An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  I will never forget the feeling of disappointment and disillusionment that overcame us as we stood there holding the iron bar, which was no coveted spear but merely a ruin from the destroyed perfection of our fence, the fence that had preserved our home and garden like a temple grove, and from which now a piece had broken off, like the tooth from Wilhelm Busch’s boy with the peashooter. For the very first time—I can still feel it today—we were filled with the fear that people might think we had unscrewed the piece ourselves, though we were never accused of doing anything that wasn’t clearly our own doing. So great was our dread that we didn’t dare tell anyone but Uncle Sergei, who commanded our unreserved affection. He listened to our story, and then consoled us, saying, “Iss no problem, my little hearts, don’t think more about it. The Germans do very many strange things; we say in Russian they invented the ape. They also invented the railroad—alors, qu’est-ce qu’on en veut!”

  The next day the picket was screwed firmly back in place. But as though our faith in the invulnerability of our house had been shaken by the possibility that even one of the lances that watched over us might fail, even if for just a moment, a secret pride began to wither inside us. We avoided approaching that remote corner of the garden fence, where the new screws stood out against their brothers. Their cheap gleam seemed to us a flaw.

  I am telling about these occurrences in such detail because all the people involved still have a certain role to play in our story, and also to give a picture of the world in which it took place, especially the world to which they wanted to consign Tildy by declaring him to be a German. Their contempt in so doing was unfortunately all too obvious, although every other ethnicity might have been viewed with equal disdain, if it were to be judged by its representatives in Czernopol. In some ways the others even outdid the Germans, but they had the advantage that their reputations were not so highly developed as that of the children of Teut, and were therefore less likely to be belittled. Not that I am presuming to dismiss our German neighbors with examples of an oddball, a pseudo-genius and a surly cur. But we would later find out that in Professor Feuer, Herr Adamowski, and Schmunzelmann we had encountered three varieties of German mischief that we would continue to meet, either separately or, very often, all together. In any case, at the time we took them to be representatives of their species since we didn’t know any others. We confided our anguish to Uncle Sergei and asked him how we could reconcile the repulsiveness of the Czernopol Germans with Tildy.

  Uncle Sergei smiled and shook his head. “Tildy,” he said, “is cavalier. He is gentleman. The homeland of aristocracy, of people with honor and manners, is very broad, it surpasses all nations and languages. But is very thinly populated, extremely thinly. And today this land suffers some epidemic disease, so its people are dying out …” He sighed from the bottom of his heart, but all the while beaming and smiling as if he were telling the most amusing anecdote. “Enfin, don’t scratch your head over what one person says about another, only scratch if you have worry. Or if you have louse.”

  We took comfort in this oracular speech, because we loved Uncle Sergei and felt secure in confiding in him. Above all, we were convinced by what he was saying about the homeland of the noblemen throughout the world; no one seemed a more competent expert on that subject than he. If someone had asked us whom we considered the perfect cavalier—after Tildy—we would not have hesitated a second in naming Uncle Sergei, although his position in our household was not the best. We couldn’t see what was so bad in what our aunts called “the bad habits of our dear cousin,” especially because he had the kindest and most attentive manners, far more convincing in their unforced grace than the calculated and often seemingly artificial bonhomie of Herr Tarangolian. Nor was anyone prepared to explain to us what exactly these “bad habits” were. We knew he had a tendency to talk about gruesome things as if it gave him some joy to describe them, but we figured that he did that for fun, as play-acting, the way we felt that he exaggerated his Russian accent or his horribly off-key singing, for the amusement of himself as well as others. For a while we were troubled by a small incident with a servant girl, an otherwise easygoing creature, who once came running through the house, completely beside herself, declaring that she couldn’t stay another hour under the same roof with “a man like that,” and although we naturally had no idea what might have happened, we knew it had something to do with the dark goings-on that occasionally happened in the servants’ quarters and with repellent regularity at Frau Lyubanarov’s in the dvornik’s hut, and which comprised one of the great secrets the grown-ups guarded from us so jealously. No matter what the case, our Aunt Elvira always seemed to consider men to be the initiators of such incidents, and spoke about “une crise juponière” as though of a sporadic bout of insanity, much as Widow Morar had described the effects of amanita poisoning. We asked Miss Rappaport to translate the expression and received an almost brusque reply, delivered from a haughty arch of protruding teeth, as severe as a window of a Gothic cathedral: “Why, skirt fever, of course!”

