An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Not until the end of the visit, as the relatives were searching for the joke that had escaped them, did Herr Adamowski get a word in. Uncle Hubert was apologizing for what we had missed, while Aunt Sophie promised to send the joke on by mail—“You know how it is: the minute you take your seat in the carriage it all comes back to you”—along with another one that was nowhere near as good as the one they couldn’t remember, as both of them seemed vexed to admit. Herr Adamowski jumped in to take advantage of the opportunity and said: “But perhaps you haven’t heard this one …” and finally had a chance to say something. He told a fairly boring joke, and then, without waiting to see its effect, which could hardly have been remarkable, quickly added: “And here’s another, if I might …” and went on telling a second, third, and fourth joke, one after the other, until he finally noticed that enough was enough. Then he went silent, baring his saw-teeth, while Uncle Hubi said musingly: “Yes, that’s a good one … But if only I could remember mine from this morning …” until a general silence settled, which Aunt Sophie put an end to: “Well, Hubi, I think it really is time for us to get going …”

  “You’re right,” said Uncle Hubert. “I think it really is time for us to get going …”

  Herr Adamowski wanted to leave with them, but his hosts asked him to stay, claiming they’d hardly had a chance to talk, though in reality they wanted a chance to see off the relatives undisturbed. The couple from the country—bright-eyes, iron-gray hair, clad in coarse brushed wool with thistly tufts, with large, dry, kind hands—seemed to anticipate the fresh air on their ruddy cheeks and the wind against their carriage. They quickly took their leave of Herr Adamowski with an alarmingly brusque display of cordiality and returned to their true element. Left to his own devices, Herr Adamowski ate two more anchovy rolls and soon went on his way. The impression he left behind neither disappointed nor exceeded what had been expected of him. No one said a thing about it.

  By the time Herr Adamowski left, we had run outside. Aunt Paulette accompanied him halfway to the gate. He waved to us and gave a meaningful, smirking nod, which we returned with the reserved politeness that Miss Rappaport had drilled into us and which Madame Aritonovich had enriched with subtle shadings vis-à-vis people of “higher, equal, or lower rank.” When Aunt Paulette came back, we were still standing in the same place. She walked right past us, but then all of a sudden turned around and smacked Tanya in the face as hard as she could.

  It was so cruel and unexpected, so bizarre, that the resounding slap seemed like a trick of the senses by the time Aunt Paulette reached the stairs leading up to the house—like one of those eerily ephemeral hallucinatory events that are no sooner noticed than they are gone, such as when clouds open up and an angel drops out of the sky, or a sudden shifting of the planet, as though mountains were dancing: things we feared with a peculiar sense of excitement, and also craved, because they would have proven to us that the enchanted, heightened reality we so wanted to believe in, with the skeptical urgency brought on by our need to affirm our own identity, was real after all. But then we saw Tanya, shielding her face with her hands as if she had been blinded, still reeling under the brutal force of the blow, crumpled inward as if wounded. Not one of us had ever been hit before. We sensed that something critical had transpired, that this blow to the face had shattered something holy, something sacrosanct—a fragile mask of inviolate dignity, and now its splinters were being rubbed into our skin. I remember my pulse pounding in my throat while wishing to see a drop of blood trickle out from Tanya’s hands, as if such a sparkling, ruby-red mystery might effect a mystical reconciliation, and rid the taint of that colorless blow.

  Tanya uttered something that was half whimper, half panting groan. She turned and raced off to hide in the furthest corner of the garden. And we followed her, also concealing our hate and choking thirst for vengeance in the leafy thicket of the bushes. We were ashamed for her and even more for ourselves, that we hadn’t been hit, too; we suffered because of her awful martyrdom. We stood around her in silence and waited with a terrible curiosity for her to take her hands from her face, and felt fear and seething rage when she finally did. She removed them slowly, holding them like the ruined shards of a bowl, and looked straight ahead with huge eyes, as if checking to make sure she still could see, her hands ready to spring back at any moment and cover her dead eyes. Then she let them drop, and we saw white welts from Aunt Paulette’s fingers between splotches of bright red.

  Tanya didn’t look at us. None of us said a word. A desperate sense of helplessness overcame us—the seed of a sadness that would never go away: our childhood had been struck dead.

  When we were finally rousted from our hideout, evening shadows were already bluing the garden. Her penance, designed to provide satisfaction, succeeded only in weakening our thirst for revenge while failing to put things right: Aunt Paulette was made to apologize to Tanya in front of us, and then to each one of us individually. Our mother forced her to do it.

  I can still see my sister Tanya, accepting Aunt Paulette’s apology with a silent nod, and it’s painful to compare that image with that of the slender girl who scarcely a year before had taken the apple from the smirking Kunzelmann, every bit as immaculate as that beautiful green apple itself, with its smooth skin, and full of self-assured grace and the inviolable majesty of a child. I know that she died from that blow. She expired at the age of twenty from a passing cold that worsened into pneumonia. But I know that the seed to that early death had been planted inside her with that blow.

