An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  She clapped her hands together in delight. “Are they all for me?” she asked. Tildy had no choice but to nod to her, noting that he was rather moved by the unconventional and rather awkward gesture he had resorted to in his temporary embarrassment at her naïve question. He bit his lip. But he immediately found his emotion validated. She sat there a while, her hands clasped beneath her chin as if at worship, in enraptured study of the basket filled with bright balls of fruit, picked one up and weighed it in her hand, her fingers touching the peel almost with awe, stroking the pored surface, with its sparkling, oily sheen. Then she carefully returned it and arranged the others around it, once more sating her eyes with the sheer abundance. Her performance seemed exaggerated; he couldn’t tell if these were mere antics, if her coquettishness wasn’t meant to be deeply ironic, if she wasn’t playing some refined game to accentuate the contrast between her fashionable getup and her evident childishness. But her delight was so genuine that he realized he might be underestimating her in two equally dangerous ways, and the potential of danger put him on guard while heightening his feeling of manliness, which made him happy. For this he was grateful to her, and insofar as he found himself willing to accept both challenges, he immediately respected her as his worthy opponent. He no longer needed to be ashamed of his sentimental impulse; it was part of a legitimate cause: a contest, a duel. Apart from igniting his emotions, which had already turned somewhat brittle, she had provoked his desire to prove himself, to perform a knightly task. From that point on he followed her game with the attention of a fencer under assault, and sensed that the attack was directed immediately at him, and his delight was ignited by her own. Once again she picked up one of the bright spheres and gave him a questioning look. And once again he nodded, smiling in the bargain. And she responded to his smile as if she were accepting a challenge: with one barbaric, cruel motion she sank her fingernails into the thick peel, pulling and tearing it off in huge furry scraps, oblivious to any possible damage to the fruit. Her fingers were dripping with oil and juice as she separated the wedges; she bored deep inside the sopping flesh to dig out the seeds, picking it apart into little pieces. But she didn’t eat any. In a fit of nervous restlessness, a kind of disturbed compulsion for order, she arranged the sections along the edge of the plate, around the growing pile of discarded peels. She tore apart three or four of the fruits in the same barbaric way, piling the pieces on the plate, and finally, when the mountain of ruins threatened to collapse, she took them and stuffed them alternately into Tildy’s mouth and into the mouth of Professor Lyubanarov, who was blindly driveling away.

  Tildy parried when with dripping claws she unexpectedly shoved the torn-up piece of orange under his mustache. But her wild, almost primal gesture of maternal feeding was overpowering; against his will, he opened his lips to accept the first piece and then offered only weak resistance to the next one, and the next after that. She seemed to find more pleasure in taking care of Professor Lyubanarov, whose stream of words had suddenly been halted and who with a glassy gaze swallowed whatever was shoved into his mouth. All the while her bearing was suspiciously serious. Tildy had no sense for how hideously ridiculous the whole scene was. The fact that he, too, had become her victim only sharpened his tense vigilance. He realized that he had lost the first round, but was unable to explain how; the contest did not follow any of the rules he had expected. While inclined to think himself duped, led on, and made a fool of—a suspicion that gnawed at him, because it was unchivalrous and would have turned his “cause” into a farce, he was immediately ashamed of his mistrust. Because after the girl had fed the last piece to Lyubanarov, she let her hands—dirty and sticky as they were—sink into her lap, and stared at the mountain of discarded peels, thin and lost before the picture of senseless waste like a sorrowful child, and this was no pose. A deep sympathy for her poverty, her youth, her bad breeding, and the loneliness of her existence overcame him, as strongly as a sense of guilt. She stared helplessly at her hands, and he handed her his handkerchief. It was made of fine batiste, large and unadorned, and she touched it with the same sensual rapture she had displayed while touching the fruit. Then she held it to her mouth, closing her eyes, and inhaled its pure scent.

