An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Bubi Brill had half a year’s leisure to ruminate on that, since Herr Perko had helped him cross the border—and at least as far as he managed to get. Bubi didn’t really have cause to complain about him.

  “On the contrary!” he explained later. “When they grabbed me at the customs checkpoint, he very honorably intervened, until they told him they would take him in as well if he didn’t shut up. So to this day I don’t know where that little case really disappeared to, assuming one of the customs officials didn’t take it. It’s odd: I know Effi Perko quite well by sight, from Schorodok’s place. I was just never able to introduce myself, because I was usually with gentlemen from the regiment, and now all of a sudden I’m supposed to believe the man stole my luggage, while all he had to do was wait until I came back and then he could have snatched both stones at once if he’d wanted to. Psychologically speaking, the whole thing is a mystery to me.”

  “When Jews are stupid,” commented his little brother Solly, “they are really stupid.”

  In any case, the Trocadero once again united Bubi Brill and Effi Perko, and they remained friends.

  What remained to be explained about the whole grotesque story was how old Paşcanu came to Perko in the first place, and how Bubi, instead of his father, found out about Perko’s planned participation in the business.

  The answer to the second question is easier than the first: Perko was never so sure as Paşcanu that old Brill would get involved in the deal. However greedy he might be, Perko didn’t think the old man was that dumb. The “transaction” was “too good” and “too simple”—in fact, it stunk to high heaven. Old Brill had too much experience with Paşcanu’s other business customs not to immediately suspect something and steer clear of it, no matter how much that might annoy him. But not so Bubi Brill, the youthful habitué of the Trocadero. Perko was a good judge of people; he observed them carefully—Bubi Brill, for instance, sporting with the ladies of the establishment, or enjoying the camaraderie of the officers of the cavalry regiment, in which he was allowed to serve, if not with a saber then at least with his pen, thanks to his mother’s hefty contributions to Madame Turturiuk’s pocket money.

  So on the same morning when old Paşcanu received Brill, Perko sent his “feelers to the right people” and had Bubi Brill informed on in confidence, namely through a telephone call placed by their common friend Schorodok, proprietor of the Trocadero.

  The answer to the first question—how old Paşcanu came to Perko, or vice versa—seems baffling beyond belief, unless one is able to empathize fully with the spirit of Czernopol. To wit: Perko had won the friendship and confidence of the castrato Miron, most especially in the church of St. Parachiva—through his acts of piety.

  He had long ago been baptized in the Orthodox rite, and his religious fervor went so far that when he was with his friends in the Trocadero, no matter how advanced the hour, he categorically forbade any and all disrespectful allusions to religious or churchly matters. Moreover, after Paşcanu’s death, he supported the scopit in the most generous manner, so that Gogeamite, the human mountain, whose voice was like the bright pealing of Easter bells, was granted a peaceful and carefree autumn of his life. Czernopol gained fodder for its laughter. Ephraim Perko was the hero of the day.

  “I have to confess,” said Herr Tarangolian, “I can’t figure out how I can hang this person at the same time I’m supposed to build him a monument. For what he did to the unfortunate Russian refugees he undoubtedly deserves to be hanged …”

  “Drawn and quartered!” exclaimed Uncle Sergei. “Every single bone broken, the nails slowly pulled off and the tips of his fingers immediately dipped in vinegar …”

  “Of course, you are speaking from a very pardonable emotion, my dear Sergei Nikiforich. But for the business with old Paşcanu he deserves a monument. Not because he was able to out-trick the trickster—my friend Merores had already beaten him to that, and very thoroughly. But because in one stroke of genius he was able to dupe the swindler and in so doing taught Czernopol, this most intelligent city on the planet, a lesson, by showing that the man was basically as dumb, primitive, and foolish as on the first day he climbed down out of the woods. To show Czernopol that it had been taken in by a blockhead, that it had fallen for a masquerade, a legend, the old fairy tale about ‘the chosen one’—well, that, my friends …” Herr Tarangolian muffled his voice into an ecstatic whisper; he shut his eyes appreciatively and rubbed the closed fingertips of his luxuriantly ringed hand under his Levantine nose, as if he were sniffing highly aromatic spices. “That, my friends, is magnificent. One of a kind. Brilliant. That is something worth relishing.”

  14 Blanche Reports on the Insane Poet; Herr Adamowski Comes to Tea

  MEANWHILE our appreciation for the sublime and magnificent comic spirit had yet to acquire the sophistication that Czernopol demanded. We looked at Săndrel Paşcanu’s attempted diamond swindle as no more, and no less, than an adventuresome and exciting tale, made all the more colorful by the figure of the old man, who for us belonged to Tildy’s retinue—one of the figures that surround the hero and provide a picturesque symbolism, like the shield bearers, unicorns, wild men, and lions on a princely coat of arms. And no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t bring ourselves to see Ephraim Perko as anything more than a scoundrel whom we would have happily and eagerly sent to his doom, if he had chanced to fall into our hands.

