An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  For I took care not to conjure the pain of the enormous otherness; I removed it from me, so as not to fall into the abyss of the much larger distance that already lay between us. Not the distance imposed on us by race—that, too, was only a metaphor—but the one that is revealed by love.

  We suffered because of how badly she danced. This great-granddaughter of Judith and granddaughter of Salome was incapable of moving in rhythm to the music she so adored. She was too much like a jar herself to carry in her blood the ancient wisdom of the swaying gait under the elongated burden of bulbous jars and the beautiful flow of arms to prop them. Nor did her skin display that saturated ochre sheen that seemed to reflect the terra-cotta vessels she carried on the head. Her skin was opaline, almost transparent, like the fragile sides of delicate Chinese porcelain, sprinkled here and there with a tender hint of sepia—at the bridge of her nose and on her shoulders and upper arms, pale like the tint of an eggshell. Although her lids were a bit on the thick side, they released a bluish shimmer whenever she lowered them; the wreath of her lashes cast a pale shadow on the matte, freckled skin of her gently vaulted cheeks. And another, darker shadow, precursor to a delicate down, could be seen around the corners of her large, knowing mouth. All of that was very exposed and at the same time very static. She was filled with something that weighed her down and threatened to explode at any moment. She couldn’t dance because she didn’t take herself lightly. We had read that angels could fly because they take themselves lightly.

  Of course not too much was being asked of her as Clara in the snowflake scene from Nutcracker. As well as she could, Madame Aritonovich confined her part to a few decorative poses. We rehearsed one last time with the full orchestra and in costume. The performance was to take place in the hall of the institute. The orchestra was seated in the gallery. The spectators were seated on both sides of the hall, next to our classrooms. Madame proved a very ingenious director—she thought of everything. There was a cold buffet and punch for the grown-ups, ice cream and sweets for the children. The last week of preparations was enchanted. Dr. Salzmann, who was surprisingly strong, performed miracles transporting furniture. Even Fräulein Zehrer lent a hand; she also contributed greatly by monitoring the precision of the corps de ballet. We feverishly awaited the Sunday evening when the performance was to take place.

  The final game of the league championship, between Mircea Doboş and Makkabi, was being held that same afternoon. Even among the residents of our rather remote villa district, the tension over the outcome was palpable. Colonel Turturiuk, the honorary president of Mircea Doboş, was picked up by a delegation from the club and an escort from the national student fraternity Junimea, traveling in a long column of coaches. By noon Frau Lyubanarov was standing at the gate, waving and greeting acquaintances. Even Herr Kunzelmann, who came rattling up on the taradaika pulled by his Kobiela to deliver fruit from his garden, was on the way to the playing field. He was wearing a dark Sunday coat and a gray felt hat with a black band, but hadn’t been able to part with his riding pants and leather gaiters. Whip in hand, he explained to us why he had to be there “without fail”: Makkabi had beaten Jahn a few weeks earlier because the referee “hadn’t been as objective as he should have been” and now he had a craving “to be a witness to the revenge” that at least Mircea Doboş was going to have on the Jews, because this time it simply wasn’t possible that the referee would side with Makkabi. Raising his finger, Herr Kunzelmann also quoted the warning of his great wise man Wilhelm Busch:

  If someone climbs with difficulty

  So high up into a tree,

  And thinks that he might just be a bird:

  He is absurd.

  —and left us with the task of reproducing the smooth original from the embarrassingly ruined rhythm.

  Just before four o’clock, Fräulein Riffke Brill showed up on our street, in a coach festooned with blue-and-white banners and the Star of David, together with her fiancé, young Seligmann, to pick up the young ladies of the Grünspan family, who lived not far from us. Bubi Brill was unfortunately still in custody, and the president of the Lawn Tennis Club, Baronet von Merores, remained true to his racket sport.

