An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Tanya stroked her hair. “You once wanted to tell us a poem that was called ‘Springtime’ which you found very beautiful.”

  Blanche hesitated, almost a little embarrassed. “I don’t want to repeat it,” she said. “It would lead you down the wrong path. It was the first of the poems ascribed to poor Piehowicz and then proven to be not his. It almost pains me to see the miracle shattered like that. As for that poem, ‘Springtime,’ the one with the last stanza that so delighted everyone—

  Alles Schwere sinkt

  von den Dingen, die sich weiten

  und die Erde trinkt

  Wunder der Entbundenheiten [8]

  we now know for sure that it was written by someone else. He seems to be a gifted poet by the name of Count Karl Berlepsch.”

  She must have seen our astonishment, even though we tried to suppress it. “Do you know this poet?” she asked, amazed.

  Indeed, we thought we did. In one of the old issues of Gartenlaube, which Aunt Elvira had subscribed to, we had come across a poem by Count Berlepsch and had learned it by heart, fascinated and wickedly delighted and simultaneously repulsed by the realization of what was wicked in our delight. Just as the hunchbacked figure of Fräulein Iliuţ seemed attractive to me in a way that left me feeling guilty, so this poem acquainted us with a kind of forbidden longing—a longing for the opposite of beauty, and for what consciously and shamefully sets out to destroy it. We didn’t know whether we should consider the piece a satire. It addressed the injustices suffered by cavalrymen deprived of their mounts, forced to dig trenches with a shovel, and was composed in a tone people generally referred to as “witty”—a genre our parents steered us away from in no uncertain terms whenever we encountered it. This was not due to the childish silliness of the writing, but because of something worse: a vulgarity of spirit that can infiltrate the soul and as such constituted a latent danger one must take pains to guard against. We had seen this deep-seated vulgarity in the smirking Kunzelmann, and every line of this poem brought him back to us; its bumpy rhythm and dreadful German called out to be recited in Kunzelmann’s awful dialect, and we never tired of repeating the lines in his voice:

  Not so long ago, it seems,

  riding was held in great esteem

  It continued in that vein, with an orderly who springs “from wing to wing,” and dragoons “who lost their jades,” now consigned to the barricades, where “instead of being tossed off by their steeds,” were digging dirt with mole-like speed.

  Enough of that. We took our wicked delight in the jocose grotesqueries that struck us as even more bizarre for having come from the German war camp, from that terrifying world of earth caterpillars and fire butterflies. The verses brought the horror painfully close to the absurd, and what was fearful was brought into the soul-crushing proximity of the ridiculous. We would declaim certain lines in Kunzelmann’s voice and intonation, using the raw Czernopol German dialect, lines such as:

  If they don’t shoot him into tatters

  he’ll learn that other weapons matter

  or

  See the army engineers

  deep in dirt up to their ear

  but it was only much later that I realized we did so out of a particular sense of despair, which often seems far more painful when we are children than later when we are grown. These were idle hours spawning devilment, empty but for a nervous aversion we couldn’t explain—not for the world that surrounded us, but for all the awful things that characterized life in this world that we were part of. In such moments we felt the malicious urge to destroy beauty, the craving for satire. And I would later learn that Czernopol’s nasty passion for laughter, for mockery and scorn, stemmed from a deep-seated desperation, and probably sprouted from the vast emptiness of the countryside that besieged the city. The threat of this looming emptiness was what made the soul unable to resist the dreadful spirit of the satirical: instead of the little elves known as Heinzelmännchen, we had “Schmunzelmännchen, little gnomes, that by night in secret come,” enlisting “all of Satan’s powers to erect a town with towers”—the town we would have to fend against our whole life.

