An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  And leading them into battle was a Jewish Mars, a stout god of war, powerful and glorious in his ecstatic rage, his fat face flushed red like David when he became a man, his black eyes flashing behind the high cushions of his cheeks, his mustache bristling furiously over his scarlet lips, and a greasy wreath of black ringlets on his neck:

  It was Dr. Salzmann in his hour of greatness.

  We turned away toward Theaterplatz. Around the synagogue we could see the glow of fire. Evidently a real battle was under way there. Soldiers with fixed bayonets were running diagonally across the plaza as if attacking.

  Our coachman drove calmly ahead in a quick, steady trot, then turned onto a side street that led onto a somewhat elevated lot where circuses set up their tents, but which now was empty. Just before the small rise, the coachman brought the horses to a gallop and had them take the embankment in three bounds. We were shaken through and through, but soon the carriage was again rolling smoothly on the hard-packed ground. The shortcut was cleverly chosen, since it allowed us to avoid the streets that might be jammed with soldiers, and we approached the Brills’ house from the rear.

  Uncle Sergei leaped from the box and helped Solly out. “Don’t worry about me,” Solly said. “Just keep driving. I’ll make it home on my own.”

  But my mother insisted that we wait for him. We stood parked for a few minutes in the shade of the bare firewalls that stood around the garbage bins. Then Uncle Sergei came back.

  Solly’s mother and sister weren’t yet home. “The father cried when he hugged his son. You are a saint, ma chère cousine.”

  We drove back across the empty circus grounds. Blanche was sitting between Tanya and me. It was the first time that I had been so close to her and could feel her body against my own. Tanya and I had our fingers clasped over one of her hands. The sky above the empty lot was dark—outlined only in the background by the lanterns along Wassergasse. Blanche raised her other hand, laid it around my cheek, and pulled my head to hers. I felt her thick, hard, curly hair; our cheeks touched just briefly, then she withdrew her hand.

  I was overwhelmed by the sweetness of this chaste, almost holy touch. All the bottled emotions of my dreams suddenly seemed like pale shadows of an almost painful irreality—although this, too, was only a dream, as it happened so unforeseen and passed so quickly and so irretrievably.

  At the embankment the coachman held the horses back: we eased down the incline at a walk, but then resumed our former speed. At that point a man ran diagonally across the street, and we heard two or three shots ring out behind him: the man flung up his arms, stood for a moment like a black cross, then staggered ahead, stumbled, and collapsed on his face, and the wheels of our carriage rolled a hairsbreadth away from his legs, which were still twitching. Tanya cried out. I could feel Blanche trembling. But the coachman kept the horses at a constant steady trot.

  We drove up to the Herz-Jesu Church, whose stone towers jutted hypocritically into the violet sky. Outside the nearby police headquarters we saw helmets gleaming under the bright light of the arc lamps that formed a whitish bell as it illuminated the forecourt, where an officer was shouting commands.

  Blanche and her father lived in a building behind the Ukrainian high school. Blanche jumped up as soon as we turned onto the short street. The apartments were all fronted by narrow, fenced-in garden beds. Only one of the buildings—the one where Blanche and her father lived—appeared to have been vandalized, but thoroughly: even the cast-iron fence had been torn out of its base, the pieces scattered on the street like giant waffles. Both windows on the second story had been shattered; bed linens were hanging out of one, and a ruined chair was caught in a shrub in front of the other. All manner of household goods lay strewn about—mostly books. At one place they were piled into a heap that had been set on fire, before other people had doused it with water that was now running into a black puddle. A group of men stood facing the devastation; one of them was wearing a tattered coat and a torn shirt and his face was bleeding.

  “Father!” cried Blanche. She had jumped out of the carriage even before it could come to a stop, and threw herself in his arms. Dr. Schlesinger had a gaping wound above his temple, with a moist handkerchief pressed against it. His eyes were bruised and practically closed shut; one corner of his mouth was torn; even his hands were hurt and bloody—he could barely move them.

  “My child!” he said. “How good that you’re here. I was just about to go looking for you. Now everything is all right. There, there, it’s all over. We’ll put things back to order.”

  One of the neighbors standing by stuck his head in our carriage. “One is ashamed to live in a world like this,” he said. “They beat him half to death and threatened to hang him. If we weren’t so close to the police station they might have done it, too. But the police are content just to look on, or even take part if possible.”

