II

“Have you ever heard such singing before?” asked Izergil, raising her head to give me a toothless smile.

“No, I have not. Not anywhere.”

“And you never will. We love to sing. Only a handsome race can sing well – a handsome race that is filled with love of life. We are such a race. Look, think you those people who are singing are not weary from the day’s labour? They laboured from sunrise to sunset, but now that the moon has risen they are singing. People with no interest in life would have gone to bed; but those who find life sweet are singing.”

“But their health —” I began.

“One always has enough health to last a lifetime. Health! If you had money, would you not spend it? Health is gold no less than money. Do you know how my youth was spent? I wove rugs from dawn till dusk, scarcely unbending my back. I, who was as full of life as a ray of sunlight, had to sit as motionless as a stone. Sometimes my very bones ached from sitting so long. But when evening came I ran off to embrace the man I loved. For the three months that my love lasted I ran to him and spent all my nights with him. Yet see to what a great old age I have lived! The blood in my veins was sufficient, it seems. How often I fell in love! How many kisses I gave and took!”

I looked into her face. Her black eyes were still dull; not even her memories could restore their shine. The moon poured light on her dry, cracked lips, on her sharp chin tufted with grey hair, and on her wrinkled nose that was curved like the beak of an owl. There were dark hollows where her cheeks had been, and in one of them lay a strand of grey hair that had escaped from under the red rag she had twisted round her head. A web of wrinkles covered her face, neck, and hands, and at every movement she made I expected this parchment-like skin to split and peel off, leaving a bare skeleton with dull black eyes sitting beside me.

Once more she began to talk in her cracked voice:

“I lived with my mother near Falmi, on the banks of the Birlat River, and I was fifteen years old when he came to our farm. He was tall and dark and graceful and very gay. He stopped his boat under our window and called out in a ringing voice: ‘Hullo! Can I get some wine and something to eat here?’ I looked out of the window, and through the branches of the ash-tree I saw the river all blue in the moonlight, and him standing there in a white blouse tied with a wide sash, one foot in the boat, the other on the bank. And he was rocking the boat and singing, and when he caught sight of me he said: ‘Just see what a fair maid lives here, and I knew nothing of it!’ – as if he knew all the other fair maids in the world. I gave him some wine and some pork, and four days later I gave myself to him. Every night he and I went boating together. He would come and whistle softly, like a marmot, and I would jump out of the window like a fish on to the river-bank. And off we would go. He was a fisherman from the Prut, and when my mother found out about us and beat me, he urged me to run away to Dobruja with him and even further – to the tributaries of the Danube. But I had grown tired of him by then – he never did anything but sing and make love. I found it boring. And just at that time a band of Hutsuls came roaming through these parts and they found sweethearts for themselves here. Those maids had a merry time of it! Sometimes one of the lovers would disappear, and his sweetheart would pine away, sure that he had been put in prison or killed in a fight, and then, lo and behold! he would drop out of a clear sky, alone or with two or three comrades, bringing rich gifts (they came by their riches easily). And he would feast with her, and boast of her to his comrades. And this would give her pleasure. Once I asked a girl who had such a lover to introduce me to the Hutsuls. Yet see, what was that girl’s name? I have forgotten. My memory has begun to fail me. But it happened so long ago, anyone would forget. Through this girl I met a young Hutsul. He was handsome. A red-head. Red hair and red whiskers. Flaming red. At times he was moody, at others tender, and again he would roar and fight like a wild beast. Once he struck me in the face. I sprang up on his chest like a cat and sank my teeth into his cheek. From then on he had a dimple in his cheek, and he liked me to kiss him on that dimple.”

“But what happened to the fisherman?” I asked.

“The fisherman? He stayed on. He joined their band – the Hutsuls. At first he begged me to come back to him and threatened to throw me into the river if I did not, but he soon got over it. He joined their band and found himself another sweetheart. They were both hanged together – the fisherman and my Hutsulian lover. I went to see them hanged. In Dobruja. The fisherman was deathly pale and wept when he went to his death, but the Hutsul smoked his pipe. He walked straight ahead, smoking his pipe, his hands in his pockets, one of his moustaches sweeping his shoulder, the other his chest. When he caught sight of me, he took the pipe out of his mouth and cried out: ‘Farewell!’ I wept for him a whole year. They had been caught just when they were ready to go back to their native mountains. They were holding a farewell party at the house of a certain Rumanian when they were captured. Just the two of them. Several others were killed on the spot and the rest escaped. But the Rumanian was made to pay for what he had done. His farm and his mill and his barns of grain were burnt to the ground. He was turned into a beggar.”