  “Satan is coming closer to us, and he is smiling, my little ones,” Uncle Sergei used to say, himself smiling with his irresistible charm. And since we didn’t notice Satan hiding behind all the smirking, we assaulted Blanche with rhymes from the dreadful poem, and added insult to injury by reciting them with the crude gesticulation that we had picked up from Solly Brill:

  “Oh me, oh my

  another shell comes flying by:

  first we listen to the whine,

  next it’s Boom!

  behind our line”

  as if Blanche’s lovely story of the insane poet and Tildy’s noble strivings on his behalf had become a farce, a joke. Even Tanya couldn’t refrain from laughing along, in a sudden disregard for Blanche that clearly let it be known that she, Tanya, had little regard for herself in that moment. “You’re overexcited,” she said to Blanche, using an expression the grown-ups applied to us whenever our enthusiasm tried their patience, because their souls could no longer summon the same unbridled fervor. Today I know that this act of cruelty came from a different source, a secretly concealed despair with deeper roots.

  Because in actuality we were taking revenge for something beautiful that had been destroyed, something that had been the epitome of beauty in our childhood: that image of the hussar in front of the lance-leafed pickets along our garden. Tildy had become entangled in a farce, in a joke. He was attempting to coax beauty out of the mouth of a crazy person, and this beauty had been proven counterfeit; what’s more, the true creators of this ostensible beauty were on the same level as the smirking Kunzelmann: they were his German brothers. We no longer saw Tildy on his horse: the line

  And the hardest struggle in the battle

  was easily solved atop a saddle

  cruelly exposed a deeper meaning, replacing the hussar’s beautiful feat of derring-do with the foolish act of a simple-minded cavalryman like the ones sitting in the Trocadero. The hussar had dismounted and was rooting in the mud. Tildy was mixed up in a literary quarrel, and consequently became the victim of ridicule, as a cavalryman.

  Once more it was only much later that I would again encounter the tragicomic figure of a hussar lost in a world devoid of poetry—in a photo of the German crown prince, which I happened to see in the same seedy dive at the edge of town where Tildy’s fate would be determined. But back then we were unconsciously taking revenge on Blanche Schlesinger for the fact that the poetic symbol of our childhood had been destroyed. We had no idea what had caused the destruction, only a vague intimation that this figure had been stripped of its poetry—the hussar had dismounted and had become the gambling buddy of the German count with the Kunzelmann-like verse (“what makes men today are spades”) which added the macabre humor of the Ludenburg brothers floating off into the air to the absolute horror of the earth caterpillars exploding into fire butterflies. Tildy was caught up in everything that he had opposed as the hussar: his poetry had become embroiled in a literary controversy; his struggle for justice had been derided as untenable, he himself had fallen victim to Czernopol’s dominant reality, which was that of the smirking Kunzelmann.

  Unschooled in literary fairness, we didn’t ask whether the conclusions we had drawn were false, whether the abstruseness of an occasional verse—that was clearly “witty,” although perhaps out of desperation—gave us the right to pronounce judgment, as though its author were unworthy of producing anything more beautiful, whereas what came out of the mouth of the poor insane locksmith Karl Piehowicz had to sound like it issued from the wellspring of beauty itself, as in the poem “Springtime,” (“All that is heavy sinks away from the things that expand”) or if the desperate wittiness of that shoddy effort from the trenches should be allowed to call Tildy’s noble efforts into question. In the poetic justice of childhood, which has its own laws, judgment had been passed on our hussar in the poem out of Garten
laube, to which the great poet Karl Berlepsch had signed his name: “Into the dust, you proud rider!”

  For that we took revenge on an innocent party—as always happens when taking revenge—namely Blanche. Only later did we realize this, and understand at the same time that our revenge was just, at least in the poetic, fairy-tale sense of childhood, because she had functioned as the messenger of the destruction of this poetry.