  The idea that Uncle Sergei might be particularly susceptible to this disease seemed contradicted by the fact that he was always extremely restrained toward Frau Lyubanarov—and this type of conversation came up primarily in connection with her. Moreover, we would have found it more natural that he were the one to be pitied, if that were the case, just as we found it ungenerous, and even untactful, to criticize his passion for “playing,” just because he was forced to live as a poor refugee at our expense. We couldn’t grasp why they would hold against Uncle Sergei what they were constantly urging in us—mostly when we were following a conversation among the grown-ups with particular interest. Then they would usually shoo us off, with a gesture we hated as the most arrogant grown-up gesture: “You look like you don’t have anything to do, my dears. Don’t you want to go out and play a little?” But when it came to Uncle Sergei, people spoke in muted tones about the sad fact of his “regrettable penchant for playing.”

  But from the strange, almost hostile world of the adults we had learned simply to accept certain things that didn’t make much sense, including at times their crass lack of understanding—for instance, when people, in their ongoing efforts to prove Miss Rappaport a Jew, cited as evidence the fact that on an order slip for religious utensils she had misspelled the word for rosary—Rosenkranz—as a Jewish name: Rosencrantz. No one believed us when we explained that the spelling came from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet, which she had read out loud to us in batches. The stubborn assertion of preconceived opinions seemed to be one of those annoying prerogatives claimed by the grown-ups, on the basis of nothing more than an agreement concluded solely among themselves, a convention that was, unfortunately, unassailable, and the occasional vague interest they showed in our own views, always tentatively expressed, had long since demonstrated to us that we were better off keeping our thoughts to ourselves.

  We had also learned, however, that there were grown-ups who defied categorization according to the arbitrarily established rules of the grown-up world, or who in fact opposed them—outlaws, or at least people like Uncle Sergei, who were not fully accepted or who had outgrown existing conventions, each in his own way, and had thus acquired the privilege of disregarding them, whether through some particular fate or sheer force of personality, such as Widow Morar or Herr Tarangolian. They participated to a lesser extent in the general conspiracy of the grown-ups who considered themselves keepers of some great seal and who were bent on protecting us from the secrets of the world. On occasion they also served as our interpreters. Not that we would have communicated to them our most intimate concerns, for childhood does not engage in communication. But in addressing the riddles that confronted us, they spoke the way we would have, if we had been equipped to do so. They helped us understand by expanding our imagination. Thus, after Uncle Sergei told us about the vast homeland of the aristocracy, we were no longer plagued by the doubt that Tildy might have some blemish because he came from t
he same tribe as Professor Feuer, Herr Adamowski, and Schmunzelmann. Nothing was more illuminating than the fact that he belonged to the special nation that formed the substratum of the noble qualities of all the nations, a legitimate descendant of the early-medieval knighthood, united by one God and one ideal image of itself.

  Consequently, we were all the more bothered by what Widow Morar told us about Tamara Tildy. We had asked her if she thought it possible that Tildy might be killed in a duel, and whether his wife would then be unhappy. She shook her head. “She is a Paşcanu,” she said. “She is not afraid of anything—only herself. Her father once told her how people in the mountains, where he came from, used to kill wolves: they would set a knife in the snow and let it freeze over so that only the blade was visible. Then they sprinkled blood on it. When the wolves came at night, they licked the blood and cut their tongues. In their greed they did not feel the pain. The taste of the fresh, warm blood coming from their tongues put them in such frenzy that they attacked each other and tore themselves apart.”