  “I love you,” she said, as if in jubilation. She stood up, letting her light coat slide off her shoulders. She was wearing a sleeveless dress of a very plain cut, which despite its cheapness seemed on her as elegant as a chiton on a young Greek woman. She came mincing over to him on her high heels, and sat down in his lap, with such a natural lack of inhibition that he did not resist. He let her drape her bare arms around him and snuggle her face against his, allowed her to kiss him, cover his forehead and cheeks with a shower of tender fleeting kisses like the warm droplets of a fine spring rain. Her display of affection showed a brilliant gift for avoiding routine opening gestures; she was able to elicit desire that went beyond the merely immediate and touched on the sublime; she knew how to draw things out into an ongoing play that was at once innocent and sinful. She touched the tip of his nose with her own and opened her eyes very close to his, and he gazed into her large, fixed eyes, ringed by the dark makeup, and saw the mask of death and yielded to the temptation of that ultimate sinking-away, that final act of relief, of becoming a child in the lap of nonexistence. And she tossed her head back and took a deep breath and laughed a mute, enraptured laugh, then nuzzled her temples against his mouth, and rocked her head as if falling into a happy, restorative slumber. Overwhelmed by this tenderness, Tildy found himself touching her with a sensual delight he had never known, as his hand caressed the beautiful curve of her head, clasped her neck with a warm, firm grip, and guided her blissful child’s head close to him. A dark feeling of happiness engulfed him, clouded by an inexpressible sadness that was now finally free of all constraint.

  Professor Lyubanarov again took hold of his arm. “No,” he said, with glazed eyes, as if making a great mystic proclamation, “the curs no longer step aside for you, they rub their mangy fur against you, they lick your boots—soon they will bite you, brother-in-law. And yet you have also gained something: now the butterflies are alighting on you …”

  And then Tildy sensed the hornet-flicker of a uniform hovering over the head of the girl. He looked up. Standing in front of him was a sergeant from his former squadron, who had been in the service for years: vulgar, mustachioed, brutal, his eyes empty and mean. “You will permit me a dance with the lady,” he said in a voice dripping with scorn. And before Tildy could reply she had jumped up and was reclining in the arm of the mercenary, playing the same brilliant game of erotic delay, as she danced with him in the sliding, choppy rhythm of the tango—except her movements were more undisguised, blatantly routine, with a hypocritical coldness that did not lessen her pleasure, but on the contrary appeared to arouse it.

  Tildy felt the raw, deadly sharp stab of disappointment and averted his gaze, eager not to meet the eyes of the brute in whose arms she was cradled. His courage commanded otherwise, to meet each and every scornful glance with his unruffled “English” countenance. He found himself once again deceived, because the sergeant no longer cared about Tildy but was simply staring at the girl, crudely lusting into her eyes. Nor did she pay Tildy any notice.

  The tango seemed to go on forever. Its flat musical motif kept curling out of the monotony of rhythmic thrusts and shoves, twining into a primitive arabesque and tapering off with no real resolution into a banal loop of endless repeats. Professor Lyubanarov let his head droop from his pulled-in neck like a befuddled steer. “Bear it, brother-in-law,” he croaked. “Here all pride has an end. I know all too well, believe me.” He shook Tildy’s arm vigorously—“Believe me,” he shouted, “I know the arrogance that poisons the ear with phrases like ‘even though I’ve treated you as my equal you’re still far from being my equal.’” He sobbed once again, the tears running down his spongy cheeks. “Words! Their poison eats away the heart like the eagle gnawing on Prometheus’s liver. But they don’t help you in
the least. Not at all. If you are honestly uxorious, and devoted to one woman, then bow your head and submit your neck to the yoke. Never will you find a woman who spares the man who loves her; for though she be herself aflame, she delights to torment and plunder him … Nothing will help you, and least of all words, words, words! Subter caecum vulnes habes sed lato balteus auro praetegit ut mavis da verba et decipe nervos si potes … Mere words, once again! Admovit iam bruma foco te Basse Sabino iamne lyra et tetrico vivunt tibi pectine chordae mire opifex numeris veterum primordia vocum atque marem strepitum fidis intendisse Latinae … Yes, soon the winter frost will coax us to the Sabine fireside—the Sabine fireside we do not possess … the winter frost … The world, I tell you—are you listening to me? You don’t wish to hear what I’m saying, brother—you don’t want to hear me in your hurt pride, sir, but nonetheless I am offering you a great and deep truth: the world, dear sir, is dark, wet, and windy—just like an old man’s ass—yes that is a great—deep—wisdom.”

