An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Of course that was sheer fantasy. After all, we had our friend Widow Morar to thank for most of the stories.

  What was true, however, was that both of Săndrel Paşcanu’s wives lay buried next to each other in the little forest of Horecea. The oak grove was about a half hour’s wagonride out of town and belonged to a small monastery; Paşcanu’s generous donations had made the monks eager to do his bidding, and they watched over the grave of his wives like a holy shrine. Apart from that, he was accompanied on his nightly visits by his elephant-sized coachman, who despite his mutilation, which was generally understood to have a mollifying effect, was supposedly as mean and cunning as a buffalo gone wild.

  We did manage to visit the mausoleum several times, though always during the day, and without being able to see whatever fantastic things were happening behind the thick tangle of barbed wire. The structure was indeed a detailed reproduction of the Taj Mahal, except for the fact it was made of the cheapest limestone and covered with plaster that had long since yellowed and partially peeled off. It was also very much scaled down in size, so the whole thing looked pretty hideous. The long reflecting pool, where we expected to see lotus flowers, was brimming with frogs and toads.

  But perhaps it looked different by moonlight. Presumably the air of danger exuded by the castrated coachman prowling about while his master paid his devotions to the two coffins gave it a bizarre charm. And just as children everywhere challenge each other to venture into the cemetery at midnight, we would say: “I dare you to go to the Taj Mahal at night, to see what old Paşcanu is up to.”

  People said he couldn’t sleep because of a terrible conscience, that that was what drove him to the coffins of his two loves, and that in his remorse he kept buying new jewels to present to the dead women, hoping for the forgiveness they could no longer grant him. The coffins were supposed to be completely covered with the most expensive gems.

  But people also said he skulked around the crypt at night because he wanted his huge diamond back, and that every night he was tempted to open the coffins, but he was always held back by the horror he felt at the sight of the crypt.

  Both tales were probably simply made up. But that didn’t stop Săndrel Paşcanu from using the first one to his advantage, to give his last coup the aura of romantic extravagance—and thus credibility: he had some middlemen purchase a gem that was worth a fortune, then let out that he was looking for the perfect match, no matter what the price. After that, he tried to sell the same stone to the first seller, through intermediaries, for two or three times the original price.

  Old Paşcanu hadn’t realized that the trick was one of countless primitive scams known to every jeweler of any stature. After that he tried to dupe his middlemen—and wound up being robbed himself in the most ignominious way. It cost him all that was left of his fortune—and his life.

  This all happened at the same time as the events I have already described, shortly after Major Tildy was sent to have his mental state examined at the municipal asylum.

  Later people said: “And one fine night old Paşcanu rode out to his two wives for the last time.” And nobody knew that it was true …

  Perhaps the moon was out. Perhaps the crickets were chirping their silvery notes all across the fields and meadows of the vast countryside. Perhaps the croaking of myriad frogs in the cattails around the pools and ponds and muddy lagoons of the Volodiak hung like a veil in the starry stillness. No one paid attention to that. That last night swallowed his secret, and never surrendered it.

  No one will ever find out what he really did that night, or all the nights before, in front of the coffins of his dead wives.

  Perhaps when he came back there was only one star left in the pale sky—the one the wild pigeons had announced, and which they hurried after when it suddenly went out, proving themselves its loyal messengers, always at the ready.

  And the colossal horses in front of Paşcanu’s old-fashioned, swaying coach stamped their great hooves, raising the dust on the country road that led to the little forest of Horecea and far beyond until it lost itself in the immeasurable expanse of the countryside. What had been a pale-yellow ribbon of moonlight just a little while before, banded by black stripes from the hard shadows of the poplars, was now a melancholy trail in the morning twilight, urging the wanderer to shoulder his bundle and move on, toward that which can never be reached. A black box, framed by the silhouette of the poplars: this is how the old coach looked, coming down this road, thumping onto the planks of the ferry, which was pulled by a wire cable which workers from Frost’s Steam Mill had set across the muddy water of the Volodiak arm. The colossal horses snorted down at the water, while the mammoth scopit seemed to sleep on his box, his head covered with a narrow-brimmed Russian cap. The water gurgled past the rusty iron drums beneath the planking, and the cable sang quietly. The ferry creaked to a landing on the opposite shore, and while the sleepy sawmill workers patiently waited in the gravel on the bank, Paşcanu’s horses clattered up the escarpment and trotted hard and heavy over the wretched cobblestones of the Wassergasse, up toward the town.