  9 Herr Tarangolian Reports on the Challenge to a Duel

  IN THOSE days Herr Tarangolian paid regular visits to our house, for reasons that gave the most eloquent proof of his tender sensibilities, but which, given our family’s constant urge to criticize, were interpreted in a less appreciative manner. He had an obvious fondness for one of our aunts, my mother’s second-youngest sister. She was a delicate creature of nervous, girlish charm, with an alluring hint of something unrealized, unawakened, that came from the shadow cast by an early misfortune—a shy, tightly budded blossom that in another place, under more caring hands, might have unfolded into a tender glowing beauty. She had distinct musical talents but never developed them beyond a promising dilettantism, mostly because she suffered from a very painful and persistent ear complaint that later proved much worse than first assumed.

  The prefect paid her a chivalrous attentiveness that never went beyond a tender thoughtfulness, but which struck us as all the more conspicuous, because all of us except our mother, who loved her younger sister very much, had grown used to viewing Aunt Aida’s constant poor health as a conceit, and her overly inhibited and supercilious air got on our nerves. And indeed she clearly bloomed under the discreet favors of the prefect, although she had to endure relentless gibes about the age and corpulence and dandyish swagger of her prominent admirer. Although Herr Tarangolian never gave the slightest hint of such an intention, people spoke bluntly about the possibility of a union. This was clearly a case of wishful thinking, because not only did the prefect’s high position win people over—he was also considered rich—but no one believed that Aunt Aida would ever find another suitor, and certainly never a more fitting one.

  But as I said: Herr Tarangolian kept his attentions entirely within the bounds of warmhearted fondness and the understanding of an old family friend, and whatever tomcat-like gallantry accompanied this paternal familiarity could be ascribed either to his vanity or to a certain compassion for the unfortunate girl—and perhaps also to a genuine attraction for her faded magic, which would by no means have obliged him in any way. Unfortunately, our aunt’s ear complaint broke out with a ferocity that made it necessary to send her to Vienna to be treated by the great specialist Professor Neumann. But by then it was, sadly, too late. She died half a year later of tuberculous meningitis, in indescribable pain.

  There was no reason to doubt the sincerity of the prefect’s grief. They said that his wreath of white camellias covered the entire grave. He asked for Aunt Aida’s photograph, which he placed in his apartment, where, years later, it continued to be decorated with the same tenderly glowing, romantic flowers on every anniversary of her death.

  In fact it was unfathomable how the idea could have taken hold that Herr Tarangolian took double pleasure in the role of the prematurely bereaved bridegroom: first to conceal his relief at having escaped the marriage, and second because his sentimental attachment to the deceased provided a welcome barrier against all future endangerments to his long-established bachelorhood.

  During Aunt Aida’s illness he had developed the habit of showing up shortly after meals for some black coffee—in other words, at an extremely unconventional hour, which suggested more than a merely casual friendship. His heartfelt expression on those occasions and his compassionately muted voice when he asked our mother, without letting go of her hand: “Do you have any news?” and later, after Aunt Aida’s death, when he continued to visit, his daily exclamation of “Ma chère!” uttered in deep sympathy with my mother over their shared grief, while the red carnation of the old playboy flamed in his lapel and faint tinges of green and ruby could be seen in his raven-black, freshly dyed mustache—all that caused us so much wicked pleasure that the tragic death of a near and beloved relative wound up being treated as a highly amusing anecdote.

  Part of this was certainly due to the fact that Herr Tarangolian’s natural temperament never allowed him to display such sympathetic concern for longer than a few fitting moments. No sooner had he had his first cup of mocha, which he sipped in silent and pensive dignity, then he began to relate whatever news he had to tell, in his incomparably lively manner, full of wit and insinuation that captivated and delighted his listeners, so that in the end he sat there, completely engaged in entertaining his circle as best he could, cozily leaning back in his chair, a cigar in his comfortably perched hand, legs crossed, outdoing himself with sparkling wit, while our mother and her older sister, Elvira, sat beside him, their own grief undiminished.