  It had another, indirect, effect as well, that blow. When Blanche came to us a few days later, a little more shyly than before, and mentioned that her father had come into possession of a new poem by the insane locksmith, Tanya demanded to see it. She read it and gave it back to Blanche. “It’s very beautiful,” she said. “Would you please make me a copy? And of that other one as well, that you read to us first. It was very foolish of us not to see then how beautiful it is.”

  “And now you see it?” asked Blanche with a poignantly illuminated smile—we hadn’t told her anything of what had happened.

  “Yes,” said Tanya.

  Blanche put her arm around her neck and kissed her.

  The new poem was called: “One Drink of Love.”

  Laβ uns in dem Silberglanz,

  mit des Blutes letzter Welle

  so hinübermünden in den Strauch,

  wie ins Wurzelwerk der Quelle!

  Laβ uns mit dem letztem Atemhauch,

  den die Birken grün umhüllen,

  unserer Herzen Krüge ganz,

  mit der tiefen Stille füllen!

  Alles Irdische muβ wesenlos

  ohne Trauer von uns fallen;

  kindgeworden in des Waldes Schoβ

  sind um uns nur Nachtigallen.[2]

  Shortly afterward, the Viennese author Karl Kraus—the most significant German-language thinker and writer of his time—wrote: “Only at the highest peaks of German lyric poetry, where peace and quiet reign—only in a few verses by Claudius, Hölderlin, or Mörike, or today in lines by Trakl or Lasker-Schüler, does what a single heart and nature have to say to each other find such form, such sublime harmony of vision and sound. Lines such as unserer Herzen Krüge ganz, /mit der tiefen Stille füllen; like this divine thought of nightingales surrounding us, kindgeworden in des Waldes Schoβ—make up for entire libraries full of verse. The real miracle is that this force of nature, this insanity, to which one easily entrusts the act of birthing the vision, has also affected or permitted this unbelievable congruity: one could write an entire essay on the symmetry in alternating short and long lines, and the psychic effect that proceeds from this, for example about the great pathos reserved for the additional two syllables of this final breath.”

  And the miracle continued. Because it soon turned out that this poem, which was already a finished work of art with the closing verse about the nightingales, was even further elevated by the following magnificent addition:

&n
bsp; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nachtigallen.

  die uns über Raum und Zeit

  über uns hinaus zu den Gefilden

  Gottes wiegen in die Ewigkeit

  wo die Engel mit den milden

  Mutterhänden unsren Liebesbund

  heiligsprechen und in Harfenchören

  und von Mund zu Mund

  jubeln, daβ wir wieder Gott gehören.[3]

  “Of course it’s hard to say,” Karl Kraus wrote in a postscript, “whether we ought to bemoan the loss of the full caesura following the line about the nightingales, or be thankful for the magnificent resurrection contained in this relative clause woven from these two verses that lead straight up to God. No matter what the results of the investigation into the authorship, and even if it turns out that admirers of spiritual values have found and memorized a poet who has gone unknown for centuries—it cannot produce a greater miracle than the work itself, and editors around the world will remain shamed by the fact that the asylum is, if not the source, then the refuge and sanctuary of this creation.”

  The unresolved question of authorship had its own story: Czernopol was not a city to believe in miracles. After Blanche’s father and one of his colleagues—the junior house physician Dr. Kipper—forwarded the poems of the poor mentally ill person to a publicist named Sperber, who published them in the Tschernopoler Tageszeitung, people began to treat the case “scientifically.” The insane locksmith was then subjected to a cross-examination that yielded the following result:

  Karl Piehowicz, whose command of German is lacking, and whose transcription of the poems is so difficult it literally requires deciphering, is not capable of defining single words of his poems. When repeating certain dates from his life he commits inaccuracies and entangles himself in contradictions. Upon much questioning and urging he confesses that he spent time in Morocco in the Foreign Legion in the company of some Germans, who “together wrote poems with him,” and his description of the origin of these poems is peculiar and not easily understood. The forementioned legionnaires evidently spent their free time trying to outdo one another composing poems, polishing and improving them, etc. Today Piehowicz is unable to identify with any degree of certainty the authors of the individual poems; he is sure of having composed only one of the poems himself. After much questioning, he ascribed the verse “The Young Dancer” to a certain Otto Berger, who comes from Stuttgart or Strassburg, and whose last address in Morocco he claims to know … Karl Piehowicz maintains that he possesses a notebook at home containing 1,500 (!) poems …