  On the outskirts of the city, the moonstruck dogs had stopped their baying. Columns of small farmers’ carts rattled monotonously on their way to market. In the cellar bakeries of the Jewish quarter, which stretched over five-sevenths of the built-up area of Czernopol, muscular journeymen shoved long peels loaded with kosher rolls, braided challahs, and kolatschen pastries into heated ovens, causing the rats to flee into the rear courtyards, where snarling cats waited for them, their backs arched over the remains of fish, and where the whining and bawling of little children mixed with the sad singsong of their mothers and the groaning of their grandmothers and the abysmal coughing of the grandfathers to form a symphony from the dormitory at Saint Bridget’s hospice, which was an antechamber of hell.

  In front of the Trocadero, on Iancu Topor Avenue, a pack of drunken students gathered, then went rampaging along the park past the provincial government offices, down to the main street, to paint swastikas on the warehouse belonging to Usher Brill. In the garage of the house belonging to the Baronet von Merores, the chauffeur began washing the Chrysler. Further on, beyond the Volksgarten, the buglers blew reveille on the grounds of the cavalry barracks. In their stalls, the horses snorted and ground their teeth, chains clanked, buckets rattled, and from the windows of the troops’ quarters could be heard sergeants bellowing at their men, shooing the sleepy soldiers out of the stuffy, sweaty rooms, and sending them pattering into the corridors like a herd of groggy sheep. In the large loop beside the sheds, the first streetcar howled.

  At the Bahnhofstrasse, the old-fashioned coach had to cross the streetcar tracks. Perhaps the sleepy scopit reined in his team with a loud curse, because a man was walking along the rails, his cane riding inside the groove that was leading him forward, his head aloft like that of a blind man, mumbling Latin odes to himself, occasionally laughing or launching into a song.

  It was Professor Lyubanarov, coming home from a long night in the seedy dives around the train station.

  The rampaging students recognized him. They danced around him a while, hooting and jeering, without his even noticing. Then they ran ahead to the Ringplatz and reset the switch at the tram stop. They roared with delight when they saw him switch tracks, with all the confidence of a sleepwalker, then let him move on in peace, turning their attention instead to the aurochs of Tescovina, which with lowered horns was trampling the breast of the eagle of the Dual Monarchy. One of the students climbed onto the primal bull, straddling its neck to work his way up to the horns, from where he pissed down onto the pavement of the esplanade in a high splashing arch. Day was breaking over Czernopol.

  The coach with the faded violet silk repp curtains and the mice-infested upholstery rattled onto the bend of the narrow street at the Turkish Fountain and pulled to a stop at its crest. The coachman swung his rippling castrated corpulence off the high box and opened the gate with a massive key. Then he led the giant horses
by the snaffle into the courtyard. The gate was immediately shut; a heavy bolt slid into place. Săndrel Paşcanu was alone in his home, with his mean castrated servant, his solitude, his senile pride, and his Titian.

  11 On the Myth of Childhood: Madame Aritonovich’s Institut d’Éducation; Blanche Schlesinger and Solly Brill

  WHENEVER in later years we thought back on our childhood, painfully recalling its richness and dignity, what we had retained from our youth struck us as an inheritance acquired by devious means. It had so little to do with what we had become that we at times felt tempted to consider it the “literary existence” Herr Tarangolian had dutifully warned us against. The images from those days seem as far-removed as the untold fairy tales and legends that filled it with such wonders. Just like these stories, our childhood may be told and may even come to life in the telling, although the unmistakable quality of its reality cannot be reproduced. And even if this reality is awakened inside us for a few moments, in all its layered complexity, and speaks to us so directly and urgently that it causes us to shudder, what we then hear doesn’t seem entirely our own, but rather the voice of the past itself, lamenting that which is lost, and which continues to dwindle into oblivion, with us and around us, with every passing hour.

