An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  The brothers Ludenburg, too, moved from the windy reaches between thunderhead gods and light-headed balloons into a firmer station, which did acquire a kind of high-priestly consecration—as the highest functionaries of the total order.

  Nevertheless, back in the days of our childhood, we were still disinclined to fully abandon our perception of beautiful war, which we saw expressed in Tildy, the hussar, pliant as a windblown sleeve and ready to strike—exuding the aura of a bold and shiny knightly past. In him we rediscovered the grand fluttering of silken banners embroidered with gold, the flash of the saber wielded by a man’s hand, the mystery of bloodletting, and a different proximity of death that made one proud and unworried, because it was fervent, full-blooded, and full of life.

  Nothing we thought we knew about Tildy fit with the impression we had acquired of our German brothers-in-arms. But it was even harder for us to imagine him alongside the Germans of Czernopol.

  8 The Volksdeutschen: Professor Feuer, Herr Adamowski, and the Smirking Kunzelmann

  THE CITY of Czernopol cannot be imagined without its Germans. Franconian settlers directed to Galicia under Kaiser Joseph were among its putative founders, and their descendants comprised nearly a third of the population. Of course, they became so mixed with the original inhabitants and other migrants who arrived before or after, and their language was so corrupted, that they could hardly be considered children of the same nation as the famous stone Horseman inside the Bamberg Cathedral—though that didn’t stop them from invoking him and all other good Germans as part of their crude and pushy jingoism. But today a pedigree like that is hard to believe even for the ones who stayed in Franconia, so that it’s tempting to suspect some puzzling cosmic event caused one large nation in the heart of Europe to be replaced overnight with a different one, completely alien and incomparably inferior.

  The head of the ethnic confessors, the honorary president of the German Men’s Chorus and the Turnvater Jahn Athletic Club, a fanatically nationalistic polemicist and fervent anti-Semite, was a certain Professor Feuer, whom we called “Champagne Bottle” because of his steeply falling shoulders. I have difficulty describing him because his external traits—and undoubtedly his character as well—seem such a clichéd picture of the disciple of Wotan and the cranky high school teacher: tall and ungainly, with enormous feet in ridiculous orthopedic lace-up boots, with a cycling jacket and a broad, Odin-style slouch hat over his petit bourgeois clothes, and their stiff propriety stood in contrast to the threadbare condition they showed from everyday use. He would step along, craning his head like a madman, casting fiery glances this way and that, his long white neck jutting out of his collar like a singer preparing to deliver the highest note his vocal cords can muster. But it wasn’t just his dress, bearing, and demeanor that made him seem comically operatic and anachronistic: he was one of those men whose bodies never reach their full maturity, or else skip over manhood and proceed straight to a eunuch-like old age, while they themselves remain stuck in a transitional period of development, like giant boys, who along with their laughable and pronounced erotic traits have something angelic about them. Not until later, long after we had left Czernopol, did we realize how much he looked like Strindberg: he wore the same thick, salt-and-pepper mustache, with the ends loosely brushed up and recurved like cupid’s bow, and a soft, reddish, and seemingly moist little spot beneath his lower lip. Perched above his finely modeled chin like that, framing his responsive, highly elastic mouth, the beard seemed as fake as the beards donned by participants in historical pageants, the sort who reenact the Swedish siege of Rothenburg, when after everything has ended they sit down in the pub, in full costume but with none of the fun and foolishness of carnival, still ostentatiously seeking respect for the greatness of the past which they embody—while wolfing down sausage and swilling beer.