  But Ephraim Perko had loaded a fiacre with half a dozen exquisitely beautiful, long-legged blondes, and was lounging in the cushioned carriage, beaming, his arms wrapped around their blossoming voluptuousness, his short legs crossed and resting on the jump seat, his jacket open and his homburg tilting back onto his neck.

  A little later we heard the first roars of the crowd greeting the players as they ran onto the field; the din came bursting over the canopies of the trees in the Volksgarten like a dark cloud of passion.

  Despite their animosity toward Madame Aritonovich’s Institut d’Éducation, our mother and even Aunt Elvira had agreed to watch the ballet, for our sake. The performance was to begin at seven o’clock, but Madame had told us to be in the institute no later than five, to give us enough time to put on costumes and makeup. Uncle Sergei had promised to come later, and to persuade Aunt Paulette to join him. Our father had left town to go hunting with Uncle Hubert.

  We loaded the costumes into the carriage and set off. In the main boulevard of the Volksgarten, which was open to traffic, we ran into various packs of people on foot—mostly adolescents. They whistled as shrilly as they could to spook the carriage horses. One voice outshouted the others: “Yossel, what’s the score!” “Four to three for us!” was the answer. “Fight’s broken out. Better not waste any time getting there.”

  The noise from the playing field had become constant, tumultuous, disquieting. Outside the officers’ casino a platoon of gendarmes was being sworn in. A man with a badly bleeding head passed by, kicking and screaming and struggling against the two companions who were escorting him. Someone called out: “I can’t believe that the gentlemen in the casino won’t let a person use their phone even in a case like this. I’m going to report this. A scandal, that’s what it is!”

  We turned off the main street and stopped in front of the Institute. Solly Brill pounced on us, very excited: “Haveyouheardanything? Anynews? What’s the score at halftime? A stroke you can get from all this worrying, on account of this stupid ballet! Mama brought me here but she left right away to tell Riffke to stay away from all the passions running high and such what a nebekh—what’s it going to hurt her if Jacky Seligmann gets a bump on the nose. Oy, am I sad that Bubi’s in jail! He’d have a good chance of losing his spleen—they’d sooner slap him as look at him. I can’t tell you how worried I am, really.”

  Aunt Elvira remarked pointedly to Madame Aritonovich: “This young man seems to regret missing the opportunity to see his family killed.”

  “Not exactly,” replied Madame. “He’s merely behaving like the farmer who prays for a few drops of rain to fall on his field when he sees it’s pouring at the neighbors’.”

  “Very well put, since we come from the country,” said Aunt Elvira, with an alkaline smile.

  “Really!” said Madame Aritonovich. “I know some very charming people from the country.”

  Our mother looked at Dr. Salzmann. Madame Aritonovich introduced him. Mama spoke a few half-friendly words about how she hoped our inadvertent participation in his course had not wounded the sensitivities of any of the other pupils’ parents.

  “Absolutely not, gnädige Frau. Jewish parvenus are usually quite tolerant.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring,” said our mother, nodding to Dr. Salzmann.

  “Not for me,” he replied, ignoring her gesture of parting. “Among the better-off members of the Mosaic faith, at most sixty percent still believe in a personal god—the remaining forty percent do not. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, as usual. Those of us with convictions would prefer to see a better proportion.”

  He reached below his mighty stomach into his waistband pocket, pulled out his thick watch, glanced at the face, wound it, held it to his ear, knocked it against the back edge of an armchair, and listened once again. His j
ocund, awe-inspiring face was redder than usual, and his thick mustache bristled warlike over his scarlet lips.

  We were shooed into the bedroom that had been designated as our dressing room. A few latecomers arrived and reported that the soccer match had been broken off because a tumult had erupted just as the second half was beginning—at which point the game was tied four to four. The fighting was still going on and had spread into the city. Reinforced squads of police and gendarmes were trying to restore the peace.