  “We are like the housing of an hourglass,” Herr Tarangolian used to say, when he felt obliged to admit that his memory was beginning to deteriorate with age. “Our consciousness is its narrow waist, unable to hold on to what passes through. Only the distant filling spaces cast back a vague reflection. To perceive something in a way it won’t be forgotten we have to become aware of its presence without looking at it. You have to look past something in order to see it in full.”

  And indeed: at times we encounter something that happens to correspond to one of those essential images we carry inside us, like iridescent refraction in old glass, so that it lights up within us, for just a heartbeat, setting off a flash of magical splendor, which is as fleeting as an echo and fully out of our control. For we cannot simply conjure at will its momentary shine in all the fullness of being perceived—the unity of color, smell, sound, and touch that absorbs all these characteristics and transmutes them into a single essential core. We are left to the mercy of a moment that resembles the moment when it first crossed the periphery of our field of vision, when we were focused on something else entirely.

  This powerlessness of our will to command our perception, the discrepancy between what we believe we experience and what we truly experience, makes it difficult for us to examine our past for any fractures that could reveal to us when and how we lost our supposed paradises. Memory occasionally descends upon us with the weight of authenticity, only to vanish into the shadows, inclining us to question the world in which we have lost ourselves, since we began fobbing off our ardent yearning with cheap secondhand goods. As if we ever had any other choice! And so later on we sometimes feel tempted to attribute the loss of our blissful, dream-bound childhood to certain events, which back then—as the story of Tildy I am relating here—affected us directly. We held Czernopol accountable for awakening us to the crude banality of the world, which from then on ceased to fill us with any longing. But there was more than just one error to that logic.

  Certainly our yearning was inspired by our abundant inexperience, and it was this hunger for the world that sharpened our perception. But this negative abundance was paradoxically a burden, because its pressure complicated the experience itself. What we consider basic aspects of our character—aspects that appear to us like the ruins of a large, emotionally structured composition that was never completed due to the powerlessness and carelessness of its creator, and which is now completely lost but for a few barely discernible fragments—are clearly nothing more than the moments when our desire was at its strongest, and connected to images, sounds, smells that it was not aiming for, perceptions it had looked beyond, as it focused on a goal that was very far away. In other words, these were the moments of our most secret torment.

  No childhood is beautiful, and none is happy, and ours was no exception. The distress a child feels as he attempts to recreate the world in his playing within a reality that is proportionate to his own, springs from the consuming awareness that he himself does not possess any reality whatsoever. Just as Professor Feuer’s house seemed to us the most beautiful of all, because it most resembled a play-world house, and just as we always regretted the fact that it was so real, and just as we wanted with all the power and weakness of unbridled desire to wield one of the spears of our garden fence as a play-world weapon and then were terribly disappointed, sobered, and hurt when Herr Adamowski unscrewed one and placed it in our hands, so we wanted everything to hover in some intermediate sphere of reality, balanced between expectation and readiness; in short, we wished it were all there in the same never-never land in which we ourselves lived. And that was a landscape of melancholy. What today seems to be the most reliable legacy of our childhood, and the only one truly intended for us—the sadness that was secretly mixed in with every one of our hopes—comes less from the disappointment of half and paltry fulfillment and more from the knowledge we had already acquired as to the invalidity of wishing at all.

  And meanwhile the unfilled space inside us reflected the richness of images that the world contained. Because our desire focused so far into the distance, we looked past whatever was near, catching it by surprise in unguarded moments when it revealed its secret. Our childhood is the myth about ourselves, the saga from a time when we were yet an intermediate race, when we stole knowledge from the gods, insight into the essence of things. It is our magical dawn, a twilight filled with mystical happening. And every reencounter with it has the character of the numinous.

  So if the memory of Czernopol includes experiences which we presumably ought to have been spared, that does not make it any less fortifying and purifying—or, in a word, any less holy, than whatever impressions we might have retained from some other perfectly harmonic world. On the contrary: the city’s reality, with all its dubious morals and drastic goings-on, was so mercilessly close that it provided a truly mythical background, so that the heroic characters of our early years stood out in all their ambiguity, impossible to forget. But what truly infuses our memory with a sense of primal experience is not so much these remarkably distinct figures and the impression they made on us, but rather the quality of the time when these events took place, and their ever-changing symbolic effect.