“Did you do it?” I hazarded a guess.

“The Hutsuls had many friends – I was not the only one. Whoever was their best friend did this in their memory.”

The singing on the sea-shore had ceased by this time, and no other sound but the murmur of the waves accompanied the old woman’s tale. Their murmur, restless and brooding, was fitting accompaniment to this tale of a restless life. Milder grew the night, deeper the blue of the moonshine, and softer the indefinable sounds of night’s invisible denizens whose clamour was drowned out by the increasing roar of the sea as the wind rose.

“And then there was a Turk I fell in love with. I was one of his harem in Scutari. For a whole week I lived there without minding it, but then I found the life tiresome. Nothing but women everywhere. He had eight of them. All day long they ate and slept and chattered nonsense. Or they quarrelled, and then they were like a set of cackling hens. The Turk was not a young man. His hair was almost white, and he was very rich and important. He spoke like an emperor. His eyes were black and straight – I mean they looked straight into your soul. And he was always praying. I first saw him in Bucharest. He was strutting about the bazaar like a king, looking very important. I smiled at him. That same evening I was seized in the street and brought to him. He traded in sandal and palm wood and had come to Bucharest to make purchases of some sort.

“‘Will you go away with me?’ he asked.

“‘I will indeed,’ I said.

“‘Very well,’ he said.

“And I went away with him. He was very rich. He had a son, a slim dark-haired youth of sixteen. It was with him I ran away from the Turk – ran away to Bulgaria, to Lom-Palanka. There a Bulgarian woman knifed me in the chest because of her husband or lover, I have forgotten which.

“For a long time after that I lay ill in a nunnery. A Polish girl, a nun, took care of me, and her brother, a monk from a monastery near Artzer-Palanka, used to come to see her. He kept wriggling round me like a worm, and when I got well I went off with him to Poland.”

“But wait: what happened to the Turkish boy?”

“Oh, him? He died. He pined away with homesickness, or perhaps it was love. He began to wither like a sapling that has too much sun. Just withered away. I remember him lying there blue and transparent as ice, yet consumed by the flames of love. He kept asking me to bend over and kiss him. I loved him dearly and kissed him a lot. Little by little he became so weak he could hardly move. He would just lie there and beg me, as if he were begging alms, to lie down beside him and warm his poor body. And I did. The minute I lay down beside him he would be all aflame. One day I woke up to find him stone-cold. He was dead. I wept over him. Who can tell? Perhaps it was I who had killed him. I was twice his age and very strong and vigorous, but he? – he was just a child.”

She sighed and crossed herself – I had not seen her do that before. Three times she made the sign of the cross, muttering something between her dry lips.

“So you went off to Poland —” I prompted.

“I did, with that little Pole. He was beastly and absurd. When he wanted a woman, he would rub up against me like a tom-cat, the honey oozing between his lips; when his desire was satisfied he would lash me with his tongue as with a knout. One day when we were walking along the bank of a river, he said something proud and insulting. Oh, I was angry! I seethed like boiling pitch. I picked him up like a baby – he was very small – and squeezed him until he went black in the face. Then I swung out and hurled him over the bank into the river. He gave a shout, and it sounded very funny. From the top of the bank I watched him struggling in the water, and then I went away and I have never seen him since. I was lucky in that respect: I never met my lovers after I had left them. It would be bad to meet them – like meeting the dead.”

The old woman grew silent. In my mind’s eye I saw the people her tale had conjured up. I saw her Hutsulian lover with the flaming-red hair and moustache calmly smoking his pipe as he went to his death. His eyes, it seemed to me, were a cold blue, and their glance was firm and intense. Beside him walked the dark-whiskered fisherman from the Prut. Loath to die, he was weeping, and his once merry eyes stared dully out of a face that had grown white in the anticipation of death, while his tear-drenched moustaches drooped mournfully at the corners of his twisted mouth. I saw the important old Turk who was no doubt a fatalist and a despot, and beside him his son, a pale delicate flower of the Orient, poisoned by kisses. And the conceited Pole, polite and cruel, eloquent and cold. And all of them now were but wan shades, and she whom they had kissed so ardently was sitting beside me, still alive but shrivelled with age – bloodless, fleshless, with a heart bereft of all desire and eyes bereft of their shine – almost as much of a shade as they themselves.

She continued: