An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  “Aha,” he said. “A young man as an escort, a true cavalier from top to toe—noble, elegant—my congratulations!” He bowed before me, sinking down on his clubfoot, and then righting himself by exchanging his swinging leg for his stamping leg. He had bared his saw-teeth and his monocle was flashing. “Take your coat off, dearest,” he said to Aunt Paulette, “and please step inside, the colloquium is all assembled.”

  We stepped into a kind of library that also seemed to function as his living quarters. All the tables and even some chairs were littered with piles of books, magazines and newspapers. Three men rose as we entered; a woman in a brown silk dress stayed seated and took in our greeting with a nonchalant play of worldliness. Aunt Paulette introduced me with a mocking undertone as her chaperone. Everyone laughed.

  “Please, have a seat wherever you like,” said Herr Adamowski, swaying from his long leg to his short one, and then straightening back up. “Of course the young gentleman will have some liqueur—a little glass of Cointreau won’t harm anyone, am I right, Herr Kavalier? For who can reject a drop of respect!” The three men laughed loudly and tensely, all the while nodding to one another.

  “Give him something to look at,” said Aunt Paulette. “Then he’ll sit in a corner and not bother us anymore.”

  “What bother, what bother!” exclaimed Herr Adamowski in feigned indignation, baring his teeth and flashing an embarrassing conspiratorial look at me through his monocle. “Who said anything about bother! We are delighted to have the young man’s company. If you feel inclined to have another little glass, please, help yourself. I’ll put the bottle here just in case.” The three men laughed. “You have all the books you could wish for at your disposal, although I’ll ask you to skip the ones on this particular shelf.” The three men laughed. Herr Adamowski winked at me: “They’re a little on the piquant side, capito? Only for collectors. But perhaps this one here: Greek vase paintings. It shows figures that are in their paradisiacal state as well, but they’ve been rendered harmless by their classical lines. Hellene goddesses and gods in contemporary portrait. And so on. Seek and ye shall find.”

  Aunt Paulette had sat down in her usual lethargic posture and said nothing in response to these fatuous remarks. One of the men lit her cigarette with exaggerated eagerness, cupping his hands around the matchbox to create a hollow for the flame, as if it there were a violent storm inside and the match were in danger of expiring at any moment. Aunt Paulette had to dip her face into this hollow: the reddish-yellow tinge of the flame spilled onto her mouth so that she seemed to be drinking fire from his hands.

  Herr Adamowski sat down as well and stared at each of the guests, one by one. When no one said anything, he stated with an eager, smirking grin: “So, our gathering is complete. And how is the general health of the assembly?” The men laughed once more, this time accompanied by the woman in the brown taffeta dress.

  I began leafing through a book, pretending that I was entirely absorbed in my reading. I was disappointed and alert at the same time. After everything I knew about Herr Adamowski, and the secretive circumstances surrounding both my visit and Tanya’s earlier one, the last thing I expected was a group like this: boorish, gauche, and awkward despite the crude familiarity, where no one ventured to speak except the host, and everyone seemed to be waiting for some comment or observation that would relieve the tension. The three men sat there like lumps of wood: I found out that their names were Leutgeb, Fellner, and Kopetzki, but couldn’t discover more about their background or occupation. The names alone sounded like a bunch of bandits. Fellner was still rather young, with a healthy, ordinary face and large hands, evidently very strong. He was the most awkward of them all; at every new outburst of nervous laughter he would squirm in his chair and look around and nod to the others, hiding his large hands between his knees, since he didn’t know what else to do with them. Leutgeb was a middle-aged man, thickset, with a small mouth that displayed a hint of malice. Kopetzki seemed to suffer from a lung disease: he never stopped quietly coughing, though at the same time he smoked a pipe that gave off thick clouds of smoke. He had a finely shaped head, narrow and pale, with a dark Polish mustache. The woman in the brown taffeta answered to the name Theophila—evidently a nickname; her dress looked worn and its rhinestone embroidery gave a shabby appearance. On the rare occasions when anyone but Herr Adamowski said anything, they addressed their host as “Adam” or else by the less-than-elegant diminutive: “Adamchik.”

  I have to confess that it was my Aunt Paulette who gave this group a peculiarly macabre note. Her presence was like a last spot of paint, a bit of contrasting color that paradoxically fit the whole picture and made the group seem a little eerie, or even dangerous, like a secret alliance, a conspiracy sworn to fulfill some covert mission. In later years I would encounter in spiritualist circles a similarly tense atmosphere charged with a furtive intimacy, together with the same vapid cheerfulness and habitual shallowness in the conversational tone of the séance leader before launching into the parts of the program that were meant to be creepy.

  “You laugh, Ladies and Gentlemen,” said Herr Adamowski in his harsh-sounding German. “But these days one cannot be serious enough in inquiring after the health of every worthy gathering. You see, Gentlemen and Ladies, you are caught up in the course of the times, without realizing that this is more than just your personal progression—please consider the implications! All jests aside—the difference is a crucial one. For me the difference is quite clear, as a journalist with his finger constantly on the pulse of the times, I live with it every day, I experience this same discrepancy in all its tragic consequences, not only the direct effects that have already resulted, but ones yet to be seen, ones to be feared. It makes a tremendous difference if one chooses to view the times abandoning all claim to exclusive possession, in other words no longer as a phenomenon of personal episodes alone, but of collective experience. As a journalist I have a professional obligation to provide an accounting of the quality of the times, both for myself and for others. While doing this I have to bear two things in mind: first, that the quality of the times is shaped and molded by the sum of its details, a sum of purely personal experiences, which taken alone would be completely insignificant, and would lead to nothing but misleading exceptions divorced from the spirit of the times, but which in the aggregate, as I have said, help determine the general character of the epoch. And, second, that this specific general character in return has an effect on each individual fate, no matter how isolated, and shapes how each person passes their time, no matter how remote the activity. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is perhaps the most interesting interplay in all of nature, the one that leads us closest to metaphysics, and one that demonstrates the difficulty of the journalistic métier … Yes, you laugh, but please bear in mind what our thankless task consists in. The journalist, Ladies and Gentlemen, does not have as congenial a profession as people are wont to think.” The group laughed out loud. “He must, as my esteemed friend Professor Feuer would put it, act like the squirrel carrying discord up and down Yggdrasil, between the eagle in the canopy and the dragon in the roots. He must roust the privately minded man from living solely for himself, by ceaselessly calling his attention to outside his personal sphere—events that don’t concern him at all, that don’t apply to him in the least, as he sees it, but which in reality are of his utmost personal concern, whether it’s a murder in the house next door or a change of regimes in Portugal, for instance, or an earthquake in Kamchatka. On the other hand, our conscience dictates that we journalists hold up this model of the private man to the so-called general public as an ideal form of being.” They laughed. “Yes, my friends, that’s the way it is. Who among us would deny the singular truth of the saying beatus ille homo qui sedet in suo domo, and who does not yearn for this very same thing from the bottom of his heart? Nietzsche was proud of not owning a house, but you ought to read sometime what he said about Epicurus …”

  The room groaned with laughter. The woman kn
own as Theophila said: “That was fabulous, Adamchik, truly fabulous. Where does he come up with all of that?”

  “The happy isolation of the man,” Herr Adamowski went on, after granting just enough time for the applause to play out, “que sedet post fornacem et habet bonam pacem—you laugh, my esteemed friends, but deep down you also feel envy for such a person. You would not be able to resist his powers of persuasion, as I myself experienced in a recent visit to Fräulein Paulette and the parents of the young man there in the corner who is reading so nicely and at the same time listening so intently …”

  I now had to acknowledge that the laughter was meant for me and acted as if I was so deeply engrossed in my reading as to give the lie to Herr Adamowski’s comment. At the same time I was ashamed of being afraid to openly admit that I had been listening in on the conversation—after all, no one could have held it against me. But we often lose our nerve in milieux that we disdain, and when that happens we easily lose our candor as well—otherwise the most reliable of our virtues. However, the embarrassing situation I found myself in did lead me to understand what Herr Adamowski said a little later about the “chemical” makeup of human relationships. Meanwhile he went on:

  “The person, Ladies and Gentlemen, who cultivates his garden, has a certain unimpeachability, and indeed, I would feel as though I were ignoring my calling if I missed an opportunity to uphold this as an ideal worthy of the highest striving, to lay it as a charge on the general public—in all earnestness! And herein lies another contradiction: on the one hand, the genuine regret that such happy, modest people are harder and harder to find, and a certain indignation that such a lifestyle still exists—an almost criminal removal from the world, a selfish consumption of time that is actually antisocial, just like someone secretly nibbling from the common larder. I only mention it as one example among many …”

  “Fabulous,” said Theophila. “Truly, truly fabulous, Adamchik!”

  “You will see, Ladies and Gentlemen,” said Herr Adamowski, baring his saw-teeth, “that people show so little understanding for the difficulties of our profession, for the true dilemma that lies at its core, that they begin to mistrust it.” Laughter echoed along the bookcases. “It is so grossly underappreciated that people are inclined to link our efforts to this cause or that—because they fail to understand that journalism is a cause in and of itself. And yet people will dismiss even its most serious attempts to convince the public exactly how great its own misfortune truly is.” Laughter. “I see a time approaching when people will no longer speak of the terribles simplificateurs, but of the terribles complicateurs …”

  “Magnificent,” said Theophila, thoroughly exhausted. She nodded to Fellner, who wriggled uncomfortably on his armchair as he relayed the nodding and sighing on to Leutgeb and Kopetzki. “Simply fabulous.”

  “You see, Ladies and Gentlemen,” said Herr Adamowski, “people reproach us for the fact that what we produce—i.e., the newspapers—is so open to dispute. Of course this criticism comes in various degrees, but that is the general accusation. I’m not talking about the loss that occurs between an idea and its execution, between the vision, so to speak, and the hand that gives it form—everyone knows that the best things are always lost in this process. I mean the fundamental misconception that someone who undertakes to put out a newspaper would ever be able to create anything but a newspaper …”

  Fellner slapped his thigh and immediately hid his hands again, aware of his faux pas. Leutgeb grumbled, and Kopetzki coughed on his pipe smoke when he started to laugh. “This ought to be written down word for word,” said Theophila, suddenly very serious.

  I was watching Aunt Paulette. She was sitting opposite Herr Adamowski, between Fellner and Kopetzki, evidently unmoved. She did not take part in the bursts of applause that were elicited by every other word and came cascading down like loose scree sliding down a mountain. I could tell that she felt the same inner aversion for the surroundings as I did—that she, too, could not abide the peculiar atmosphere, the combination of slovenly comfort, unabashed abandon, and an extreme but nonetheless futile attentiveness. It was as if Herr Adamowski’s gait were a feature of his words, in the stamping rhythm that resounded in all those present in the room: rearing up and straining excessively on the upswing, and then collapsing onto itself, as the ambitious stamping leg fell onto the careless swinging leg. We could even smell his sweat, for there was nothing comic to his remarks, which were clearly meant to be taken very seriously. The whole performance was like a feat of strength when the athlete is clearly straining and seeks to escape into the grotesque by clownishly exaggerating his own grimace. Herr Adamowski’s own contortions, under a burden that made his forehead bead over with sweat, were repulsive. Today it seems to me that I must have compared his pitiful efforts with Herr Tarangolian’s expertise, the juggler-like ease and fluidity with which the prefect mastered the most tangled trains of thought, evincing far more wit than Herr Adamowski was ever able to wrestle out of the angel of esprit. I’m not saying that I realized then that the Latin’s intellectuality could best be described with the French word lucidité, for which there is no German equivalent, but certainly it was that moment that led to my ultimate understanding that the secret to such clarity of intellect lies in the power of discernment, the ability to differentiate the truly simple from the truly complicated—in other words a sense of tact that accords each person his own room to move.

