An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  We had yet to endure the painful experience of seeing such an entity as seemingly natural as our own family dissolve and disintegrate. In later years we told ourselves that we had parted from nothing more than a beautiful delusion, that the nestlike warmth we remembered from our intact home had never truly resided between its walls but was more the product of the warming rays of our childish bodies, our liveliness and open-mindedness, and that what we experienced was therefore the only natural outcome—namely, that we grew colder, along with the world around us. But no matter how reasonably we bore that in mind, it failed to assuage our homesickness—any more than a secret suspicion we shared that none of us would ever be capable of erecting anything as solid, sheltering, and warm as our childhood home.

  Or should we already have had some feeling, some premonition, of what it was that made Madame Tildy so cold?

  Meanwhile, Uncle Sergei seemed to show more understanding than might be expected from the implacably cheerful and charming countenance of an unreformed rogue. The accidental silence lasted for several minutes and at one point suddenly became palpably oppressive, without anyone being able to say why. Then Uncle Sergei blew a few rings from his cigarette in faux contemplation, puckering his lips in a kind of artful parody and sending the smoke off into the past, while quoting: “He who doesn’t build a house today will never build; and he who is alone will so remain …” He reached his hand out to Aunt Paulette, who was resting her head against the back of the chair and staring at the ceiling, and said with exaggerated sentimentality: “Give me your hand, ma chère cousine, in order to warm me.”

  Aunt Paulette didn’t move. Uncle Sergei raised his eyebrows very high and then sang, as mellifluously as a tender Pierrot, and bone-chillingly off-key, “Là ci darem la mano,” then sighed and got up. We knew he was going to play cards. Our mother stood up with him and left the room under some pretext. We knew that she would slip him a little money outside.

  It may have been a mood like that which led Aunt Paulette to go and visit Tamara Tildy. She hadn’t told anyone her intention, and we didn’t learn of the visit until a few days later, and then quite by coincidence.

  The conversation proceeded the same as most of the conversations that took place in our house did, and exactly the way, strangely enough, we would recall later on: assembled in the so-called salon, drinking black coffee after dinner, a group of people sitting motionless, silent, and fossilized. The only thing that occasionally enlivened this group was the presence of Herr Tarangolian, but after Aunt Aida’s death his visits grew less and less frequent, and finally, after a difference in opinion that had become all too clear, they ceased almost entirely. We were always inclined to think that this increasing stiffness in the lifeless room didn’t start until after Miss Rappaport had left us—which is proof of how much we are prey to optical illusions whenever we look back at the past.

  The conversation was trivial and disjointed. Sentences such as “Will you have some more coffee, Sergei?” and “Thank you so much, Cousin Elvira!” floated randomly on the surface of a sluggish silence. Aunt Paulette, her head resting on the back of her chair as usual—which earned the undisguised disapproval of her older sisters—interjected: “Do tell me if you should ever win anything at cards, Sergei. I’d like to borrow some money from you.”

  “You know, my angel, I never win. Alas.”

  “It might happen yet. If you cheat as cleverly as you do when you play rummy with me …”

  “Why do you need money, moye serdtse? A woman who has your beauty has everything.”

  Aunt Paulette said nothing.

  “I understand,” said Uncle Sergei after a while. “She is not doing well? She is always hungry?”

  “Yes, she is hungry.”

  “Oh-là-là,” said Uncle Sergei. “But this hunger is very hard to still. Very expensive. The games I play are for kopecks.”

  “You sometimes see a doctor, by the name of Zablonski or some such?”

  “You are speaking of Madame Tildy?” our mother said, not without a certain edge. “Have you seen her?”

  “Yes, I went to visit her,” said Aunt Paulette with unabashed nonchalance.

  “To visit her?”

  “Yes, the day before yesterday. There was already someone else there as well. A certain Herr Adamowski, an editor from what I understood. He was performing magic tricks.”

  “He was doing what?”

