An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  The examination dragged on for hours. Time and again the young prosecutor picked some new aspect of the attempted tax evasion to entertain extravagant speculations concerning the most unrelated issues, and time and again he would stop after a fruitless detour, slap the pile of documents on his desk, and say: “Your answers are insufficient and intentionally misleading, sir. But don’t go to the trouble: everything about this case is watertight. The major fact—the active bribe—has been proven beyond doubt. For the moment I’m leaving aside gross embezzlement, extortion, fraud. The indictment will give you the opportunity to convince yourself of the soundness of my accusations. Herr Paşcanu, you are a cancer on the economic body of our nation. Your actions are tantamount to sabotage. The public figures incriminated by you will be called to account. The highest state positions have been compromised by your misdeeds. I consider it very likely, monsieur, that a special law will be passed just to mete out the justice you deserve.”

  Old Paşcanu didn’t respond at all, but merely stared at the young zealot with his lurking, menacing, boarlike eyes. Behind his bushy white mustache it was impossible to tell if he was smiling contemptuously.

  But when he then stepped out of the courthouse, he found himself face-to-face with his own kind, with his brothers who no longer believed in him. Even though Paşcanu had yet to be charged, the prosecutor had arranged—quite unlawfully—for the old man to be escorted by two policemen—an act that was all the more malicious as it had no other motive than simple spite. And so the moment he stepped outside, flanked by two minions of the law, people considered him already under arrest.

  Had a single voice been raised, it would have saved his life. A curse, which was otherwise always quick to fly, or a stone, which was always at hand in Czernopol, would have aroused his old fighting spirit, his craftiness and his desire for revenge. But nothing like that happened. He looked into the eyes of his people—the people for whom he had become a legend—and saw that his star had fallen.

  And old Paşcanu raised his arms toward heaven, turning up his palms like the two pans of a scale, and rocked them up and down before his people, meekly nodding and shrugging his shoulders; he was holding his case for them to see, the case of a bold and adventuresome life, holding it in his empty hands and weighing it before their eyes: a human life that had been the way it had been; the life of a man who had wanted the most and obtained much and still wound up with nothing more than his bit of used-up earthly self—an old body; a crippled, disappointed spirit turned brittle, tough, and mean; the ruins of frail desire, paltry fulfillment, spoiled wishes, missed goals.

  It was a gesture both disturbing and strangely redemptive, a pitiful paraphrase of old man Brill’s—and just as ridiculous—and it released the rising tension of the crowd, which ran the gamut of feelings from bloodlust to jubilation, triggering a great cackling laugh, a storm of roaring and bellowing laughter. The marketplace had understood: a legendary crook was confessing his failure. The weather-beaten peasants, whose last bits of brain had been singed away under their pointed sheepskin caps by the Podolian summer, and whose spirit had been stunted beneath their broad waistbands by the icy wind of the vast steppe—these peasants laughed so hard that tears came rolling down their jagged cheeks. They slapped their gnarly, rootlike hands against their scrawny thighs, raising the dust off their hemp-linen pants and scratchy shirts; they hunched over even more and bent back so far that their skulls rested in their necks; barked their laughter through the yellow stubble teeth of their rough mouths up to the heavens and down to the earth. The hoi polloi of Czernopol squinted until their eyes were mean slits, and bleated and bellowed with all their might; the Jewish hawkers gloated out loud in booming tenors; ethnic Germans come to market uttered short guttural sounds of disbelief because they could not comprehend; street urchins let out piercing whistles through their teeth; and from a group of young gentlemen flaneurs sauntering from the tennis courts came the cry: “So God the great is giving the ganef a good going-over. Let us leave leisurely from hence or else the mob will go meshugge and perhaps tear his head asunder.”

  Old Paşcanu looked on at this raging merriment for several minutes. Then he picked up his cane and began lashing out without mercy in all directions, laying into shoulders and heads, until he had cleared a passageway. He beat his way through the tangle of people as the laughter rose into a howling roar. Because it was not anger that drove him on: it was shame. Nothing could have a more comic effect in Czernopol. The two policemen followed the old man, knocked about this way and that like little jumping jacks as they attempted to ward off and return the jostles, thumps, and punches of the crowd.