  I found Herr Adamowski’s guests even more disagreeable than I did the host himself. They were delighted with his faux clown act, wallowed in his sweat, so to speak. The graceless laughter of the men, and Theophila’s idiotic, vacuous enthusiasm were better suited to a fairgrounds sideshow than a kaffeeklatsch. In a word: I was in bad company, and, as usual, profited greatly from the experience.

  For my own insights were immediately deepened and strengthened as he went on riding his hobbyhorse.

  “Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen,” he said, and I suddenly realized that his relentless holding forth was meant as a provocation for Aunt Paulette. “Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, you don’t realize how much of being a journalist is really about innate aptitude. Take, for example, our young colleague from the other school, so to speak: Herr Alexianu of the Vocea. This youthful firebrand has literally been dubbed a knight of the press, and by someone to whom we also have a certain connection …” Laughter. “The slap that Herr A. received from this person—there’s no need to mention any names—was an act of initiation, a rite of admission, so to speak. The vague inclinations that had merely seethed beneath the surface of this young man suddenly took shape after this painful introduction to manhood. As I say: we are not molded by ourselves alone, by the inner core of our being, but from the outside as well—for example, by the general quality of the times, isn’t that right? The true man is revealed to himself and all others first by his enemies. Only when his hatred has a tangible goal does he come into his own, does he find himself. In this connection it is interesting to think of the theory postulated by the well-known Herr Năstase—I will spare a commentary.” Laughter. “According to him there is among men a very definite, let us say, measuring stick, for ranking individual prestige. And widespread feelings of insecurity come from the fact that this—again, let us call it a measuring stick—is seen in its proper proportion where it pertains to others, but in our own case is almost always viewed from above, and so appears foreshortened. Only the condition of exaltation reverses this image, because the elevation to a horizontal plane brings one’s own expanded capacity to view, while the optical illusion ceases to play tricks with regard to the other when the focus is on the other. But precisely in this state one should not underestimate the other …” Groaning laughter. “I don’t wish to make this mistake. As a journalist I am duty-bound to be objective …” Enormous merriment. “Therefore I am full of admiration for the upright hatred exhibited by Herr A…. All joking aside, Ladies and Gentlemen, we cannot pay enough attention to our young colleague’s journalistic success.
His holy excitement has made him the guardian spirit of the entire press. His paper, the Vocea, which had the keen sense to hire him, is not the only one that has experienced an unprecedented upswing. I’m sure you know how much our own circulation has risen thanks to him, ever since my friend Feuer’s response rekindled the general interest in reading newspapers …” Merriment. “Recently this stimulating effect has spread elsewhere as well. The newspaper of the Ukrainian minority, Narodny Dym, which you see lying here, has published an incisive piece examining the general legal state of minorities in light of the purge-concept propounded by Herr Ali—exactly what people want to read, my friends, a true example of the press as mouthpiece for the public …” Laughter. “Other ethnic groups won’t be far behind, either. So you can see that the spirit that has filled our young genius is one of general enlivenment. And so please bear in mind that being a journalist entails a lot more than curiosity for events, joy in expressing yourself, and a certain talent for writing. You have to be animated by a specific will to assert yourself, rather like a washerwoman using indelible ink to number items of especially fine and beautiful clothing—all to make sure they are returned to the rightful owner …”

  “Wonderful, Adamchik,” groaned Theophila, “truly wonderful. Where does he come up with all of this?”

  “And to think that this act of will can be conjured by a slap on the face!” Herr Adamowski continued, teeth bared and monocle flashing. “Yes, my dear friends, once we realize that true human relations occur as chemical reactions, outside all logic and even morality, then we land smack in the middle of alchemy. What spirit guided the hand that with one stroke made a hitherto chaste youth into a man, a human being full of the desire and distress of his hatred—with no apparent cause, mind you—it’s impossible to have any delusion in the matter, this is not about motives, but a metaphysical rite of initiation, the meaning of which we are able to discern with increasing clarity as it plays out. I tell you, we live in a magical hour, and so it is our human duty to ask, and with the greatest concern: How is the general health of the assembly?”