  “Magic tricks. He pulled a sugar-egg out of his nose, and other unappetizing and boring things. Card tricks, too. You should avoid him, Sergei, if you run into him in one of her circles. He’s better at it than you. You can recognize him by the fact he has a clubfoot. And a monocle. Both are hard to miss. Incidentally, Tamara Tildy seemed to be thoroughly amused by the man. She was practically bubbly, witty and charming. And the old Morar woman was lurking like a spider. When you look at her she closes her eyes and smiles. Her gold teeth are so bright you have the impression the sun is rising.”

  “She waits on her, from what I hear,” our mother said.

  “I think they sleep in one bed, if you can call what I saw a bed.”

  “It’s horrible,” our mother said. “By the way, children, you haven’t been outside all day. Go play in the garden until Aunt Paulette calls you in to do your homework.”

  If someone had told us back then that Aunt Paulette would wind up marrying Herr Adamowski, and then only after she’d been his mistress for a long time and under circumstances very embarrassing for all of us, we would have considered it the product of an unsound mind. We once spoke about it with Madame Aritonovich.

  “What’s so hard for you to understand,” she said, “about your aunt falling for this man? Tamara Tildy fell for him as well.”

  “And?”

  Madame Aritonovich smiled. “Didn’t you ever notice how fascinated Paulette was by Tamara Tildy, from the very beginning, the same way you were fascinated by Tildy?” Except she was fascinated the way one woman is by another, through constant secret comparison, relentlessly lying in wait for the moment when she might emerge triumphant. She was younger and more beautiful, and that made her envy all the more bitter—that gives it an edge right away … You understand what I mean, Tanya, don’t you?”

  Tanya didn’t answer.

  “Of course,” the rest of us said. “And we could have understood it if she had taken Tildy away from her when he came back. But not this clubfoot, this salon-buffoon.”

  “Tildy!” said Madame Aritonovich, almost disdainfully. She looked at Tanya. “You know what I mean, yes?”

  Tanya still said nothing.

  “Wait until you are twenty-five,” said Madame Aritonovich. “Live with relatives when you are young, beautiful, and at the peak of vitality but unable to move freely. Your expectations from life have been curtailed. Meet a man you find repulsive in every way—physically, mentally—but who has conquered the woman who makes you uneasy, because you sense that you have something in common, if nothing more, or nothing less, than a seed of the same despair. What will you do? You take revenge for this despair that she has beaten you to. You will want to hit her where it hurts the most, on account of your own despair … I don’t expect you to approve, I only expect you to understand … Ah, but sadly you weren’t in my school long enough, you little titmice, back then.”

  The platitude that “You never can tell” could be aptly applied to the short time we spent in Madame Aritonovich’s Institut d’Éducation, and we could count ourselves lucky that we didn’t know back then how soon we would leave it. Because we were happy there, apart from a few very mundane childish worries—minor aches that later struck us as ridiculously trivial, though at the time they seemed as bitter as any sorrow yet to come.

  One of those early pains, which I alone experienced, was responsible for our friendship with Blanche Schlesinger.

  For a few weeks we had tried in vain to get to know her. But she was as retiring and shy toward us as she was toward all the others, and, moreover, we felt awkward a
nd embarrassed by our attempts to approach her, and especially by our poorly feigned casualness. This was a technique we had picked up from Solly Brill, and to us it seemed a wonderful way to overcome embarrassment. But while such spontaneity was second nature to him, we were never to fully master it, not even later on. Nor did it work in the least bit with little Blanche. When her large, knowing eyes met our own, when we saw her sad smile that seemed to say “Don’t try to disguise anything, don’t put on an act, tell me what you want from me and I’ll do it if I can, if it isn’t too loud or garish,” we were stopped in our tracks, succumbing instantly to a sensitivity against everything garish, loud, or direct. For we had seen, often enough, how just one excessively familiar word or overly intimate gesture could cut to the quick, wounding a person where he was at his most vulnerable, at the core of his personality. And having to watch Blanche’s eyes grow a shade darker, or her smile turn more sadder, while knowing that whenever things remained unsaid that should have been stated hardly helped us overcome our shyness—well, it only made things worse.

  I feel a little embarrassed when I say “little Blanche,” for although she was probably younger than we were, we never had the feeling that we had to patronize her, or that we even could. She was superior to us in every respect. Just like Solly Brill, and for the same reason: she was thousands of years ahead of us—the superiority of an older race.