  Our unworldly upbringing failed to educate us in many areas, but thanks to our friendship with Solly Brill we were able to catch up on what we had missed by making several forced marches. Nor did this friendship suffer because of our other one with Blanche Schlesinger. As siblings of different ages, with strong internal bonds, we had always been essentially self-sufficient, and at the same time open with one another in sharing whatever came from the outside, and as a result we were never in danger of succumbing to the isolating exclusivity of those exalted childhood friendships that carry within them the seeds of anger, where disloyalty takes root alongside jealousy. Moreover, what we called our friendship with Blanche Schlesinger was really the lightest contact: she had set herself down beside us like a butterfly, and we marveled at her and loved her and took care not to endanger her fragile tenderness.

  Our closed, rounded world grew layer after layer—“We were like an onion,” was how Tanya put it later on, shortly before she died,

  “Whatever became of us?”—and Solly burst into this world, raucous and robust, full of lively cheerfulness. Of course our dealings with him had no trace of the heavy disposition people so often mistake for “soulful.” We have these two Jewish children to thank for the realization that the seat of the soul is found in the forehead and not the stomach, although we didn’t quite know at the time they were Jewish.

  At least, back then this was of no account to us. Doubtless after all that I’ve said up to now it sounds surprising to say the least, and yet it was true. At home we constantly heard remarks about Jews that were disparaging but also stretched into a grotesque or burlesque form that couldn’t be taken seriously, and which left us with an exaggerated impression of their essential nature—a notion that was contradicted by the reality we were now experiencing, despite all of Solly Brill’s characteristic traits.

  Naturally we had known other Jews before, and not just from hearsay. Every day swarms of peddlers, so-called hondeles, descended on our house to buy up whatever junk we might otherwise throw away, and in our neighborhood there were also Jewish families who had sufficiently expanded our minds and freed our imagination from the cliché of kaftans, peyes, crooked backs, protruding ears, and unrestrained gesticulation. But we had never had any personal contact; to be sure, we had heard them speaking among themselves, but had never spoken with a single one of them. And so Jews, by which I mean the concept of “Jews,” seemed like a species of clown, constantly on the move, devising their clever and comical—if also somewhat repugnant—plans to coax money from the pockets of Christians, but not humans with generally human traits. In
his outward appearance, Solly Brill did indeed fit this image, but not in his character, which we found endearing. The fact that Miss Rappaport had been called “the Jewess,” and more or less openly teased with the insinuation that she really was Jewish, always struck us as one of Uncle Sergei’s ideas, as absurd as it was funny, and we never really believed it.

  Nor did the speech of many of our classmates, in particular our friend Solly, startle us out of our innocent and unbiased amusement. In Czernopol every language was corrupted, and none more than German: the communal barking of the ethnic Germans, their dreadful maiming of their mother tongue, sounded more unpleasant to us than the patter of the Jews, in which now and then an old, powerful, and wonderfully patinated expression or a richly picturesque turn of phrase emerged out of the linguistic sludge, and even the degradation of the language showed a spirit—admittedly a repulsive one, but a spirit nonetheless.

  But, as I say, the most important thing was that we came to converse with our friends in the first place, and only later—quite a bit later—did we find out that they were Jews. So we didn’t make the usual discovery that Jews are also people, but rather the reverse, that people are sometimes also Jews. This was one of the most beautiful of the invaluable discoveries that we owed to Madame Aritonovich and her Institut d’Éducation, as well as to our parents’ temporary inattentiveness.

  In this way we learned that what these people known as Jews shared was not so much a common character, but rather common forms of expression: in other words, that there were no “typically Jewish” traits, but rather a characteristically Jewish way of expressing traits that were simply human.

  For the moment I’m not even talking about Blanche. Solly Brill with his shock of red hair, his freckles and protruding ears could have easily been the son of thoroughbred Prussian parents, the “bright lad” that would have occasioned much delight and a host of proud anecdotes. The only one thing likely to have gone missing was his sharp wit, which made common platitudes sound persuasive, absolute, and irrevocable, and which legitimized his cheekiness as a time-honored, effective means for probing and testing—and that is not only a characteristic of Jews, but also of other older peoples. Thus not a racial trait, but a character marker of specific races.

  From earliest childhood we had been brought into contact with the concept of race, whether in connection with our dogs, horses, or the colorful fowl in the countryside, or else with the ingrained overestimation with which our family fed its feeling of self-worth, and we understood the idea of race as something that applied equally to all human types, as a collection of specific physical and mental peculiarities. Consequently a “thoroughbred” Chinese was more closely related to a “thoroughbred” Negro or European than to a compatriot of lesser breed. After we made the acquaintance of a few Jews of remarkable intelligence and beauty, we were inclined to think that Jews were considered a race apart because the specific characteristics of their race found more frequent and stronger expression than was usually the case among Christians.

