists the possibility of change, the possibility not only of a new life, but a new self to inhabit that life, untainted by the failings we have made in our own lives.  The only tragedy in life is that there is no escape from ourselves.  A man scrabbles at the walls of the prison — his own life, the one that he has been given, the one that he has ruined — try as he might, he cannot escape it.  The only possibility of escape is into others.

And even then, the escape into women — or one woman — is only temporal.  And even if one did fall in love, a woman who became a part of one’s life would, eventually, by becoming part of one’s self suffer an assimilation into the things that one despises.  Because desire

 

 

Had this desire for erotic love distorted my life?  I didn’t feel so.  It was true that the other elements of my life that I had brought with me to Varrenia were receding.  My duties at the university were something that I undertook with less and less seriousness, even as I grew more comfortable with my students, even as I was able to fulfill these duties with greater competence.  I explored the countryside less than I would have wanted (the woman there in the village would have to wait).  But I had the sense that my life had a certain fullness.  Every morning, I walked to the central plaza.  And the university was at best an abstraction.  I could live a life that was vibrant, that was heading somewhere.  The very quality of my life that made it static also made it into something that felt brimming with possibility.  Eroticism made of my life a perpetual adventure, and I might, standing before a woman who had unclothed herself , think something like:  “This is life.  I am alive, and this is what it is like to be alive,” a wild and revelatory feeling that it was necessary to communicate this to someone, as if I had been made into an emissary or a prophet, and the only precept of my religion was to remember that one shouldn’t forget this fact:  that one is alive.

 

 

At Cafe Altas where I was writing down my thoughts each day and gazing out at the piazza, thinking of the flower girls I had been in love with in the summer — or not ‘love,’ but, well, you know — and the piazza was grey cobblestones beneath a grey sky, and the spring, the true spring, seemed about to commence, I attempted to shift my thoughts towards the question of what kind of love it was that I desired.  Sometimes it drizzled for hours, an inexhaustible spring rain that trapped me within the glass panes of the cafe’s windows, but then, in the midst of the rain, the clouds would part, revealing a tantalizing yellow sunlight which would restore the colors of the buildings around the piazza, make the cobblestones sparkle and reveal in the pools left by the day’s rain skies so blue that it seemed I’d landed on another planet.  And I thought to myself:  “I desire love.”

On my desk in my room in Vira’s, the pile of papers had grown high again, and I would leaf through them, looking for the phrases that had struck me as so very beautiful days, weeks, months before.  Occasionally, I was struck by a feeling that was like the echo to a feeling that I had when I was very young, when I had dreamed of the adventures that I would go on, of the world that I would have liked to see.  And this feeling demanded attention and concentration to understand.  It brushed up against some internal organ… I remembered the adolescent part of myself, and the desire for love that I used to feel then, and try to square that, then, with my relationships with the women I had known in Varrenia.  There had been some great misunderstanding that I had had about love when I was younger, but I couldn’t understand what that misunderstanding was — for the reason that I did not understand love now.

It could be simply that I didn’t love anyone now.  That perhaps I had never loved anyone.  I understood or at least suspected that she no one loved me either.  And this thought was as much consoling as dismaying.  Women were too different from men.  I was too different from other human beings.  Madelỳna had once told me about the Varrenian myth that men and women once were the same creature — or else that both failed to exist.  Once there had been only man, an immobile, dendritic creature, with four arms and four legs, not unlike the trees that the ancient Varrenians worshipped, but man had chosen out of a desire for companionship to remove parts of himself to form a new creature who could be a companion.  This myth seemed to say everything that needed to be said about how the ancient Varrenians viewed the relationship between men and women:  a necessary relationship.

 

 

By the arrival of spring, the scales fell from my eyes.  It was as though I had been moving through a dream.  Of course I wouldn’t ever be a writer.  I saw my writings for what they were:  it would be one thing if these were the ramblings of a deluded tyro (they were, but all writing is this), but the fault was deeper, these writings were completely lacking in direction, purpose, were merely graphomania.  The tyro can become the master, provided he proceeds in the direction of mastery, but I was proceeding in no direction; it was as if, rather than spilling the breadcrumbs so that I could find my way back out of the forest, I was merely spreading them in a spiral about me.  The greatest delusion was that I was a kind of picaro, and that my failings were forgiven by my own ingenuity, by my spirit of freedom.  But I wasn’t free, wasn’t more than a kind of layabout.  What travels had I made?  What had I done but sit around reading books and occasionally write down my trite thoughts, where I elevated uninspired feelings, and what was worse, I had the evidence here that I had been doing this all along.