  During these weeks two exciting events occurred, subsequently telescoped in memory in an odd and unsettling way due both to the turbulent events that followed and to our later illness. The first involved Herr Adamowski’s second visit; this time he was received by Aunt Paulette alone, that is to say accompanied only by Aunt Elvira. Our mother, whose relationship to her sister had become strained after the awful scene with Tanya, had excused herself with an obvious pretext and arranged an outing for us children, which ended up being canceled because of an unusually violent storm. The intense tropical downpour made such a spectacle that we completely forgot our disappointment at the missed excursion, and when it started to clear up after two hours of pouring rain we ran into the garden to see the damage that had been done. The drains were all stopped up; the water was foaming past the sandstone plinth of the lance-leaf fence like a wild brook and had formed a small lake on the lawn in front of our house. Keeping our feet dry required all our skill and attention, so that we didn’t notice what was happening around us, and didn’t look up until we heard a high-pitched woman’s laugh. Then we saw Herr Adamowski trying to navigate around the deepest puddles and streams, awkwardly on account of his deformity, while underneath the arc of water still cascading from the eaves of the dvornik’s hut was Frau Lyubanarov, leaning against the wall as usual, laughing out loud as she watched Herr Adamowski.

  He appeared not to take offense at her rather tactless amusement, but merely trudged ahead, rocking from side to side, swinging his cork-soled boot into one puddle after the next. When he came close to where she was standing he stopped, leaning with his hand against the wall. She studied him with her golden, goatlike eyes.

  “Well, old goat-hoof,” she said in a guttural voice. “New paths to travel?”

  “Your lack of shame is magnificent,” he said. “You know that your blouse is wet and wrapped on you like a skin—that you can see right through? And you’re not wearing anything underneath.”

  “That’s why I’m standing here. I like it when people see me.”

  “I know. And who do you think will see you here?”

  “Whoever comes by. I’m not picky—that’s something you should know as well.”

  “And you never get enough?”

  “Do you ever get enough?”

  He bared his saw-teeth. “I never get enough from you.”

  “And from that fool who poisons herself and stumbles through the streets like a drunk woman—what about her?”

  “Whom do you mean?”

  “Come on, let’s not pretend. You know as well as I do who I mean. I’m talking about my little sister, the fine lady. The major’s wife, who’s so far gone as to sell herself to you for a little pack of powder. Who’s finally landed completely in the mud. How is she in bed? As good as I am? I can do it even when I’m drunk—but her? It’s only you men who can’t when you’re plastered.”

  “They ought to tie you to a stake and burn you. If you had lived a hundred years ago they would have done it, too.” He shoved his face right next to hers. “Where’d you come up with that?” he asked.

  She gave a dark and throaty laugh. They stood there and looked at each other, face-to-face.

  And suddenly the golden rain tree beside her parted, and a figure burst out and headed straight for Frau Lyubanarov.

  It was the Widow Morar. As she later told us, she was on her way to us, and had arrived at the open gate just as the two had begun their conversation.

  Like a fury she went after Frau Lyubanarov, screaming: “She’s lying, the tramp, she doesn’t know a thing—she doesn’t know anything and pretends to know everything in order to coax it out and then broadcast it to all her studs and stallions, so that the filth will lust after her. You don’t know a thing, you cesspit, who’ll open your legs for any Gypsy’s slime. In the mud, you say, you who are nothing but mud yourself. If it’s mud you want, then I’ll give it to you! Mud to mud!”

  She clawed at the gurgling runoff and scraped up a handful of earth and gravel and leaf mold and hurled it at Frau Lyubanarov’s head. We heard it rattle and slap against the dvornik’s hut. Frau Lyubanarov had shielded her face with her hand, but a stream of dirty water came flowing out of her hair onto her forehead. Before her opponent could reach into the gutter a second time, she shot forward and threw herself on the other woman. In the process she knocked Herr Adamowski’s arm off the wall he had been leaning against and sent him tumbling. The two women grabbed each other by the hair, tangling themselves into a knot; they clawed each other to shreds and bit each other with a venomous rage, such as we had never seen before and thank goodness never would see again. Howling, shrieking, and screeching like cats, the two women rolled over each other on the ground until the coachman, who had heard the noise, came running up and tried to separate them the way you would separate fighting dogs, with a bucket of water. But that didn’t help; they only became more and more entangled. Shaggy locks of hair clogged their mouths, bloody welts marked their faces, and their eyes rolled back into their heads out of pain and rage. All the household servants came running outside; the women’s fingers had to be pried apart, their feet had to be held so that they wouldn’t keep striking blindly at the other, and they were lifted or dragged away, Frau Lyubanarov returning to the dvornik’s hut, Widow Morar into the street. Their screaming and howling brought the entire neighborhood out of their houses.