  We had no reservations when it came to treating Solly, who was a head shorter than we were and almost two years younger, as a superior being. His verdict on Blanche was, incidentally, absolutely matter-of-fact: “A whimsical creature, the Schlesinger girl”—and here he was right—“but intellectually anemic. Not worth talking about.”

  So we contented ourselves with greeting her from afar, with a short nod and a quick glance, both conveyed in embarrassment, leaving us even more embarrassed because we knew that she was still observing us with her big eyes. And then the day came when she spoke to us.

  It was during Fräulein Zehrer’s German class, which usually passed sluggishly, unless it was fraught with the kind of tension that made us refractory and unleashed all the bad habits children are capable of when pressed into a stupid and unenlightened educational mold, although it should be noted that Fräulein Zehrer was hardly the fossilized schoolmarm people are inclined to blame for the shortcomings and taxing boredom of school. She was healthy and red-cheeked, relatively young, blond, even bright. But her unconcealed disapproval of Madame Aritonovich’s pedagogical views and methods—which were never presented as a program but simply derived from her unique personality—made her contrary, and thereby inept. She taught in protest, and her protest was as much against Madame Aritonovich as it was against ourselves. Alone among the teachers employed at the Institut d’Éducation—mostly mousy old spinsters or kind, grubby old men—she had trained for her profession and had fallen victim to various modern ideas. Her ideal was most likely a German Waldschulheim—a boarding school in the woods with lots of sun, enormous windows, where the walls were adorned with the students’ artwork and where the children sat outside in a meadow, singing chorales in a circle—the idyll, in a word, of a kindergarten teacher. The very building that housed the Institut d’Éducation, a dilapidated private home where the only equipment was the barre in the ballet room, must have been repugnant to her. Her revenge took the form of teaching us with a matter-of-factness and thoroughness that suffocated us with boredom. My guess is that Madame Aritonovich probably realized all this, but kept her—or possibly even hired her—for pedagogical reasons, namely to provide contrast, following the only principle she ever did put into words: Children should not be spared anything.

  We were practicing what was called the “spoken essay.” My assignment consisted of retelling the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. I did my best, and when I came to the place where the prince reaches the castle surrounded by thorns, I said: “… and the prince saw before him a sleeping castle, covered with layers and layers of briars …”

  “What was sleeping?” Fräulein Zehrer interrupted. “The castle?” She turned to the class: “Did you hear that? Have any of you ever seen a castle sleep?”

  The class howled with laughter, with Fräulein Zehrer laughing along at full volume. “The people in the castle were sleeping, you dum–mkopf—Sleeping Beauty in the attic chamber, the king on his throne, and next to him the queen, her pages on the steps and the guards on the balconies and over the gate, even the cook, who was in the process of giving his apprentice a slap on the face, and the court dog on his chain and the cat at the hearth—but not the castle!”

  I stood there close to tears, overcome with shame. What hurt me the most was the betrayal of my friends: Solly Brill next to me had thrown his arms over the table and laid down his head, which was red from so much laughing. And although I knew that he wasn’t laughing so much at my mistake—which I couldn’t consider a mistake—as much as expressing his relief from the deadly-dull torment, which would have made me every bit as cruel if someone else had been in my place, I did feel the stabbing pain of having been utterly and despicably abandoned.

  “Now take your seat and think about whether a building can sleep,” said Fräulein Zehrer. “But don’t go dozing off on me, you sleepyhead!”

  Solly Brill grabbed his protruding ears as if his head were about to fall off. “A sleeping castle! Who ever heard of that! You have words for that, all right! Go to sleep, sleepyhead!”

  I was as if blinded.

  But when the class was over, Blanche Schlesinger came up to me. “What you said didn’t make me laugh at all,” she said. “I thought it was exactly right, and very poetic, a beautiful shortcut that said all that was needed.”

  My sister Tanya joined us. “You have a very nice dress,” said Blanche, briefly turning a little red, as if the compliment seemed a little empty. “And very pretty hair,” she added, as a kind of compensation, “and pretty eyes. I’d like to be friends with both of you. Do you want to trade some books?”