  They started getting us into costume and applying makeup. The theater barber and his assistant applied scented creams to our foreheads and cheeks, dusted us with powder that tickled our noses, and under the careful supervision of Madame Aritonovich, shaped Tanya’s and Blanche’s eyebrows into the wingtips of demonic butterflies. We were enjoying ourselves immensely, and performing every conceivable nonsense. In fact, Solly had to be reined in; he had fashioned a ball out of a bundle of stockings in order to show how Moishe Eisenstein, the center-forward for Makkabi, dribbled.

  Meanwhile, more disquieting news continued to filter in about what was going on in the streets. Evidently the police, heavily reinforced by the gendarmerie, had managed to restore order outside the playing field. However, it was time for the daily promenade, which usually filled Iancu Topor Avenue—and, at least on Sundays, the paths in the Volksgarten as well—with alarming masses of people. But today it was positively frightening to find out how many inhabitants Czernopol really possessed—and what kind of people they were. Apparently the entire rabble from the outlying districts had formed a mob. The matchyorniks from around the train station, accompanied by hordes of streetwalkers, the burlaks from the settlements around Kalitschankabach, the huligans from Klokuczka, and whatever the other particular groups might be called, roamed across the avenue so that even the spacious Volksgarten was practically overflowing. Even the fashionable patchkas of young flaneurs had armed themselves with sticks; individual groups of Junimea had taken important strategic positions at specific corners and intersections; the ethnic German fraternity Germania—wearing the colors of their club, with ribbons and caps and provocative glances—approached anyone coming their way, and the Jahn Athletic Club was in the beer cellar of the Deutsches Haus, ready to spring to action as a man to the cry “Brothers, come out!” And finally it was impossible to overlook the throngs of young Jews—including some who were practically children—who were streaming in from all sides. The police had been ordered to disperse groups of more than three people, and performed this task—at least the older watchmen among them who recalled their “German” from the Austrian days—by saying the words: “Either go where it is you’re going or stay where it is you’re staying but don’t be making any kupkis!” which, in their mix of Polish, German, and Ukrainian, meant, quite simply, “Either move on or stay where you are, but do not defecate.”

  Mama Brill hadn’t returned to the institute. “What do I care if she runs after Riffke,” said Solly. “What I want most of all is to be out on the street myself—but no, it’s a snowflake I have to be playing, the one time something fun is going on outside.”

  We asked Blanche about her mother. “I don’t have a mother anymore,” she said. “You couldn’t have known. She died two years ago.”

  “And your father? Is he here?”

  “No, he wanted to come, but he was called to the asylum. I’m all by myself.”

  We began to grow apprehensive. Report after unsettling report alarmed us to the point where we lost our joyful anticipation of the ballet. Seven o’clock came but Madame Aritonovich gave no sign to begin: Herr Tarangolian had yet to appear, and she didn’t want to start without him.

  Uncle Sergei arrived late and unaccompanied—Aunt Paulette had turned back when she saw the seething crowd in the Volksgarten. Giving his most charming smile, he said: “The mood on the streets is just like before a revolution. I saw someone almost beaten into mincemeat.”

  At seven-thirty, Madame Aritonovich asked Dr. Salzmann to go to the corner apothecary and telephone to see if the prefect would be able to attend—unlike today, back then it wasn’t a given that a private school would have its own phone connection. Dr. Salzmann set off with eyes ablaze and martial mustache twitching—and never came back. Frau Dr. Biro (née Wurfbaum), who had laid out the cold buffet and was chewing on the remnants, set off to find out what had happened to him. After a very long while she came back and informed us that Dr. Salzmann had been to the apothecary—which incidentally was hastily closing its shutters despite the official after-hours service—but had disappeared in the direction of downtown. In any event, Herr Tarangolian could not be reached; she herself had tried, in vain. Nevertheless, her trip wasn’t entirely for naught, because she was sucking on a gumdrop with great relish and satisfaction.

  “So we’ll start without him,” said Madame Aritonovich. “All right, then, children, to your places!”

  But the parents had already decided to put off the performance to another day. The way things were, it was time to get the children home as quickly as possible.