  “You are listening to my stories with the kind of flattering attention, Ladies,” he said, with a malicious laugh, “usually reserved for indiscretions. Permit me to say that I expect this. As it happens, I am so bold as to hold my own views on the subject of discretion, and how much it is worth—or not worth.”

  He took a nip of his chewy brandy, gently blew a thin trail of cigar smoke from under his large Levantine nose, and again showed his overly perfect teeth. “Most people consider me to be an incorrigible gossip. Well, they are right. But they should know I have good reason to do what I can to earn this reputation, since this allows me to take the wind out of the sails of the other gossips in our city. Where nothing stays secret anyway, where rumors are entrusted to unbridled imagination, to suppressed hopes and desires, to scarcely concealed calculated lies and, finally, to a deeply ingrained craving for jokes and witty anecdotes, where—as I may safely say among friends—the press prints more and dumber lies than all the other liars put together, there has to be, ladies and gentlemen, a different source of information, one that circulates nothing but the pure facts, nothing but the unadulterated sequence of events. As you can imagine, in my position I hear practically everything there is to hear, reported to me from the most varied sides and the most diverse points of view. I know who stands to gain by presenting something in this light or that—in my position one gains a certain overview, a certain instinct for associations. I know what to add in each case and what to take away. In a word, what you learn from me is the purest, so to speak the scientifically sterilized, pasteurized news. And because objective presentations are always a little dryer than biased ones, I enhance my report with the piquancy of a confidential communication. I am indiscreet, my dear ladies, in the service of truth.”

  He gave us children a quick glance, screwing up his eyes in a comic way, as if his jokes were part of some conspiracy with us, then, raising one of his black, artist’s eyebrows into a diabolical arch, he turned back to the grown-ups: “But in no way does that mean I wouldn’t at any moment fiercely deny having said a single word of anything you might claim to have heard from me. Just in case anyone should have the unfortunate thought of citing me as a source. But I have nothing against spreading stories without using my name. I am a servant of truth, but I prefer to be an invisible servant. For you as well. And now you will have to excuse me, but I must leave … Nothing is dearer to a poor and increasingly lonely man such as myself than these hours with your family, surroun
ded by such good, close friends, showered with such kindness. But—hélas—my burdensome everyday duties are calling once again.”

  He finished his brandy, stood up, took our mother’s hand, looked deeply into her eyes, and said in a voice only she could hear: “Soyons forts, ma chère!” And with that he guided her hand quickly and fervently to his lips, turned on his heels as if overcome by painful memories, and left the room with a sad wave, his head somewhat obscured.

  Most of us had a hard time restraining ourselves from bursting out in laughter—of the kind that quickly escalates into full-fledged fits capable of bringing relief to the tension that always lurks in nerve-ridden families. Once, I recall, we managed to avoid a catastrophe at the last possible second when a visiting teenage cousin pinned an enormously long mourning band onto the prefect’s straw hat. Luckily the tasteless prank was discovered before it could do any harm. Otherwise Herr Tarangolian never would have entered our house again—and he would have been right not to.

  But we will never know how much snickering, presumably hidden behind his back, how many quick winks and suppressed laughs and evident breaches of tact the prefect intentionally overlooked, for instance Uncle Sergei’s very indelicate habit, when our aunt was still alive, of warbling “Celeste Aida” each time he saw Herr Tarangolian, as if by chance—and off-key on top of that by whole quarter- and eighth-tones. Such gross disregard or crude violation of taste, directed against an entirely natural sensitivity, as well as against certain pardonable weaknesses—which would have been bitterly taken amiss if directed the other way around—was probably what prompted our family friend to be so sharply critical of us, as we later found out. In any event, these infractions from our side were far more worthy of blame than what we, in our arrogance, referred to as the prefect’s “unreliable traits.” Only our mother was spared his merciless judgment: he called her “one of the most lovable women” he had ever met, a woman “of the most tender sensibilities and equally rare stupidity.”