  Tildy was sitting, unmoved, when the girl came back. He did not look up when she picked up an orange and peeled and ate it; he saw only the barbaric motions of her clawlike hands, now less hasty, and he surmised that her face was as calm as he wished his own were. Then he rediscovered the same groping humility in her hands, and against his will he followed the one that was lifting the torn pieces of orange to her mouth, and he saw how she kept her eyes closed and chewed with an expression of inner gratitude, how she swallowed as if exhausted, gulping down that first, longed-for draught. He shuddered at the terrifying notion that she must have known or would yet know true hunger. At once, all thought of himself, all mistrust, all caution, all hesitation to become involved, was erased. He knew he had been called to protect her and save her from her dirty existence. He was flooded with self-confidence: for the first time in his life he felt how powerful he could be. He again sensed a deceptive amplification of his capacity to feel, and transferred his gratitude onto her, and as she faced him once again full-on, he sensed that her gaze was now more probing, and he believed that he saw in her eyes a tentative hope responding to the certainty that he was pouring into her.

  “… In fact, brother-in-law, we never truly love the other,” Professor Lyubanarov intoned, “but merely the different world he represents. Each of us wants to break out of our self and join with the other, but we never arrive, never. We are prisoners—do you hear, sir? prisoners—and we never even come close to the border of that unknown world we love with such yearning, we bounce back off its walls as an echo, and that is what we love, as a report from the other side: our beautiful echo. What do we see in our beloved? Does she really exist—does she? A thing is not seen because it is visible, but conversely, visible because it is seen; nor is a thing led because it is in the state of being led, or carried because it is in the state of being carried, but the converse of this. And now, Euthyphro, is my meaning intelligible. Do you understand, brother-in-law? Neither does it suffer because it is in a state of suffering, but it is in a state of suffering because it suffers. Do you not agree?” He shook Tildy by the arm. “Do you not agree, Euthyphro? And is not that which is loved in some state either of becoming or suffering? But what do you know about that, you philistines? See how I weep! Ha-ha-ha!” He laughed the crazed, empty pathetic laugh of the great tragedian. “I shed my tears out of cunning. Lacrimae prosunt. Lacrimis adamanta movebis. Fac madidas videat, si potes, illa genas. Si lacrimae—neque enim veniunt in tempore semper—deficient, uda lumina tange manu. Ha-ha-ha!” In one large gesture he wiped the table clean, sending the bottle and the basket of oranges tumbling to the floor and shattering the glasses. The greasy waiter came and picked up the fruits and shards of glass. Lyubanarov’s heavy head sank onto the table. Just as earlier the girl had nuzzled her head against Tildy’s, he now rolled his back and forth on the besmirched tabletop and repeated: “Quid faciam? Monitis sum minor ipse meis. Quid faciam! Quid faciam …” until his murmuring stopped and he fell asleep.

  When the sergeant returned to ask the girl for another dance, Tildy placed his hand firmly on her arm and looked at the other with such authority that the man automatically clicked his heels together and pulled his shoulders together, just as his face filled with a dark-red rage. Meanwhile the girl withdrew her arm from Tildy’s grasp and rose from the table. “What do you want?” she said, in her ugliest voice. “It’s my profession.”

  She stepped, erect and resolute, up to the sergeant, who put his arm around her. After only dancing a few measures, he said something to her. Then they disappeared through the door to the stairs that led to the rooms on the second floor.

  Tildy found himself driven to a desperate act of rumination. Here people fenced by rules he didn’t know. He waved the waiter over and asked irritably what apart from bad wine there was to drink, and ordered a bottle of cognac. Following the time-honored custom of the officers’ casino, he filled and drained his glass in one motion, several times in a row. With a dull sense of gratification, he felt the alcohol entering his blood and making his limbs heavy; this gave him the illusion that his spirit was being lightened. The delayed reactions of his nerves led him to believe he had gained some perspective. He followed this process with a kind of schadenfreude, a rage directed against himself. Once he had sufficiently numbed the wound within, he set out on his daring feat of thinking.