  Perhaps Professor Feuer knew of his resemblance to Strindberg and deliberately cultivated it, because if I remember right, the impression was undeniable. It could be seen in his conspicuously small, nervous hands as well as in his unusually handsome forehead and his soft, defiant mouth, but above all in his eyes, their fundamental tragic crazy-headedness, which had also given the brilliant Son of a Servant his torn, youthful expression. We of course had never even heard of Strindberg, and had certainly no inkling of his importance, so we were unable to transfer the respect for the original onto his Czernopolite doppelgänger—in fact, later just the opposite would happen—and so Professor Feuer’s exaggerated soulfulness struck us as hilarious—I can no longer remember whether on its own or if we were influenced by some ironic remark, a sardonic smile, or simply a general repudiation on the part of the grown-ups, presumably never voiced, something children always keenly sense. Because for a very strange reason, namely his strident anti-Semitism, the mere mention of his name at home evinced a silent but clearly palpable disapproval. This must seem odd, to say the least, considering the continued digs against the hapless Miss Rappaport, which were hardly evidence of an unbiased attitude toward the Jews. But in families with a strong sense of identity you frequently find the strange tendency to appropriate the most common and widespread maxims on decency, honor, virtue, or taste, as well as all manner of questionable attitudes temporarily in vogue, and consider them a kind of familial prerogative—with the result that any attempted influence by so-called outsiders is rejected as presumptuous and unseemly. Such an attitude is widely but mistakenly designated as conservative. While the family members usually reacted to supposed infringements of this sort with no more than raised eyebrows and a tense, oppressive silence, the servants reacted with considerably less restraint, as they considered it their privilege to keep guard over everything in the house. And in the same way that our cook, for example, felt excited that our much wealthier neighbors served game the exact same way we did, so our coachman gave us a stern lecture about how inappropriate it was for someone of Feuer’s social position to broadcast his political views.

  The Feuers lived in a house not far from ours at the edge of the villa district, in an overgrown garden, a house we liked very much. The properties there verged on the first fields, which were parceled off into small plots planted with cabbage and turnips, corn and potatoes with meager yet tender-colored blossoms, blossoms which, full of yearning for faraway places, bounded out into the open country as it stretched away, wave after wave, until finally lost in the promise of the horizon. The land at the town’s edge was mostly in German hands. A belt of settlement connected the city to the countryside: half peasant, half small-town, it lacked the tidy, toylike quaintness of the small country towns and showed all the signs of poverty and neglect of a remote province. Even so, thanks to its lush and sprawling vegetation, it fared much better than the average proletarian outskirts, where the mangy city limits resembled the edges of a living, festering wound in the landscape. What the corrupting proximity of the city—and particularly the city of Czernopol—had done to spoil the pleasing solidity of the German farmsteads was offset by the peculiar romance of natural decay, which is entirely different from the desolate squalor spread by the wastefulness of civilization. Here weeds unfolded into their full plantlike beauty: seas of nettles broke against the walls of half-collapsed sheds and barns, their deep green stalks forming a dangerous deterrent; morning glories whose touchingly timid flowers turned their heads in shame from the matted greed of their tendrils as they angled up the rotting fences; silvery-gray thistles that had changed the acanthus of Corinthian capitals into a knightly array bristling with points, clinking and clanging, breaking out in helmet-like metallic buds with plumes waving in the breeze; and, once opened in full flower, the heraldic black-and-gold discs of sunflowers, towering overhead on succulent stalks, replicated in wrought-iron patterns as though for an altar. The unpruned fruit trees were webbed with ivy that reached into their branches. And in their shade, the fat, soft grass, knee-high and gently bent, showed runic traces of life, like spoor from a game trail, where some human had passed. All this gave th
e garden an enchanted, fairy-tale-like quality.

  This neighborhood attracted us as powerfully as home did the prodigal son, though it wasn’t until much later that we understood why, when we realized that what we were seeking in the garden was actually within ourselves, and not because it offered a world of freedom, or because it was a paradise for adventure and play—which it was, with the dense row of hazels along the silky gray weathered picket fence, the thickets of rustling cornstalks strewn with giant striped pumpkins ripening on rough, bristly vines that twined across the ground like wondrous tropical flora—and we looked on longingly every time Miss Rappaport led us past. But strangely we were most attracted by the garden when this splendor of self-sufficiency, lapsed into a run-down slovenliness, was disrobed of all of nature’s magic, in the bare seasons on either side of winter, in early spring or very late fall. In other words, when the buildings scattered among the defoliated gardens and barren yards lay lonely between the muddy paths, and the gables stood forlorn against the never-ending background of empty fields striped with monotonous rows of dead stubble. The bleakness of the clay mines at the small brickyards, displaying a Chinese succinctness, seemed filled with some deep-seated meaning, one that reduced all life and the entire world into a stark formula, as did the emaciated, bony, bent-over figures of goats tethered by the edge of the path, with their swollen bellies and heavily pendulous udders, nibbling the last meager herbs. In the evening, the reddish lights of the petroleum lamps glimmered in the windows of the pitiful shops, glowing our way like the stigmata of poor people’s humility, pinned at the base of the enormous sky as an admonition that despite all irreconcilable differences, and no matter how far apart our worlds might be, we were united by the same abandonment.