  We brought her Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which she already knew, but was happy to have because of Rackham’s beautiful illustrations, and she in turn gave us a very strange book, God’s Conic Sections by someone named Sir Galahad, who Blanche said was actually a woman. We didn’t understand a word of it, but when we came across it years later it seemed like a revelation, and it took us another ten years to get over it.

  Because we realized the imbalance of this literary exchange, we next brought her Agnes Günther’s The Saint and Her Fool, which our Aunt Elvira had found very moving, and which we begged her for, supposedly so we could take it to Fräulein Zehrer. We felt that Blanche was the spitting image of the “little soul” in the book—a misunderstanding that later proved to be quite cruel. That must have led her to judge us for what we were. Her next gift to us was Kipling’s Jungle Book.

  But that wasn’t all. She gave us Mörike, in homeopathic doses, then Thackeray’s Pendennis, which to this day remains one of our favorites, and, finally, a volume of selected poems by Goethe, and after that Longus’s Daphnis and Chloë, in all naïveté and undoubtedly only because of its beauty. We loved her more and more with every book.

  I don’t know what was more exciting for us back then: the events concerning Tildy, his wife and her father, old Paşcanu, who were often the subject of conversation first at home and ultimately throughout the entire city—or our friendship with Blanche Schlesinger and the other world that she opened for us, the marvelous wonder-world of literature, this real place of refuge for those who have need to flee.

  “Come visit us sometime,” we asked her. “We have a big garden.”

  She smiled sadly. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “Then we’ll come visit you, and you can show us all your books and your father’s as well.”

  “That won’t work, either,” she said quietly.

  We were inclined to consider her very elegant, because she was kept so isolated. So there she was at last, our bewitched princess,
who remained beautiful and noble even though a terrible curse had deprived her of her crown and her rule over her subjects. I loved her, and I loved her name, which I expanded into the name of Parsifal’s love: Blanchefleur.

  Later, after our friendship had been sundered in the most horrible way and she and her father had left Czernopol, she sent one last book: Disraeli’s Tancred. As a dedication she had inscribed a few lines from Verlaine:

  Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela,

  Et que je suis plus pauvre que personne,

  Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela,

  Mais ce que j’ai, mon Dieu, je vous le donne.

  In the meantime, while we were so absorbed in our immediate concerns, things were happening that would have a far greater impact on us. Czernopol was weaving the background for our myth.

  In this city, where whatever didn’t take place on the street was indiscriminately dragged into the open, the events that led to the animated conversation between Bubi Brill and his father, which Solly had so masterfully reenacted for us, did not remain hidden for long.

  People said that Usher Brill looked up old Paşcanu in order to propose a daring business deal with him. But that wasn’t so: old Paşcanu had summoned him.

  People knew everything, down to the smallest detail:

  On the morning before the night when he paid his last visit to his dead wives in Horecea, Săndrel Paşcanu appeared in the stairwell of his house. He hadn’t slept. He stood there, nearly six feet tall and despite his eighty years—or more, since he didn’t know his exact age—quite erect, although admittedly one hand was leaning on a rough cane, while the other, as horny and clawlike as the talon of a gigantic bird, rested on the dirty handrail of the wooden staircase, scaring the cockroaches into the cracks. He was wearing the trousers and vest of a suit made of the finest material, of a cut that a dying breed of London tailors is taking to the grave. His shoes, too, with their suede uppers fastened from the side, were almost dandy-like in their elegance. Instead of a jacket, however, he had put on a sleeveless sheepskin, a so-called cojoc, which after decades of use hid a fleece that had worn down to a few moldy remnants with the brownish sheen of old bacon rind. His nose was bold, prominent, and vulture-like, and his mustache was white as snow and soft as silk and covered his mouth completely. His black eyes glowed beneath his bushy eyebrows. They were set close together, like those of a lurking boar, wily and dangerous. He was unshaved—white stubble covered his gaunt cheeks. A tall, pointed lambskin cap crowned his skull, which was completely bare; he never took it off, no matter what the season or occasion. He called for his coachman. His voice had retained the power of his youth and betrayed the full tone used by the speech-happy Latins.