  Dr. Schlesinger came to our carriage. “Thank you for bringing my daughter home safely,” he said.

  “You’re wounded,” said our mother. “You and Blanche should come to our home and spend the night. The child can’t be left in this devastation. And you need looking after.”

  “Thank you, gnädige Frau, we have kind neighbors that have offered to take us in. I’m sure you’ll understand that I first want to put things back in order as much as possible. Some scientific works that mean a lot to me have been destroyed. You are very kind, and I thank you.”

  “But you are clearly the person they are targeting. The violence isn’t over yet. You may still be in danger.”

  “I’m sure I’m not, gnädige Frau. They did what they set out to do. Now it’s all over. We’ll be putting things back in order now.” He stroked Blanche’s head. “Once again, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  Blanche broke away from him to come to us, but then turned around and ran into the damaged building.

  Dr. Schlesinger nodded to our mother. “You should take your children home, gnädige Frau. As you see, I have help. Blanche and I are not alone.”

  “And I know every single one of them,” one woman said. “I can name each one by name. They should be publicly whipped, the lot of them.”

  Dr. Schlesinger smiled, resigned. Our mother signaled the coachman to drive on.

  Our street was empty: nothing had happened here; the whole commotion had passed by almost unnoticed. We were given a cup of tea with a good dose of rum and sent straight to bed. Uncle Sergei came to our room to wish us good night.

  “Was he dead, the man they shot?” we asked.

  “What man, my hearts?”

  “The one who fell next to our carriage.”

  “No, never. He just stumbled. I saw how he got up and happily went on running.”

  “That’s not true, Uncle Sergei, you’re lying to us.”

  Uncle Sergei was quiet for a moment. “Would you rather believe the alternative?”

  We didn’t know what to answer. No and yes.

  “Does it hurt when a person gets shot to death?” we asked.

  “Not a bit. You don’t feel any more than when you get thwacked with the finger—tuk—and it’s all over. It’s no fun at all to shoot someone dead.”

  “The children should go to sleep now,” our mother said. “We’ll be right nearby and will leave all the doors open.”

  Behind the gardens outside our windows, the darkness was rocking the treetops in the Volksgarten. The song of the nightingales rose from there and echoed off the walls of the night. Apart from that, there was no sound.

  The next morning we were running a fever and stayed in bed. Toward evening Tanya had a big reddish patch on her forehead and cheeks. The doctor was called. He diagnosed scarlet fever.

  “No wonder, in that Jew school,” our father said, who had just returned from his hunting trip and had yet to hear what had transpired.

  18 Farewell to Childhood and to Herr Tarangolian

  HONEY-golden like a pastoral goddess, Frau Lyubanarov stood at the garden gate, against the
saffron and sandalwood tones of the autumn foliage, a life-mystery pulsing with warm-blooded corporeality, encased in her skin, breathing, peering, profoundly alive amidst a barren splendor, vast and translucent, woven of light and air and color, in which those earthiest of birds, the crows, gathered in flocks as if plowed up from the fields, cawing their gray, brittle, crumbly cries. She stood there in the perfected glory of the fruit, the late sunlight falling through the thinned-out leaves, glazing her face with the thinnest coat of pure gold before drowning in the warm amber of her skin, as though the fires of an ancient sun were raining onto the surface of a pond that lay concealed within a reedy secret beneath some oaks. Her thick black hair curled into a firm wreath above her topaz goat-eyes, her pale, full lips peaked at the corners into a smile full of sweet enticement, and melted into a delicate, sharp clarity like the tone of a flute—that’s how she stood there, while the chestnuts came drumming down from the trees, their prickly, ball-shaped hulls bursting apart to release the shiny kernels, which rolled in front of her feet like a cornucopia of peasant offerings: the bright, tenderly yellowing leek-green husks, wrapped around a whitish membrane tinged with shades of violet, like fresh sheep’s cheese swathed in a burdock leaf; the eye-catching brown of the tough kernel, sharp with tannins, with a luster rich as old beeswax that refracted the ruby hues of congealing lamb kidneys into a warm and sparkling rusty red, exerting a tangy, satisfying attraction like the smell of woodsmoke; and the bright, pinkish mushroom-and-shell colored blemishes on her skin—a shellfish in the rainbow opalescence of unspoiled purity, with all the slothfulness of the autumn encapsulated in its pearl.

