An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  “Does she cry much because of him?”

  “Never. She never cries. She is the kindest, happiest, wittiest creature, chirps like a little bird. Only now and then she …”

  “What now and then?”

  “Now and then she locks herself inside. She reads in her books. Her rooms are full of books—books not even scholars can understand. No one understands them but her. She knows every author and every scholar, whatever language they may have written in. She can recite what they wrote word for word. They make her melancholic, and you can knock on her door and rattle the handle but she won’t answer. The orderly keeps having to break down the door to make sure she’s still alive, and then they find her lying on the floor, unconscious, or else she wanders out and speaks in tongues, words of deep meaning, just like the monks at the monastery where pilgrims visit, when they’re in a religious rapture. When she’s in that state she tells people their true names. To me she always says: I love you, for you are marked. And isn’t it true that I was marked by suffering on the day my blessed husband rolled on the ground like an animal attacked by wasps and tried to drink his death from a rifle? We saw it all through the keyhole, my sons and I, we bruised our heads trying to see, all the while wailing and screaming … ”

  “And her husband—Major Tildy?”

  “Oh, he is a true cavalier,” said Widow Morar and opened her eyes wide, transfigured. “He stands before her like an angel dressed in armor and keeps silent. Even when she drums away at him with her fists, he stands there without moving and says nothing. Not until the devil inside her has been bested and she crumples onto the floor and whines. Then he orders what has to be done, in his calm and clear voice. And never a word afterward, never a complaint from his lips. Nothing happened. He speaks to her the way you would speak to a princess, to the Sturdza that she is. He approaches her like the imperial sword-bearer approaches the emperor, he opens doors for her and always lets her through first, he straightens the chair she sits in, and when she speaks to him, he stands at attention as if before his general, even when she’s being playful and joking with him—because she really is like a little bird. He bends over to pick up her book or handkerchief, when she willfully tosses it away, picks up the pearls from her necklace that she has torn because the mood struck her—he bears it all without a word, like a soldier, all you can hear is her little twittering voice and her laughter, not a sound from him, even his spurs jingle quietly—they have thick carpets—until she shuts her ears and locks herself back inside her room.”

  We listen in rapt attention. For a long time, whenever we were left to ourselves, we played out the image she had depicted: the princess and her knight, the angel dressed in armor, the imperial sword-bearer. I was completely at the mercy of my sister, Tanya, and I hated the fact that she always insisted on playing the major.

  What we learned about him on the side came from a different source. I say on the side because neither did our curiosity drive us to learn more about him than we knew, nor was it likely that our image of him could be more complete than it already was, in its unalterably memorable details. But once, when Herr Tarangolian managed to win us over with one of his jokes and unlocked our most secret thoughts, we asked him if he knew Tildy. The prefect answered right away, courteously and willingly, that he was well acquainted with the major and knew him to be a very excellent soldier and a gentleman of the first water, a worthy role model with admirable traits, above all an outstanding horseman; but then he turned to Uncle Sergei, a distant relative who lived in our house as a Russian emigrant, and switched languages, evidently forgetting that we could also understand, and called Tildy a strange saint. From the conversation that followed this casual remark, we were able to make out the following:

  Tildy had been an officer in the Austrian service. Almost nothing was known of his background. He was not from Czernopol, and the Hungarian name suggested other roots than Tescovina. The landed gentry did not recognize him. Apparently he came from one of those noble but thoroughly impoverished families whose only achievement consisted in sacrificing themselves in the service of a banner, and as a result had acquired a certain aloof self-contentedness and a smoldering pride. We could see his ancestors arrayed before us, in miniatures and lockets: haughty, smug women with pious airs, with occasional traces of a former youthful beauty tempered rock-hard by a strict and stringent life, and swarthy men with the puckered look of the brave, whose only passion is to demonstrate their courage, some surprisingly coarse, with round skulls, massive faces, and martial mustaches, others of more noble cut that comes from the knowledge that early in life they will carry out their assignment to die a model death. One of these may have been Tildy’s father.

  And he himself: a childhood in unquestioning obedience; women of almost painfully solemn bearing as the object of the highest respect; perhaps a secret understanding with his mother that was never expressed, a shyly restrained tenderness; and an adolescence in iron discipline, total commitment to duty. But all within a world of splendid style that brooked no skimping: amid the grand waving of the pure flags, across the fresh expanses of the horsemen’s dawn, overrun by a festive swarm of brightly colored uniforms topped by a blaze of glistening helmets.