  Yes, here people fenced according to rules he didn’t know; what’s more, it was clear that no one knew the rules apart from the person called on. Consequently there were no rules. In the end it was a duel in the dark, even if only figuratively—it was Tildy’s misfortune that it was only figurative, because had it been real, he could have stood up to his opponent, even if it meant resorting to the same underhanded tricks: a duel in the dark with all conceivable weapons, tooth and claw. But even this image was false; nothing could convey how helpless he was against feints and thrusts like these. And yet he felt an ungrounded conviction, an inner certainty, that there were certain rules, and that this contest was chivalrous like no other, because it posed the most difficult challenge to his knightliness. He could have made it easy for himself and despised the girl. But he wasn’t capable of despising her. Because he loved her. Not that his pride would have permitted him to love what he secretly despised. But it forbade him to despise what he loved. And he loved her because he could not despise her.

  He tried to put a temporary halt to his thoughts. He was confused by what was coming out; it bordered on wordplay, on the tangled platonic drivel he had just heard from the drunkard Lyubanarov. He, Tildy, had a deep mistrust of wordplay, which came alarmingly close to wittiness—that is to say, it wasn’t pure, wasn’t fair. Wordplay was clever, analytic. He wasn’t used to analyzing. He was principally opposed to anatomizing a matter, because matters pressed for decisions. Dissecting them lessened their true weight. He was no lawyer. It was not his profession to talk things to death, but to face them. Astonishing as it might be, he loved this girl, and it was equally amazing how and why and in what a short time that had happened. Something inside him had called on him to love her, something like an order. But ours is not to reason why: orders are meant to be obeyed without grumbling. Nor did he have any cause to do so. He saw her face. If he closed his eyes, he saw her face before him, the beauty of a young woman, a beauty fashioned not only by the tenderness and delicacy of her features, but also by the grace of a deep-seated connection with the world—here again a raw pain sundered his thoughts, drowning them in a sharp, dark anguish. But even despite that pain, her face emerged unscathed, and her eyes focused on him. Never would he be able to extinguish this grace that was indelibly stamped onto his innermost being, the beguiling charm of this face. Its imprint would cover and erase any other face he might peer into. There were no words to say what lent it this power. It was the reflection of a creature he loved, or rather of that creature’s substance and core. Because even if she were unstable, labile, one moment brimming with kindness, the next inexplicably cruel, even if she didn�
�t know herself and was a plaything of demonic drives—indeed, even if her face itself were merely the mask of some crafty quick-change artist—he knew that it contained a core and a substance fashioned from the same material as his own.

  So it was the essence of the face that made the mask, and not merely its surface. Any discussion about its expression was simply a sham. Everything that Lyubanarov had spoken was nonsense; he was drunk, and didn’t himself believe in what he was saying. Of course there was no way to reach the core of the creature we love that does not pass through the creature. And she places herself between this core and us, and takes us prisoner. Whoever does not wish to suffer as a prisoner must love his prison. Love the forms that hold us captive, the forms that lead us to surrender … Tildy recoiled from the word. He was a hussar, and a hussar does not take surrender lightly. But he realized that he, too, had become ensnared in a game of words. Love the forms that hold us captive—that was an unambiguous statement, let’s forego everything else. So, love the creature that conceals her own substance and core. Love the creatures—all the unstable forms that merely signify the unrelieved torment of the core from which they spring. Did he not even love her ugly, spoiled hands, her barbaric movements, the fuzzy hair on her forearms that bespoke a low origin? It wasn’t that he forgave her faults and flaws because he loved her; it was precisely these faults and flaws that he loved, because they revealed her to him, they gave her away. He didn’t love her despite everything, but simply because she was. He loved what she was and the way she was. Did he therefore also have to love what she called her “profession”? No, rather the manner in which she practiced it. He loved the courage with which she acknowledged it.