  I gave her names such as Mother of Corn—because of the glory of her shoulders and breasts, or Stallioness—because she struck me as the mythic mate of that sinewy steed the hussar had ridden, or else Thetis or Nereid—on account of the gritty curliness of her hair, which contained the churning swish of waves. But the most beautiful, the most divine of all her names was the one bestowed on her by Herr Adamowski: magnificently shameless …

  I eyed her through the window, yearned to go out to her—all the while secretly conspiring with my fate, grateful that the wall of glass panes separated me from her and cut me off from the reality outside, which I would have lost had I ventured out—just as every reality is lost as soon as we enter with a mind to act: just like the air in which we breathe is not visible to us. In my room I was fully transported, and also removed from her, therefore fully gifted with her presence: the window of my room was set before the transparency of the bright October day like the facet of a prism, refracting its image into a spectrum without disowning its structure; it focused my visions into a perspective whose vanishing point was the woman at the garden gate—a sparkling equilibrium of correspondences, which showered me with riches, weightless like the joy of forgetting oneself while dancing.

  I took this being separated from the world by a glass pane as a kind of pictorial correspondence—a reflection of the transported condition my sickness had left me in. It happened that I was sick longer than my siblings, and my case was more threatening: the scarlet fever led to a completely abnormal case of pneumonia and pleurisy that kept me laid up for weeks with aches and fever while the summer simply passed by.

  And it was only reluctantly that I recovered: I had no intent or desire to return to the loud, crude, and tumultuous world of the healthy, with their ruddy cheeks, where one robust thing alters another, and connections of a base nature cheapen the worth of everything. That world possessed nothing of the floating interchangeability of all that is perceived, a quality I had learned to love, thanks to the fever and the exhaustion, like a delicate intoxication. As the care and attention I was being shown began to taper off, I responded with a kind of charitable scorn, which I wielded like a dagger, either turning the point inward toward myself or out and away—at least for as long as I was visibly sick. As I recovered, I could feel how I was being cheapened, how my senses—which my ailment had honed to a fine, excitable edge—were again getting sucked into the undertow of a life that struck me as full of fake cheer, that seemed artificially packed with pointless actions and gestures, and overflowing with wholesome precepts—all aimed at deliberate deception. And the harder people worked to peddle this concept of worthy life, the more they aroused my suspicion, just as if they were hawking one of the Dobrowolskis’ more dubious goods. Consequently, while I hated the dishes that were designed to make me stronger, and which with every meal were meatier, spicier—more masculine, so to speak—what disgusted me even more was the fact that my appetite for them was growing. And as much as I despised the eager voices full of anticipation, and modulated to cheer me up, as if wanting to transfer their own impatience onto me—“Just a few more days, then you’ll be able to go out and get some fresh air and play with the others. I’ll bet you can’t wait, can you?”—I detested the excitement that I felt against my will, and which was all too closely related to that uncouth cheerfulness.

  I had the feeling as though now were the time for me to leave my childhood once and for all. Because what was expected of me, this ideal of “being healthy and taking part in all of life’s joys and duties,” meant renouncing the earnestness I had developed in the great unconscious tension of my unmediated confrontation with the world. It meant exchanging the inscrutable autocratic splendor that accompanied each new thing as it entered that world for a routine interaction with the all-too-familiar, where things were ascribed functions merely as needed—thereby manufacturing a world that was falsely acted, instead of experiencing a world full of mysterious play.

  Not that the reservoir of things to be experienced seemed depleted. Had that been the case, I would have had no cause to lament any loss: I was sensing that my own ability to experience things was diminishing as I recovered. There was clearly a limit—not of the wonders that surrounded me, but of my strength to perceive them, as if my soul, which had once again been exiled to my body, possessed only a limited facility to comprehend, an unalterable capacity that could contain a finite quantity of basic images and not a single more.