  Paşcanu’s old-fashioned coach with the colossal horses was waiting a little ways off from the main entrance of the courthouse. The castrated coachman was dozing on the high box, a tower of quivering flesh kept in check by a bulging pale-lilac sash. He sat without moving, his expressionless, moonlike Mongolian face reminiscent of a pumpkin. Old Paşcanu woke him from his flabby, lethargic apathy by slapping his cane across the whale-sized back, and tore open the door to the coach. The crowd shoved and pushed him in, lifting in their wake the two policemen, who were striking this way and that, their faces red with fury. White-haired peasant patriarchs and mangy urchins clambered onto the springs and axles of the coach and pressed their noses against the windowpanes, and when the horses started up they tumbled off into the arms of the pushing mass, which knocked them down, trampled them, and jerked them up again. The howling and laughter followed the coach even after it turned onto Neuschulgasse, a glorious bouquet of unbridled jollity, rude and cruel, like the tail of a peacock being dragged along through the gutter, which shimmered with a metallic iridescence like its besmirched feathers.

  But Săndrel Paşcanu did not drive home. The two addled policemen could hardly object when he called out to the scopit in a shrill, almost rattling, voice to drive to the house of his daughter, Tamara Tildy. Much later, Window Morar—who had been forbidden to set foot on our property after her catfight with Frau Lyubanarov—told us of the conversation between father and daughter, after we had sworn complete secrecy:

  “… And you know, they hadn’t seen each other ever since she left home to marry the major: at that time Tildy was a lieutenant with the Austrians and handsome as a young hero. They hadn’t spoken in years, father and daughter, not since the death of her mother. She had cursed him whenever she said his name, and now there he was, standing before her and speaking to her of the same blood, the blood of the Paşcanus, that flowed in her veins as well. He reminded her of how he had cradled her in his arms as a child, and of a little pony he had given her on which she trotted along next to his coach wherever he went. Because back then she had loved him, her little father; it wasn’t until later that her mother ingrained her own hate in her daughter, when the other woman came, the maid Ioana Ciornei, who produced the witch I tried to tear apart with my own two hands, and whose children I now feed from the work of these hands because she is also blood of her blood, and because evil should not be passed from one generation to the next, from the grandfathers to the grandchildren. That’s how he stood in front of her then, shaking and sobbing, the old man, and his voice, whose power had once struck fear in the high and mighty of this world, was the voice of a whining woman. ‘Do you want to let this shame cling to your name?’ he howled. ‘Do you want to be the daughter of someone who has been laughed out of town, chased out of house and fortune, back to the loneliness of the mountains from which he came? Do you want every churl to grin in contempt when he hears whose child you are? I will give you all the jewels, all the gold that I own, I’ll tear open the coffins, not of your mother, but of the other. I’ll take the rings off their decayed fingers and the stones from the necklaces that have fallen between their ribs and will give them to you—but you have to help me. You have to help me restore our honor … !’ And he pushed his nose, that vulture’s beak, close to her face and said, with crazy eyes: ‘Let them see what they have gone and
done. Let them find out who they are clashing with. May terror seize their hearts when they hear that I, Săndrel Paşcanu, have gone to my death. And then let them be horrified when I again rise up before them, may they fall on their knees in fear and regret and grovel for mercy … Because I will not die,’ he said close to her ear. ‘I intend to hang myself, and you are to come and cut me down at the last moment. I know a body can hang for a long time before it gives up the ghost, I’ve seen many people hanged, at the siege of Plevna and elsewhere: it can last up to five or seven minutes. I know,’ he said. ‘I know how long I can last. I can stand three minutes. You come inside after two minutes: the doors will be open. You can be praying at St. Parachiva and then be at my home in half a minute. I could order Miron to do this but I don’t trust him, the dog, I don’t trust anyone in the world except my own flesh and blood. This is not a servant’s business, it’s a matter for one’s own flesh and blood. He’ll be in the stable, sleeping, the way he always sleeps, the castrato. You are to leave me lying there and go to him and scream: My father has hanged himself, and tell him to go and shout it out in town! And he will do it, and you will see how terror will strike the hearts of all who will be ruined if I die and who I can save as long as I stay alive. And then how they will fear if I will still save them when they see I haven’t died—resurrected like the Savior!’ He said those very words: resurrected like the Savior! My blood froze to hear him speak them. And he said: ‘You will see how they will cower. How they will crawl in the dust before me, from the greatest to the smallest in this country! You are to lock yourself up at my house and admit no one, and if they want to come in you will say: my father is dead—and so on until the next morning. I don’t need a doctor to bring me back to life, I’ll do it myself, I tell you: I know how. Once when I was young they tried it with me. I can last three minutes and don’t need any doctor to help me afterwards … Will you do this?’ he asked her. And she was as if transfigured. She said: ‘Yes, I will do this!’ ‘Do you swear by the grave of your mother?’ he asked. And she said: ‘Yes, I swear by the grave of my mother.’ ‘So go to mass at St. Parachiva,’ he said, ‘and when they ring the bell, I will climb into the noose and kick the chair out from underneath, and you look at your watch and wait one and a half minutes. You need half a minute to my house. You can say you heard a voice telling you to go there while you prayed.’ And she said: ‘Yes.’ ‘Swear to me once more on the memory of your mother,’ he said. And she said: ‘I swear it on the memory of my mother!’—and was as if transfigured. And that’s how she was the whole day, and when I came to her and told her: ‘You have to go now, the mass at St. Parachiva is at six o’clock!’—she just sat there as if transfigured and didn’t hear me, not even when I shook her shoulder, in her trance she was as if dead. And I shouted: ‘You don’t want to become the murderer of your father, think about your oath!’ But she didn’t move. And then I saw that she had smashed her watch under the heel of her shoe. And I ran out, and it’s a long way to the Turkish Fountain, it was long after six by the time I reached his house, and I ran to the scopit in the stable. I ran so fast I could taste my own blood in my mouth, and I cried out to him that he should come with me. And he woke up and went with me. And all the doors were open that were usually closed on account of his treasures. And when we came inside, the coachman and I, the old man was standing on the top of the stairs and shouted: ‘So she didn’t come, eh! She didn’t come, just like I foresaw. Did all of you think it would be so easy to let me hang myself?’ And he laughed like I’d never heard anyone laugh before, the marrow froze in our bones, of the scopit and me. Only the devil can laugh like that. And up on the stairs he shouted: ‘Run and tell the whole city how well Paşcanu knows people. Everyone who has laughed at me shall learn to fear me!’ And he spread out his arms, brandishing his cane, and shouted: ‘Because I’m alive, you see, I’m still alive!’ Returning his cane to the ground he reached out too far, past the top of the landing, but he had already placed his entire weight on it and so he lost his balance. He fell down the steep stairs so hard that the house echoed and the landing splintered into pieces. And when he hit the floor at our feet he had broken his neck: his eyes were open and fixed in that last gaze, and his mustache stuck out in front of his teeth so that he looked the way a dog does when he wants to bite you. We carried him back up, and I tried to close his eyes, but they wouldn’t shut, so I had to leave him that way, still seeing and looking like a dog who wants to bite. And above him was the painting of his two wives …”

  It was the famous Titian. A completely inferior copy of the Reclining Venus. Some obscure painter had been commissioned to repaint the picture with the head of Princess Sturdza and the naked body of Ioana Ciornei. Paşcanu had had the red curtain installed so he could change his view according to his inclination, so that it sometimes covered the head and sometimes the body. The collected rubbish they found in his house didn’t even pay for the costs of his funeral. The two colossal horses would have fetched the highest price, despite their age, but they were found the next morning dead in their stalls, grotesquely bloated. People said that the scopit had poisoned them out of some ancient hatred.