  And then came the war.

  He was said to have served in an excellent regiment, albeit one which had been subjected to the harshest censure. Evidently, during the war-of-position in Galicia, after the last great cavalry battles had been fought and the war had become a troglodyte affair, an attack couldn’t be carried out because one sector’s officers were conducting a race behind the lines with gentlemen from the opposing regiment of Russian guards. The men were sent to the Isonzo Front. Tildy must have been still young at the time.

  Whether his homeland, like ours, was occupied after the collapse of the empire, and ceded to a new state, was not clear, because no one knew for certain where he came from. In any case, the fact that a former officer of the Dual Monarchy was so quick to accept service in a different army was not seen in the best light. Despite all the presumed reasons that spoke for him—and on close inspection none spoke against him—he could not shake the odium of the renegade.

  In Czernopol that would have normally counted as a sign of quick-witted flexibility and competent life skills, and commanded a certain respect rated far more highly than honor: “You know, we don’t put much stock in such fiction,” was how Herr Tarangolian put it. Strangely, that didn’t apply to Tildy, however. There was something in his bearing that everyone—everyone without exception—found provocative.

  “He has the very best, that is to say the most curt, manners,” said Herr Tarangolian. “He despises polite gestures the way a very rich man holds them in disdain. In doing so he sets a high price—too high, perhaps. But he’s one of those men who are more than willing to bleed to death.”

  Whether he was aware of this general resistance or not, Tildy did not counter it with anything except himself: his impeccable performance of duty, his cool, elegant propriety that was the tersest possible, and his deadly earnest.

  “God knows, it’s not that what he does is too little,” sighed Herr Tarangolian. “On the contrary: it’s too much—too much for Czernopol. But Czernopol is drawing the short end of the stick, if you know what I mean. Let me tell you a story: His people idolize him. Recently, however, one of his men had stayed a few days beyond his leave, and when he came back, he brought his esteemed major a chicken, not as a bribe—heaven forbid—but as a gesture, and in order to mollify him. Still, a chicken is quite a lot for a young farm boy. So what does Tildy do? He assembles the entire company and informs them of the incident. He punishes the man for staying over his leave—not too severely, but not too mildly, either. And he orders that the chicken, which a sergeant was holding next to him on a kind of tray—or was it a cushion for medals—in short, Tildy orders that the chicken be thrown into the regimental kettle. Can you believe it? One chicken in a soup for four thousand soldiers? Even a child knows that the quartermasters s
teal meat by the ton. But in the name of justice: a single chicken! Even his own recruits no longer take him seriously. No, no, nothing good will come of that.”

  Herr Tarangolian spoke with stageworthy pathos.

  “And I don’t mean his career as a soldier, although that, too, is doubtful. His superiors can’t abide him, without exception. They respect him, to be sure, but they don’t trust him. They find him odd, and, to put it frankly, disturbing. Recently someone asked me in all earnestness if he might not be an Englishman working for the secret service. Why does he trim his mustache the way he does? But all joking aside: the man will destroy himself in one way or the other. There’s something Spanish about him. He is a hidalgo. Not a conquistador, no Cortés or Pizarro or Alvarez—he lacks their greed, he doesn’t have enough plebeian blood for that. Nor is he Iñigo de Loyola, although I admit he shares the same rigor and passion for a Madonna embroidered on a flag. A shame to find such traits wasted on a cavalryman, isn’t it? But, then again, would Roland and El Cid be able to conquer anything better than a heavyweight championship? For all we know a stigmatized headwaiter might soon proclaim himself lord of the world! But the hidalgo I mean is the other one, the knight of the sad countenance, Don Quixote. That is Tildy’s character through and through. He is indeed the last knight. He is incapable of taking revenge on his own predicament, like everyone else in Czernopol, by laughing at it. Do you know that people deliberately play pranks on him and place bets on how he will react, and that every time the fellow who chooses the most humorless possibility is the one who wins! He himself supposedly said he knows only two types of response: the witty one and the just one. Yes, you heard right: the witty and the just! My God, what an alternative! … And then, on top of that,” Herr Tarangolian added with faux seriousness, “on top of that, this woman …”

  One day this woman stood in front of us, spoke to us, stroked our hair, kneeling down to pat Tanya—and we failed even to recognize her.