  Hesitantly, then, and with an anticipatory sadness, since I was growing out of my childhood anyway and registering the renunciations that this entailed, I took leave of my sickroom, within whose walls everything had been calibrated to my sickness, with gentle consideration and tender care, and which was filled with the echoes of heightened perceptions that had grown in time and space, and which I had savored to the fullest, just like my aches and pains. For years I wasn’t able to pick up a book or look at a picture that I had studied then without feeling the vague stimulus of a deeper recognition, an impact that strikes the core of our being, the sense of déjà vu mingled with nostalgia that comes when we reencounter motifs from our childhood and we regret having lost the power to experience the world in a way that brought us closer to the essence of things. Because we never again experience the world with the same thoroughness as in the stillness that fills us when we are completely alone and close to not-being, the tranquility that is either the echo of the not-yet-being that precedes our birth, or of the no-longer-being that follows death. The other states of rapture we encounter—love and intoxication—merely borrow this proximity to not-being, and are therefore merely reflection and illusion. They do not entirely come from us, do not spring out of that same enigmatic element from which our life arises, and into which it ultimately descends. Neither love nor drugged exhilaration can be attained without assistance: they require other means to transport us and connect us to their qualities. Only the most lethal narcotics or the most feminine—that is to say, the most changeable—woman are able to temporarily create the illusion of the truly lived life, owing to their deadly effects. And the despair into which they plunge us is the voice of our innermost conscience, which opens our eyes to our illusion and reveals the underlying fact that we turn to surrogates to still our true desire—the desire to be extinguished.

  In the autumn air, the morning frost was sharp, pungent—like
a mild odor of fire and mold. I went out into the garden and joined my siblings. I felt estranged, no longer able to follow their games. What’s more, they had acquired new friends—or rather reacquired old ones: the two Lyubanarov daughters had come home, shy and a little feral after their long stay in the country, where they had acquired the exaggerated and somewhat clumsy manners of a God-fearing household, amid the black-bearded and unctuous patriarchy of their clergymen kin. They even smelled like church candles, like the spice cakes laced with icing and adorned with almonds, and the aromatic brandies of baptismal celebrations and wakes; their hair still contained the shady cool of the untended corner of the parish garden where the blue glint of jays with their rosewood breasts squawked away. They were suntanned and hardened and wore sleeveless summer dresses, and I felt mollycoddled and awkwardly dandyish in my scarf and coat, like a scholarly bookworm confronted by peasant beauties.

  Looking through the lance-leaf fence, which once again appeared indisputably slender and erect against the trembling gold of the leaves on the bushes, we saw the prefect’s shiny black coach approach, the gleaming brass and polished lantern panes like heraldic emblems, towed behind a whirlwind of red spokes and horses’ legs blurred in movement. The carriage stopped at our gate. The batman jumped off the box; the martial eagle on his heavily polished spiked helmet gleamed above the silver buckles of the chinstrap, and Herr Tarangolian leaned heavily on his shoulder to climb out of the carriage. Then he stepped into the garden with the mincing gait of a bon vivant, a red carnation flaming in his buttonhole. Without turning his head he walked past Frau Lyubanarov, who was leaning against the wall of the dvornik’s hut, giving her a restrained greeting by placing three fingers of his gloved right hand to the brim of his stiff hat and barely lifting it. His heavy eyes, however, rolled out past the twirled ends of his mustache in a meaningful sidelong glance and sank inside the depths of her topaz gaze. She leaned her head back and smiled, without changing her overall expression—except for a barely perceptible narrowing of her eyes, and a tiny upward tilt to the corners of her mouth. But her shoulders and breasts smiled from under the hem of her colorful embroidered blouse; her crossed arms smiled as if they wanted to open up to receive a guest; and the curve of her full hips smiled with provocative irony. The prefect’s bon vivant gait seemed to pick up a mechanical whirr. His knee action—as the horse experts call it—increased, and he started to strut like a peacock. The immaculate white linen spats above his dainty shoes showed a vain display of carefully aligned buttons; his collar and cuffs were flashing; his tie was a billow of silk beneath his pompous chin. His arms, slightly angled at the elbows, rowed alongside his flanks, which seemed to shrink, so that his gloves suddenly appeared too large, as if he were shoveling the air in front of his silvery gray vest like a clown, or securing a path for his virility through a tangle of unwelcome advances. He seemed to sense how silly they looked and so he gave them something to do by twirling his ebony cane between his fingers and then rapping it against his left palm. We were expecting him to pucker his lips under his executioner’s mustache and whistle a few tense, jaunty bars from under his bulbous Levantine nose, while his jaundiced eyes bulged more than usual above their heavy bags, and his pupils stayed as rigid as archers’ targets.