  “Please,” said Madame, “consider the fact that right now is the worst possible time to be driving through the city. At least wait till after the promenade. Besides, I don’t believe that anything serious is going to happen. There’s no reason for …” She interrupted herself.

  “What was that?” someone asked. “Those were gunshots.”

  For a few seconds all of us in the festively decorated Institut d’Éducation were deathly silent. We heard the same roaring crowd that we had heard in the afternoon coming from the playing field—except now they sounded much closer, just down Iancu Topor Avenue. We heard a noise as though a handful of beans were being tossed into a bucket. After that it went quiet for a moment, and then the noise broke out again, louder and higher by a whole tone. We could now make out individual voices, very agitated, shouting.

  “A salvo,” observed Uncle Sergei, gleefully.

  Panic broke out among the grown-ups, though not among us children. They threw coats on top of our costumes, grabbed our clothes, and fled to the carriages.

  “What you are doing is insane!” Madame Aritonovich cried out. “Don’t go out onto the street right now while there’s shooting going on. It’s bound to be over very soon.”

  “That was just a warning,” one of them countered. “If things don’t calm down after that, then the shooting will really start in earnest. And we want to be home before then.”

  That point of view was compelling and ultimately proved correct. Madame Aritonovich’s request to spare the children the sight of the pandemonium was ignored. After all: there was property and furnishings to protect.

  Our mother was inclined to stay in the institute until the worst was over. But Aunt Elvira said: “I wouldn’t take the risk of waiting in a school like this. The bitterness is clearly directed toward Jews.”

  Uncle Sergei also thought it would be better to return to the villa district, which would be relatively free from danger.

  “I beg you, think of your husband,” Aunt Elvira added. “I refuse to be held accountable if anything happens.”

  “If you do decide to go,” said Madame Aritonovich, “please take little Brill and Blanche Schlesinger and see that they get home. They’re both on their own here.”

  “Yes, but you have teachers from your institute at your disposal,” said Aunt Elvira. “For us it would mean taking a long detour through downtown.”

  “That’s true,” said Madame Aritonovich. “But we don’t have a carriage. Please, do it for the sake of your children’s friendship with them.”

  “Of course,” said our mother. “After all, we have Sergei to pro- tect us.”

  Our coachman was a long-serving, reliable man, whom we had brought from the country. “Ach, that’s nothing” he said. “People beating on each other like at the fairgrounds, knocking out windowpanes, firing into the air to chase everyone away. We’ll put up the cover so we won’t catch a stone on the nose, that�
�s all. I’ll see that everyone gets home.” Uncle Sergei sat heroically next to him on the box. And in fact the noise seemed to have passed in the direction of the Volksgarten.

  We made a loop through several streets that were completely deserted, and crossed Iancu Topor Avenue just before the Ringplatz. The pavement was strewn with shards of glass, but otherwise empty. At the main street, however, we ran into the commotion. Our coachman charged so fiercely into a mob of suspicious characters that a few of them barely escaped getting run over. One stone hit the cover of the carriage.

  Solly Brill was fidgeting between us anxiously, as much as the cramped space allowed. “There’s our shop,” he called out. “Look at what they’re doing, the pigs!”

  Some of the rabble was in the process of systematically demolishing the Brills’ store. The roller-shutters were torn off, the windows shattered. A few men had crawled into the display window and were tossing the wares to the others outside.

  “Look at the robbers!” Solly cried. He jumped up and clambered onto Aunt Elvira’s lap, stuck his head out the window, and shouted, full of tears: “Why does it always have to be us! Aren’t there any other Jews?”

  He was pulled in as quickly as possible.

  But then we saw something that made us shout with jubilation.

  From the darkness of the chestnut trees in front of the provincial government offices, a troop emerged and fell upon the plundering mob like a flock of avenging angels. They were muscular young men dressed in white linen pants covered with flour; their shirts were open, and their heads were covered with little visorless felt caps—apprentices from the numerous kosher bakeries. Swinging their long wooden peels like double-edged swords, they mowed their way through the streets like threshers.