  Our mother and Aunt Elvira, who had also come outside, chased us back into the house. For the first time in our life Mama lost her composure in front of us; she shooed us in and threatened us with terrible punishments, even spankings, all because we had been involuntary witnesses of the horrible scene. We were locked in our rooms, had to eat supper late, and by ourselves, and were immediately sent to bed. The storm at home raged for days, bringing with it the dreaded arguments between our parents, behind closed doors that were suddenly opened and slammed shut. Our aunts looked at us as if we were to blame for everything that had happened. Uncle Sergei deliberately stayed out of the house as much as possible. Only Herr Tarangolian, who once again stopped by for some black coffee, treated us with the same affectionate and attentive politeness as always, and invited us, as compensation for the outing that had been canceled on that ill-starred day, to a long ride in his carriage, which was a great treat for us, especially as it was crowned by a lavish visit to the Kucharczyk Café and Confectionary.

  We were the only ones who knew of the conversation between the two furies that had set off the fight, and we kept that to ourselves.

  The second incident I have to report before I go on to events that also affected other people was so cruel it made the first one pale by comparison. It was not quite as violent, to be sure, but the pain was greater for having been inflicted on us in a blindly unfeeling and incomprehensible act of stupidity.

  Clearly the preceding episode took its toll on us, though it would take a far greater shock before an actual illness manifested itself. Meanwhile it was only thanks to our school that we were able to withstand the psychological burden as well as the physical stress: there our friendship with Blanche Schlesinger and the irrepressible vitality of Solly Brill allowed us to escape the chaos at home completely for part of the day, and we felt liberated and very happy.

  Madame Aritonovich decided that the school should put on a ballet performance for parents and guests; in later years the gratitude we always felt for her made us think that she came up with the idea just for us, and above all for Tanya, who danced with enthusiasm and talent. Nor can this supposition be entirely mistaken. Madame Aritonovich was too close to the prefect a
nd Uncle Sergei not to know every detail of what went on in our house. She probably knew more than we did at the time, for instance about the heated arguments with Aunt Paulette, who stood accused, justifiably, of having opened the house up to Herr Adamowski. At the same time, no one had any idea of the content of Adamowski’s conversation with Frau Lyubanarov, which was the actual cause of the fight between her and Widow Morar. But Herr Adamowski was mixed up in it somehow, and that was bad enough, according to the entirely proper view that even an innocent bystander at such occurrences bears some responsibility. In other words: “That kind of thing just shouldn’t happen to you, regardless of whether you were involved or not.” Naturally Herr Adamowski never came to our house again; instead, Aunt Paulette began to visit him.

  In any event, the prospect of the school ballet recital excited us, along with all of our classmates. We began rehearsing the snowflake scene from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. Tanya danced the part of the Snow Queen, while a handsome and talented boy from a higher grade played the Snow King; Blanche, to our delight—and this seems to confirm our suspicion that the plan was devised with us in mind—was given the part of Clara, while the rest of us, as part of the corps de ballet, were to be plain snowflakes, albeit exceedingly eager ones. Solly was cast as a comical snowball with his own special choreography. Turning to her inexhaustible supply of assorted odd, highly original, and skillful acquaintances, Madame Aritonovich assembled a small orchestra. Other instruction was reduced to the bare essentials. Costumes were sewn; Tanya was given a genuine tutu. We were in heaven.