  The Feuers’ house lay exactly between this very mundane edge of town and the manicured villas masquerading as lordly manors. Their garden abutted the orchards of a man named Kunzelmann, of whom I will speak later. Only when the trees were bare could we see enough of the unusual building to satisfy our admiration. The moderately large house was covered with wooden shingles from its base to the ridge of its roof, shingles that overlapped like the scales of a dragon, and it was adorned with countless balconies and balustrades, turrets and towers topped with weather vanes, and fortified and decorated with fretsaw work like a cuckoo clock. Nothing could charm us more than this confused and overly ornate hybrid of Black Forest cottage and late-medieval castle in miniature, constructed with the carefree randomness of childlike fantasy—the ideal playhouse if a child had the manic patience to dream up every ornate detail. They said that Professor Feuer and his older children had acquired and rebuilt it without expert help. The surrounding garden was large and every bit as untended as most gardens in the neighborhood, and the house seemed enchanted, like the playful grottoes or pavilions hidden away in the remote corners of abandoned and overgrown aristocratic pleasure parks.

  The house gained a special charm thanks to a saying over the entrance, burned into the wood in ornamentally entwined Gothic letters:

  Wunschgott hier wohnet und Sälde selbander

  niemals nahet, widrige Wichte!

  (Godspeed who dwell here and fortune withal

  Draw nowise nigh, ye nasty gnomes.)

  Miss Rappaport was extremely disconcerted by the word Sälde, which she didn’t know, and she finally read the complete works of Richard Wagner, with a dictionary close by, to see if she could guess it from the context. Meanwhile, she had been told that Professor Feuer himself was the author, because he had written a book, Wälsung und Waibling, published by the Tescovina German Messenger with support from the German School Association, in which he proved himself a true aficionado of alliteration and a master of poetic haziness permeated with the mystic magic of dawn that lit the primal oak forests of German fairy tales. Of course no one had any clue as to the content.

  Despite our own constant curiosity, however, we were not dying to know or find out who was a Wälsung and who a Waibling, or decipher the riddle of their relationship. Nor were we anxious to hear the results of Miss Rappaport’s philological investigation concerning the word Sälde. We loved words like that precisely because we didn’t know their meaning and because the sheer sound of them, which would have evaporated the moment it was filled with some explicit meaning, not only gave our imagination almost limitless room for play, but magically opened a door for us into secret regions.

  Listening to the sound of rare words with unclear meanings was one of the secret passions we pursued with a dangerous devotion. We considered them treasures, like the oddly shaped and colored things we collected and kept—potsherds, pebbles, twisted roots—not only because they provided the most vivid models for our imagination, but especially because in their fragmented state they suggested a final form that was all the more perfect; they were, for instance, more barrel or glass or stone or root than the usual objects of their kind. As the relics of an ideal design, they seemed to promise more information about the objects as they were meant to be. Just as an old coin long retired from circulation but of obvious fine alloy flashes unexpectedly in a handful of change, all the more promising the more its once-clear features have become blurry and worn under a patina of long disuse, and just as its value is all the more exciting because it is unknown—so rare words would occasionally pop up in everyday speech, and immediately command the high price set by our hopes for something marvelous and wonderful. And as with the money that—all too seldom—passed through our hands, nothing could compare with the glittering gold ducats and twinkling silver talers of our play chips as symbols of the most lavish wealth, precisely because these could not be tendered or traded, they were money in and of itself, and so there was nothing we craved more than words with meanings we never discovered or had lost due to a misunderstanding or mutilation—or, even better, words that had been freely invented and were thus words in and of themselves, vocabulary that no one took away from us because they were “complete and utter nonsense.” Words like that were capable of harboring more than a single sense. Not that they could be given any arbitrary meaning, but their meaning could be expanded arbitrarily. Their sound alone, the rhythm of their syllables, the body of vowels curving around the framework of the consonants, contained more than just the vague outline of a presumed structure: their foggy, diffused appearance enclosed every shade of the moods they strove to inhabit. Nothing seemed more worthy of contemplation than Lewis Carroll’s “nonsense” lines from “Jabberwocky”:

  ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  All mimsy were the borogoves

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

  Enticing and foreboding, conjuring the light and shadow of that fabled forest and the grotesque, fairy-tale-like slaying of a dragon, each and every one of these glimmering words had been made up, none of them was real, and we knew that—but the last thing we wanted to do was deny ourselves the reassurance of their pretend meanings by dismissing them as nonsense. That would have meant abandoning our secret hope that they might be part of some higher language, a special lingo for the initiated, for which there was no key, but which we expected to understand at some miraculous moment, as the apostles understand the language of all people at Pentecost. A language with an undeniable splendor all its own, with a relative absolute value like that of our play money, with no value but its own worth, which could be set as high as we wished.

  So ingrained was our habit of trying to force meanings out of words we didn’t know that we often had to endure Miss Rappaport’s reproaches that we were too vain to admit our ignorance. But it was not a matter of childish vanity or childish pride—a pride, incidentally, that is more immediate and therefore purer than later in life—that kept us from admitting this. Nor was it our disappointing experience that the answers to our questions usually proved as unsatisfactory as what Fräulein Iliuţ told us about losing face. Certainly we were reluctant to give up the free rein to play afforded by these inexhaustible
possibilities. But even this playful impulse expressed a more deeply rooted unrest. We resisted fixing things unambiguously, because we ourselves were anything but fixed and unambiguous. By the same token, we looked elsewhere for reassurance—to the definite, to the set and certain, fully expecting that things would reveal themselves to us of their own accord. Consequently there was something amiss about the passionate way we listened to a name such as Wälsung, fully in the thrall of adventure, convinced that our urgent desire would compress the sound of the word into some shape, making our wish come true, and that the peasant-knightly traits augured by its sour-apple smell would suddenly appear—whether in the form of gnomelike dwarves or a race of Æsir. The stealth, too, with which we carried on this foolhardy game of enticement and desire also had something wicked about it; we were ready and willing to be terrified, and this made us aware that our evil invocations were as sinful and dangerous as Doctor Faust’s, for we were summoning the spirit of language itself, and that brought us perilously close to falling into the hands of the devil.

  But that wasn’t enough to make us want to stop. We did our best to avoid Miss Rappaport’s relentlessly sober explanations, and managed to cheat her out of the richness of the word Sälde. In this way its mystery, which kept the saying over the Feuers’ door in a state of enigmatic ambiguity, reconciled us with the disappointment this house had in store for us. Precisely because it was a house we would have preferred to encounter in a game of our own imagining, in which we wielded powers that could make our boldest wishes come true—to the point of reinventing ourselves—in other words, because it appeared to come from the realm of make-believe, where we felt much more securely rooted than in the actual world, its reality bothered us. Its roof and four walls ought not to have fit so well together. An unfinished construction, or one fallen into ruin, would have been a clear sign that the place came from and belonged to the land of fantasy. But as a home serving the same banal aims as any other, connected to the municipal electrical works and sewage system, it belonged in an embarrassing way to the real world, where it merely seemed odd and bizarre. Only the saying above the door, which we never fully explained, served to dispel this everyday quality like a magical incantation, returning it to our daydreams. And at the same time its dark conjuring, which corresponded to the irrational side of everything that was magic, including the nonsense of all our count-out rhymes and witches’ spells, offered us admittance to the secret essence of all things German—full of wonder, and always a little uncanny.