I waited for absolution to come from outside of myself.  I knew the form that it would take.  What I desired was a woman who could forgive me.  Who would laugh at my and say:  “But it’s no fault to feel that way,” and the fault was that I could not write myself out of that.  The dream-logic prevailed.  My fault was that I didn’t live up to the idea of art that I myself believed in, that I didn’t live up to the vision of life presented in the novels that I had read, that I had settled on a simulacrum of love — and of life — and of art — rather than the real thing.

I thought of the arguments that I had had with Madelỳna.  I regretted the ways in which I had been disingenuous when describing to her my affaires, or when we were discussing the nature of romantic love.  Worse than simple misrepresentation (I was trying to win some argument about whether I should continue pursuing a particular girl), it was as though I were living a kind of double life:  in my conversations with Madelỳna, there was one version of myself, who espoused all the ideals of love and guarded himself from all accusations of caddishness, and then, in my actual sentimental life, there was another, a cynic about love, or something less than a cynic:  a mere failure.  And I could never admit to her that I was this failure, because it would mean detonating her regard for me.  Too late, I realized now that she had already seen through this double life, and had been humoring me all along.

 

 

Biridana’s apartment was on the outskirts of the city, and the rattling, jittery little tram ride that took me there brought me past apartment blocks that had been shattered by poverty.  Her own building was scandalously poorly kept, its painted facade peeling to reveal gashes of exposed brickwork, and the outer cornices that adorned the windows and entranceway cracked open like eggshells.  On the stairs up to her flat, concrete dust, chipped paint, and archeologically ancient graffiti.

Biridana greeted me with bashful enthusiasm, a little embarrassed, perhaps, at the modesty of her apartment, which was gloomy and cluttered.  The place smelled of dust and turpentine, faded incense, and except for an abundance of drapes, which hung on the walls, patterned like the fan of a peacock’s tail, there was little that suggested femininity.  The light that came into her apartment was dark, and this gave her apartment a mysterious hieratic feeling, as if we had entered into the inner chambers of a ziggurat or a cavern temple.  On a desk:  a book on Varrenian architecture, a trio of bird feathers, a cloth doll, a small cassette of makeup, a ball of twine, straps of leather (she had sliced these into book covers for a book-binding class), a pair of steel scissors, thumbtacks.  Her movements about her flat were like the movements of a workman on a construction site, and she served me tea from a chipped cup.

There was something very fragile and provisional about the place, as if she would decamp when the week was out.  “I know that it’s not very exciting, but it’s all that I can afford.”  She wages she earned as a waitress were something like ninety Varrenian decimes.  Breakfast for her was porridge.  Lunch, she took, hurriedly at the restaurant.  And she was a little bit gaunt, as though parts of her body had been carved away by poverty.

Her eyes were deeply set, and I found this very beautiful in her. 

She took me on a tour of her paintings.

I saw a painting of an elderly man painted from slightly above, revealing a bald pate crowned by a garland-like sweep of ash-colored hair.  The man’s white shirt was open at the chest, the clavicle and sternal notch lit to reveal the bones underneath.  It was finely done.

This painting and the others, I inspected with little comment, feeling out of my depth.  I attempted to point out a detail that I liked, but the comments I made felt feeble, ill-informed and uninspired.  She led me to a stack of canvases piled against the wall.  Nudes of a young woman.  The paintings were brusque, unsparing.  Her paunch, the creases of her body, the parts of her that sagged, the deflated breasts.  The recognition came slowly, because the faces of these figures lacked any of her brightness.  It was difficult to square the complaisant, mousy creature before me with the pitiless author of this work.

“The self-portraits,” she said quietly.

She looked at me, as if seeking approval.  It was as if she was daring me to question her, the judgment that she had weighed on her own body.  Were these paintings a provocation? invitation? challenge?

I saw suddenly that she was very young. 

“You’re very cruel,” I told her.

“Am I wrong to be?”

I reached for her hands, and she drew them back, shyly.  “It used not to be very important to me, being beautiful,” she began.  “I used to live in a different kind of world, divorced from the expectations of other people, and to be beautiful was one of those expectations that I could never truly believe in.  But I was in a relationship with a man once who I felt cared for me very much, and I think that I wanted to be beautiful for him.  I don’t know that I even loved him back, truly.  I suppose that it’s very rare that a person knows what love is, but the love that he had for me… I felt and could see that it was true. 

“I used to think all the time about whether I loved him back as much as he loved me.  I wanted to know for myself what I meant by the word.  It feels very silly to have a theory of love.  You would think, wouldn’t you?, that feeling was enough.  But what was I feeling?”

I asked what had happened to the man.

“Oh,” she laughed, “I suppose he fell out of love with me.  And I don’t blame him, for the way that I treated him, with my own indecision.  We were together only a short time, in the scheme of things.  But he left me that:  the desire to be beautiful.”

“Listen,” she told me.  She sat down again on her couch.  “I have to explain.  I wanted to feel special.  I understood that when you saw me that you felt something for me, and I understood that this was a kind of power.  I didn’t know who you were, but I could see that you saw something in me.  And also, because I didn’t know exactly what it was I wanted, I felt that it wasn’t a mistake to talk to you, and to see how far we could take things.  I was making a kind of exchange:  to give myself to someone else for a feeling.  And that was a trade that I shouldn’t have made.  All of these aspects of love, they seem so very complicated.  Perhaps I’ve gone and complicated things, when it was a feeling that was very simple that I wanted.  Loving someone is the desire to be loved back.  That was the only thing I could discover about love.”

“Have I wounded you?”

I told her that she hadn’t, but I asked why it was that she had allowed me to talk to her in the first place.

“It wasn’t you.  I couldn’t see myself with your eyes in the way that I needed to be seen.”

But surely, whatever love was, it couldn’t be that serious.  Could it?

“I don’t know.  If I am honest, I don’t know.  I can’t remember now what kind of love I was seeking.”

She stood, and I understood that things had ended. 

 

 

In Varrenia, I was, among women, and the love that I experienced was different from the love that I’d sought when I was younger.  After months, a month, weeks, a week, some flaw arose in our relationship, and the thing could not go on.  It was me — the flaw in reality was that I was myself — I had grown bored.  And for a long time, because I could not admit that the locus of wrongness lay within myself, I thought that love itself was flawed.  How could I have anticipated that the failing, or at least, a separate failing, existed within myself? 

Thus, in love, in the singular, I was defeated, and yet, it remained possible for me to continue to meet women, women whom I have left and women who have left me, but who have also left their mark on me.  It was anguish when I smiled at a woman across a café and she failed to smile back, but this anguish was absolved by the compensatory happiness I experienced when, rarely, a woman smiled at me across the cafe.  Greeted with pleasure an invitation to walk with me in the evenings.  And after an evening, if I had been able to be charming, or if the charm had been sustained by the world in the evening, we would descend the gravel path that led us down to Vira’s house on B___nyv stret, and I would remember, like the man who subjects himself to pscyhedelic intoxication, “Ah, yes, I am alive, and a person, this is what it is like to be those things.”

And then I understood after a time that the pleasures of variety were for me a consolation, or compensation, for the impossibility of love.  Why not?  Life is full of compensations like this, that when thing is missing in our lives, it is replaced by another.  Perhaps because the organism has adapted to every outcome, has developed compensating mechanisms, or because the deity has a measure of benevolence, the failures in one domain, are always…  Because I could take , because I was still, because, that is to say, I was still living in the bundle of my emotions and had not had time to reflect on life, had not had need to, I had not considered that I was living life according to a pattern.

Easy to see why I could not see the pattern.  What I had read in novels was the story of a man who rambled through the amorous landscape and came across a reason to stop his rambling, a lothario tamed by matrimony.  What had happened with me was the reverse — the lover, the monogamist, transformed by philandering into a connoisseur of loucheness, and found, through that experience, if not a deeper appreciation for women, then an appreciation of a different kind.  There is a kind of depth in breadth, and there is appreciation even in superficiality, provided that the superficiality is attended to. 

These experiences, with love, with its disappointments, finally with the compensation of variety, have educated me in another way, which was to show me the difference between life and books.  And I decided also, during the time that I lived in Varrenia, that there was nothing to be learned from books — or that, if there was, that it was so radically incomplete as to be misleading — and I had to search for some other store of wisdom, and yet, because I had long cultivated the habit, I remained someone who turned, often, to books, and I read for pleasure rather than wisdom, and not even a pure pleasure, the narcotic kind that had accompanied the reading of my adolescence, but the habituated kind.  And this propelled me to leave, to move onward in my travels, and the memory of Vira’s watery as she bade me forewell when I left her house that final time was the memory that would remember most vividly when I cast my mind back to that time.