  Old Paşcanu’s bizarre undertaking, which would lead to a grotesque and dreadful end, had a certain connection to the case of Tildy. Because hardly had the word gotten around that Tildy had been locked up in the asylum—which as usual in Czernopol took no more than a few hours—than a number of creditors approached Madame Tildy with claims that amounted to a fortune, and which had been guaranteed by nothing more than the modest, and now very questionable, pay drawn by the major. Madame Tildy dealt with the worried gentlemen exactly as one would expect from a born Paşcanu—in other words, at first she refused to receive them, but had Widow Morar, who was in those days constantly around, and who even later never left her side, show them out quite unceremoniously, while threatening to set the dogs on them if they didn’t kindly leave the premises at once. Widow Morar executed this task with closed eyes and with such a gleeful smile in her golden mouth that Messrs. Fokschaner, Lipschitz, Mer–dinger, and Falikmann fled the house as quickly as they could.

  We could never find out if Tildy himself had in fact incurred such high and risky liabilities, or whether Tamara Tildy had run the debts up behind his back—though in his name, possibly enabled by the fact that she could be considered the only legitimate heir to old Paşcanu. Even so, every child knew what the enormous sums were used for—sums well above the demands of even the most luxurious lifestyle. Nor did the press fail to take up the matter, and the leading daily, Vocea (The Voice), went so far as to publish a lead article under the headline “Czernopol: A Center of International Drug Trade?” which made numerous unsub
tle allusions to the case of Major Tildy, though without the slightest reference to the presumed suppliers of the unfortunate lady, nor any explanation of how our city deserved such an appellation.

  The possibility that a third party might be responsible for inflating the case into a public affair, and for entirely different purposes, could not be overlooked. At first only Herr Tarangolian had picked up the scent with his Levantine nose. His heavy eyes, which floated in the oily yellow veil of the liver-diseased, rolled more indolently than usual behind his thick eyelids—in his case, always a sign of extreme alertness and dangerousness. His sentences were more polished, his gestures more exaggeratedly polite: whoever knew the prefect couldn’t help notice that something was going on, and that he was in his element. He spoke of General Petrescu with an almost tender irony, an affectionate attentiveness, rather like a fencing master who gently raps his opponent’s blade to assess his skill, or offers a halfhearted feint suggestive of this thrust or that cut—until finally he performs a true attack entirely unexpectedly and with alarming power and efficacy.

  “Don’t say anything against vanity,” he explained, fanning cigar smoke under his nostrils with obvious pleasure. “It is a manly trait, a romantic one, the coquettish sister of pride, whose menacing histrionics it transforms into a flowery garland of dainty grace. And it especially becomes the military man! Because is there anything more elegant than a martial bearing when it verges on coquetry? Isn’t that exactly what lends his elegance its deadly earnestness? And doesn’t the wish to excel in the bloodbath of a battle show a beautiful love of extravagance, a willingness to squander everything just for the glances and sighs of the young women who line the streets to greet the returning victors? There are occasions when the very traits that people point to as examples of how old-fashioned our nation is, how far behind the times, make me happy and grateful to be its child, and to live among my siblings. Isn’t it delightful to watch our generals cultivating the passions and gestures of Napoleonic officers? Take, for instance, my friend Petrescu’s ambitions. The political game he is pursuing so arduously is really nothing more than an expression of his warrior-like restlessness, the impatience of a knight worried that he might disgrace himself through idleness, who engages in the business of the state because he has no war in which to prove his rank among men. The will to power—so full of sound and fury, but we are most inclined to accept it when we realize that it’s really all about the ladies on promenade in Czernopol whispering their admiration … Incidentally I will predict that the article in Vocea is only the first of what will become a whole series of similar pieces. And I will be paying them all the more attention as they represent the journeyman’s labor, so to speak, of a young man who is not unknown to you. I’m talking about the children’s former tutor, Herr Alexianu. Vocea has acquired his promising journalistic gifts, and he is finding it a much more suitable and fruitful place for his polemical talents than if he had followed Năstase’s malicious cajoling and founded his own paper, which would no doubt have been the wittiest rag around, but for a limited readership—yes, alas, a very limited readership …”