  Madame Aritonovich took care to cultivate our friend Solly Brill’s cheekiness, coaxing it out of him but never failing to challenge it in some way, almost in the manner of a gymnastic exercise. We felt reminded of certain theories of Herr Alexianu.

  “I can’t help think, Fiokla Ignatieva, that you are raising this specimen precisely to help advance the anti-Semitic cause,” said Uncle Sergei during one of his occasional visits to the Institut d’Éducation.

  “You are mistaken,” she replied. “I am treating this child exactly as I do the others. I myself had the unhappiest childhood, because people tried to give me an upbringing. Even then I knew that children can’t be brought up. In the worst case they can be trained; in the best case their characters can be fostered. You can’t implant anything, you can’t develop anything that isn’t already inside them; in fact, I am of the opinion you that can’t suppress what they’re born with, either. Even if I were to succeed in pruning this little boy, by clipping off his brazenness—and I consider the attempt hopeless—I would only break him in doing so. Then there would be one more ape in the world and one less character. And that would be regrettable. My children come to me so late that I’m never able to teach them what is known as good breeding. They either bring it from home or they will never attain it. Well-bred and embarrassed is a delightful mixture; ill-bred but happy and cheeky is the same. The combination of ill-bred and embarrassed, however, is a deadly one. Avoiding mistakes in life is not as important as not making something out of the ones we commit. In this matter you’ll admit I’m right, my dear Sergei, won’t you?”

  Strangely—and to this day it’s a riddle to us exactly why—Madame Aritonovich and Blanche avoided each other. Did Madame Aritonovich realize she was no match for this girl? Not that it would have ever come to a test of strength that she might have been afraid to lose. That was out of the question. The reason for Madame’s reserve may have had more to do with the fact that she, too, couldn’t help feeling secretly guilty about the girl—and Madame Aritonovich hated the very idea of guilt, as she expressed in no uncertain terms and with telltale vehemence. Whenever some anonymous prank or a question of responsibility triggered the judicial question “Who is the guilty party?” she would intervene forcefully and declare: “No one is at fault. It happened; it did not amuse us; let’s forget about it!”

  But perhaps the association between Madame Aritonovich and Blanche—which while not hostile did show a certain tense distance—was one of those inexpressible relationships, which if anyone had ever dared ask her to explain, Madame would have answered by glancing at Tanya and asking, “You understand, don’t you, Tanya?” There was a furtive, mutual sizing-up, and not such as between teacher and student, or between grown-up and child—Madame once declared that the “envy that grown-ups have for the richness of childhood can never fully be eradicated”—but rather between two women. Tanya herself stayed silent on the matter, like any other woman.

  Blanche had the tacit permission to withdraw or occupy herself with other things whenever “nonsense time” was declared—for instance, when Solly jumped up in the middle of the class and called out, “Madame, I know what! Why not let’s have nonsense time?”

  “What, Solly?”

  “I can act out how Papa had another row with Mama because of Bubi.”

  “No, Solly. We know your family by heart. They’re beginning to bore us.”

  “All right. Fine. I know something else. I learned a new song, a real hit.”

  “Which one? We’ve heard ‘Die süsse Klingelfee’ as much as we’ve heard Papa Brill. And that goes for ‘Salomé’ as well.”

  “Not ‘Klingelfee’ and not ‘Salomé,’ nothing like that. It’s the brand-newest of the new, not even Bubi knows it from Schorodok.”

  “And how do you know it?”

  “Record collection. I got it yesterday. Shall I sing it?”

  “All right, if the others want to hear it as well …”

  “Yes, please!” we called out in a chorus.

  “Fine. Ten minutes nonsense time,” said Madame Aritonovich.

  “I think the words might be even better than with the other two.

  I’ll say it more than sing it. We can practice the melody later on, it’s a foxtrot. So here we go:

  “You pretty girl,

  it’s pretty mean,

  to be as pretty as you!”

  “It’s pretty clear

  that’s not enough

  And pretty true I’m more than pretty—oooh no

  —with you”

  Solly started to sing:

  “Every lady

  likes-to-be-invited to the thé dansant,

  but every lady

  thinks-that-she’s-the-only girl who’s élégante

  whenever trying on a dress

  she causes tailors great distress.

  Every lady

  wants-a-look-that’s one of a kind,

  she won’t be happy

  unles
s-the-other-girls go out of their mind …”

  We cheered like mad. When Solly came to the part—

  “Buy the girl a dress,

  she will climb right in,

  and run-home-very-happy indeed.

  But for a fancy hat

  she’ll climb … right out again …”

  —we already knew the rhythm and enough of the melody that we could sing the second verse ourselves, with Solly conducting.

  I turned to Blanche and found her sitting by herself on the last bench, apart from all the others, as usual. She returned my glance, which undoubtedly revealed how much I was enjoying the triviality of the satirical song, with a brave smile that was clearly pained, but also confident and illuminated, and signaled that she had something to tell us.