 

*

 

The summer blew in from the distant sea.  A spill of long, balmy days were cast over the cobblestones of the city’s central piazza.  In the latter part of the afternoon, they drew out long shadows over the piazza, and in the evenings, a velvety, suffocating darkness blanketed the city.  There was no respite from the heat.  I grew restless from staying indoors after only a day (the sound of Vira’s mop, knocking heavily against the wainscoting of the hallway outside my bedroom, had begun to take on an admonitory cast), and stepped out to the city as late afternoon was beginning to shade itself into evening. 

Walking to the central piazza, I thought of Balthus, upon his return to Varrenia, wandering the city, debating with himself whether to spend the last of his Varrenian decimes on a woman or a beer.  How Balthus had thirsted!

The idea of a novel long-abandoned, I’d been thinking for some time of taking on a project of translating Kundra into Amarguese.  The earliest translations of the work had been done by C.K. Moncref, a spinster who had dispatched each volume over a trilogy of summers alongside a carafe of lemonade, working at the rate of something like ten pages a day.  The translations were very able, but I’d already noticed a few places where I felt the language could be modernized, made more natural.  There was, in spite of the carefree way in which Moncref had dispatched her work, a kind of fustiness to it that seemed unmatched to Kundra’s language, his bold, masculine declaratives.  It didn’t matter to me that I was still largely an amateur with Varrenian language; I could count on the assistance of some of the professors.

On S___chek street, I came across Madelỳna at a cafe.  She was sitting alone, nursing a coffee and a bed of cigarettes lay in a pile in the ash tray in front of her.  She was pensive, seemed hollow-cheeked, a little bit grey, a little bit ashen.  I guessed it was something about a boy.  When she saw me, she smiled, with a bit of effort, and invited me to sit with her.

“Do you know, that boys are absolutely terrible,” she said to me when I asked her how she was.

“You’ve told me that more than once.  But haven’t I always been there for you?”

“You’re not a boy.  I do not refer to you.”

She softened her expression.  “Well, that is enough for me.  And so tell me, then.  What is new with you?”

“I have an idea for a new project!”

“Ah, and what is it?”

“I want to translate Kundra!”

“How fine!  He is a national treasure.  But why?”

“I suppose I feel a sort of affinity with him.”

“An affinity?”

“You said that Balthus and I were of the same archetype.  But I think, really, what that means is that Kundra and I are of the same archetype.  Isn’t that what you mean?”

“It’s possible,” she admitted noncommittally.  “And so?  What happened with your artist girl?”

“It didn’t work out.”

“But why not?”

“She’s in love with someone else.”

Madelỳna’s look softened further, and I detected, at the corners of her eyes, genuine concern for me.

“It was someone who loved her more than I did.  And that was the deciding factor for her.“

Madelỳna made no reaction to this confession of mine for a long time.  “Of course every woman wants to feel loved.  Women can be selfish too.  We want to feel loved even if we don’t love that person ourselves.”

I thought of Balthus.  I would also like, I thought, just a little bit of love.  “I feel… frustrated.”  I let out a self-pitying sigh in the ellipsis of this declaration.  She understood the euphemism, and when I spoke it, her face, which had begun in a brow-knitted pensiveness engendered by her own self-pity, broke into a smile, as if she had gotten the better of me, by having gotten a man to admit his animal weakness, and this smile, preening, vulpine in its slyness, was, I felt, so wholly of a piece with herself, so consonant with her little-rich-girl greed that I was filled with a fondness for her even before she spoke these words:

“Do you know, I think that frustration is a good quality in a man.”

“Really?”

“Yes.  Because frustration is desire, and desire is passion.  And you should know that that is what all women want in a man. You have an inkling of passion now.  And I think that is a good place to start.”

She laid an acquisitive hand on my forearm, grinned with the faintly evil expression of a procuress.  I realized that my relationship with her was not fraternal, or at least, not in the way that I had imagined it to be.  All the months that I had offered her “a man’s view of things,” imagining that I was guiding her like an older brother, she had merely been biding her time.  She had finally made of me the one thing that she wanted more than anything else in the world, what she twisted each man (boy) whom she dated into:  a little brother.

“You have some work to do, but do not worry.  We will find someone for you.”  And her eyes drifted upwards, scanning for possibilities.

When I lived in Varrenia, in the evenings, I would return to Vira’s house and the city was alive with bustle.  Even alone, I felt, young, alive, carefree.  Even if I didn’t have a girl on my arm, I could dream one, couldn’t I?  In the upper reaches, above the pell-mell, the evening sun would spill its last, dying rays over the city, settling placidly on the apartment buildings, or the walls of an ancient church, and these rays would color the stone a pale, celestial pink unmatched by any earthly pigment.