  We never found out how Săndrel Paşcanu’s funeral unfolded. And because no one ever looked for it, none of us knew anything about his grave.

  The mausoleum of his two wives in the forest of Horecea fell peacefully into disrepair. When we visited it once years later we found it completely overrun by a rank growth of wild blackberries, pussy willow, and anemones. It was still bizarre, but quite romantic in its ruined state, made even more beautiful thanks to the decorative arts of a lush and rampant nature. The surrounding barbed wire had long been stolen to keep pigs penned in at some distant farmyard. Wild doves cooed in the tops of the old oaks that ringed the site. We had a picnic there and whiled away a moonlit night, telling ourselves the old stories.

  16 Tanya’s Generosity; Herr Adamowski Contemplates the Times

  ALTHOUGH the cooling of our friendship with Herr Tarangolian meant that the prefect stopped coming to our house altogether for a long time, and after that only visited rarely, we did continue to see him whenever he called on Madame Aritonovich during the remainder of our term at the Institut d’Éducation. He hardly missed a single one of our ballet rehearsals, the success of which seemed quite important to him. He would sit in the corner like an old habitué, diagonally opposite the large mirror, observing our warm-ups à la barre and au milieu with the eyes of a connoisseur, and watching the rehearsals of specific scenes, while chatting with Madame in between. Once we happened to be nearby when the name Tildy surfaced in one of these conversations.

  “Tildy sent me a letter,” said the prefect. “But he isn’t challenging his excessively long internment or petitioning me to use my influence to shorten it. No, he’s writing on behalf of this insane locksmith, the ‘poet’ Piehowicz. He complains that they won’t leave the poor man in peace. Apparently they’re subjecting his poetic genius to a thorough grilling. That offends the major’s sense of justice. He’s beginning to get on my nerves, this knight of the overly upright posture. He wants to create order even in the insane asylum, after having created such a pretty mess for me here on the outside.”

  We were shocked. We had never heard the prefect speak in such a tone of voice. We asked Blanche if she knew anything.

  After our callous reaction to the poem, Blanche had avoided speaking to us about the goings-on in the asylum. Now she showed that she had generously forgiven us.

  “Unfortunately it’s true,” she said, worried. “They’re torturing poor Piehowicz with these so-called cross-examinations, and what’s more, they’re keeping him away from Tildy. Because—I’m ashamed to tell you—people are so upset by the consequences of the publication of the poems that they’re beginning to suspect Herr Tildy. The whole business sounds crazier than anything you’d expect to hear coming out of an insane asylum, but they think that Herr Tildy is in cahoots with Dr. Kipper and my father—and that they are secret
ly leaking the poems to the press or that they leaked the poems to Tildy so he could publish them as transcriptions of Piehowicz. Herr Professor Feuer calls it an example of devious Jewish scheming, and although the article doesn’t say it outright, the implication is that Dr. Kipper and my father wanted to provoke a literary scandal that would damage the reputation of German literature, and enhance their own prestige among their peers. The same view is more or less openly stated by two new gentlemen who replaced two other physicians who were dismissed after Professor Feuer wrote an article denouncing the fact that five of the seven doctors at the asylum were Jewish. That created a lot of bad blood, and that’s why those two were replaced, because of the pressure from the nationalists. But there’s another reason for all the recent examinations, and one that runs counter to all the suspicions, voiced or otherwise. It turns out that he himself has put an end to the theory that he isn’t the true author of the poems and that he just brought them from his poets’ circle in the Foreign Legion—with a piece of prose that he could hardly have committed to memory back there. It’s a letter that he wrote to Tildy complaining that he no longer sees him. And this letter uses such linguistic power and is such a shattering poetic allegory of pain and despair that there seems to be little choice but to once again assume that he’s the author of the poems as well. If you’re interested I’ll bring you a copy tomorrow.”