  “My father is of the opinion that it doesn’t matter whether his patient was really the author of the poems or not,” said Blanche. “It would be miraculous enough if this entirely uneducated man had preserved them in his memory as the legacy of an unknown poetic genius and thereby saved them for us. Precisely at a time when, according to my father, all the keepers and custodians of German writing let this poet go undiscovered, the miracle is all the greater. By the way, my father speaks with great respect of Major Tildy, whom you admire so much. My father says that it’s only thanks to his soothing and calming influence on Piehowicz that the man has been able to withstand all these terrible examinations, without having his condition made much worse. Of course, ever since they started he feels he’s being watched at every step, so he looks for protection from Major Tildy, who seems to have a strange authority over him. Anyway, Piehowicz is devoted to him like a loyal dog, he does everything Tildy says, and is never at peace unless Tildy is by his side. Those are his happiest moments, in the little toolshed of the vegetable garden, where they both work, when he sits down with Tildy and can tell him his poems. Tildy is very conscientious about recording them. Piehowicz isn’t always capable of inventing them or remembering them, you see—he needs inspiration. Because he has never felt it in all the years he has spent in the institution up to now, and my father is inclined to attribute it to Tildy’s arrival, who apparently has had an influence on other patients as well that is quite puzzling but undeniably beneficial. Even ones who are raving mad grow calmer when Tildy, who is fearless, enters their cell. But then there are others who get worked up and angry at the very sight of him. My father says that he projects a force that no one can resist except people who are either completely without feeling or else depraved. So I owe you an apology.” Blanche smiled her beautiful, poignant smile, which in moments like that could exude such delightful and beguiling charm. “I was being insensitive when I didn’t understand why you wanted to hear about Herr Tildy more than listen to the poems. Imagine, Major Tildy is very happy in the institution. He’s never said a word about the fact that he’s being kept there with absolutely no justification. In my father’s estimation, he is a cultivated man, though not particularly educated in literature, but still his taste is so uncompromising that he not only immediately recognized the genius of the poor locksmith, but when he and Piehowicz make their selection from among the poems that Piehowicz writes down for him or which he transcribes according to the locksmith’s words, Tildy always knows which one to choose and how to tell the genuine from the false. My father says that Herr Tildy’s sense of justice, which the mentally ill notice as well—because that’s the first thing that anyone with any sensitivity notices about him—is so pronounced that it also guides him unfailingly in literary matters. Many of the poems Piehowicz produces contain verses borrowed from others, for instance there’s one about a southern landscape that begins with Goethe’s Kennst Du das Land, wo die Zitronen blüh’n. [4] Much to the astonishment of my father and Dr. Kipper, Tildy had no idea it was a line by Goethe, though he immediately expressed his doubt. He felt it wasn’t ‘genuine’! Of course, even if he’s never been interested in literary things up till now, he’s bound to have heard that more than once. But his reaction was the same with other, lesser-known citations. One poem, which Piehowicz calls ‘Life of a Legionnaire,’ closes with the line Auf ferner, fremder Aue [5] … And another verse out of a group of Italian poems is from Schiller: Prächtiger als wir in unserm Norden [6] … Tildy, who didn’t know the poem, said without hesitating that the lines seemed ‘borrowed.’ In the meantime, it’s no longer just a question of choosing only poems that are entirely original—people are also demanding some kind of evidence that would establish to what degree the mentally disturbed locksmith might be the author of lyrical compositions. As I mentioned, Herr Tildy, Dr. Kipper, and my father all agree that it doesn’t really matter, because as long as no other author can be determined, Piehowicz is the source of the wondrous poems he has given us. But the more it becomes clear that he can’t be the author, the more they should leave him in peace. And it seems more and more certain that he cannot have written the poems. After all, he completely lacks the education for that, he knows even less than Tildy—neither what he is quoting or whom—and his very low intelligence in general makes it questionable whether he could ever produce something original of such beauty. But that’s a different issue. What I wanted to say is what a fine ear Major Tildy has for distinguishing what is complete from what is not complete. From the cycle of Roman Poems he picked two where he claims to recognize that Piehowicz is quoting poems from several authors:

  Die Zypresse, die Olive,

  Pinienwald und Berg und Au

  tauchen in das himmlisch-tiefe

  fleckenlose duft’ge Blau.

  Um die Wasser, um die Lande,

  Näh und Ferne, weit und breit,

  legt der Himmel weitgespannte

  Arme der Unendlichkeit. [7]

  “Tildy thinks that these verses couldn’t possibly come from the same divinely gifted person who wrote a poem like ‘One Drink of Love.’

  “The mark of culture in a man,” Blanche concluded with her most beautiful smile, “is not his knowledge. I think I know why you are so taken with Herr Tildy. It’s because he has a kind of perfection, as my father has confirmed. He is complete in his form, and so he is related to all other forms of perfection. He is the peak of what we can attain. I’m
envious that you know him, and can’t wait for the day he’s set free so you can show him to me.”

  “Can’t you ask your father to let you visit the institution just once so you can see him? You could speak with Tildy!”

  “No,” said Blanche. “That’s impossible. I’ve always wanted to see the poor souls my father looks after, and to be just as brave as he is. But he thinks I wouldn’t be able to stand the impact. I was very sick as a little child. I’m sensitive. It shames me to admit it, but it’s stronger than I am.”

  A mark of forced concentration showed in her face that made her almost ugly. “Besides, I have to admit that at first I was put off by Major Tildy’s intention of dueling with everyone. My father tried explaining to me that the resolve to kill or die for the sake of order and righteousness was worthy of respect. I don’t approve of that view, since I detest any kind of violence. But when I started reading about duels I came across a very beautiful saying. You know that Pushkin was killed in a duel. He asked the doctor examining him to tell him frankly how long he had left to live, and when he was told ‘Three minutes,’ he closed his eyes and said, ‘Il faut que j’arrange ma maison.’ That is beautiful. I’m looking forward to when you show Herr Tildy to me.”