  I believe that happened during the same year, on one of those late-spring days so much like lilac, under the deep mussel-blue of a sky pregnant with rain. We hadn’t seen her coming, because the lance-leaf fence was overgrown, and our garden was hedged by thickets of foliage, like the upholstery of a jewel case, with spikes of blooms that had been blasted by the slow and heavy showers, which tore off the flowers and scattered the petals across the wet leaves and grass. As a result she suddenly materialized, exaggeratedly elegant and at the same time strangely untidy, with large eyes and a disconcertingly fixed gaze. Her razor-sharp aristocratic nose startled us, as if it had simply decided to appear there, and it was out of proportion to the rest of her face, which was smooth and round like a china doll’s. She gave us the kind of smile that comes melting out of someone waking from a happy dream—lost and entranced. And as if she were indeed under a spell, she reached out and ran her hand above our hair, as if she didn’t dare touch it. “Oh you beautiful children,” she said, “you dear, happy children.”

  She hastily began rummaging through her pompadour, and since she evidently couldn’t find what she was looking for, she broke into tears. “I don’t have anything for you,” she said, despairing. “I have nothing to give you, please forgive me. Forgive me …”

  We understood that she’d been looking for sweets—chocolates or bonbons—for us, and we acted stiff and acquiescent—like children practiced in accepting food, to the delight of the adults, like deer in the game preserve.

  But then she suddenly reached for her neck and started groping around, distraught. “Where is my necklace?” she asked, pretending dismay, with a false note in her voice that seemed to pain even her. “My necklace isn’t there. I had put it on. It’s gone. Gone. My necklace is gone.” Her voice had become high and shrill. She looked at us in amazed disbelief, her hand on her throat, all the while repeating: “Gone. My necklace is gone.”

  She closed her eyes for a few seconds, rocking slightly. As the tears came streaming down her cheeks, she knelt down beside Tanya and said, “I wanted to give it to you. I had put it on to bring to you. You believe me, don’t you? Of course you do. You believe me that I wanted to bring you the necklace?”

  “Oh, here you are!” Miss Rappaport’s English words cut into the scene like a clarinet, beckoning with her slightly sour voice.

  The unknown woman sprang up, greeted our governess in the friendliest, most courteous tone, and said she had come to pay a visit. Not a single word or glance more in our direction: she had forgotten us completely.

  Miss Rappaport jerked her piercingly bespectacled face a few times between her and us like an ostrich. Then she raised her hand and silently signaled us to follow her back to the house. At that the other woman gave the most gracious and ladylike hint of a bow, the fingers of her left hand delicately angled, and followed Miss Rappaport with quietly rustling, dainty steps, and her coquettishly dangling pompadour.

  In a flash, Widow Morar was at our side, hissing at us through her gold mouth, and smiling through her closed eyes: “Did you see her? Did she speak to you? Isn’t she like a little bird? They’ll have to fetch a carriage for her …”

  Only then did we realize that this was the woman in the sled, Madame Tildy, the hussar’s wife. What we never would have imagined was her nose: the vulture-like beak of old Paşcanu.

  We didn’t have much time to be amazed, though, because Widow Morar grabbed us by the arm and said, loudly and meanly, in the direction of the gate: “What is she standing there staring at?”

  And then we saw Frau Lyubanarov, leaning against the golden rain tree by the dvornik’s hut, from where she had evidently seen and heard the entire scene.

  “What is she standing there staring at?” Widow Morar repeated, even more loudly.

  “Oh, go get lost, you old washer of corpses!” said Frau Lyubanarov lazily, standing like Danaë under the shower of gold from the tree.

  5 Departure of Miss Rappaport; Fräulein Iliuţ, Herr Alexianu, and Năstase

  I SHOULD have acquainted you earlier with the person I just mentioned. She was the wife of an unhappy man, a certain Dr. Lyubanarov, formerly a lecturer in classical languages at the University of Sofia, who was hopelessly addicted to drink. So as not to wind up on the street along with his wife and children—two girls our age who were our playmates—he had taken on the job of gatekeeper at our house, a position that was quite dispensable and consequently did not require much effort, and which originated solely from the fact that we happened to have a gate with a guardhouse, the one we called the dvornik’s hut. No one thought seriously of assigning Dr. Lyubanarov any real duties; to do so would have meant courting serious disappointment, because he generally slept for most of the day, and made his way to the drinking holes near the train station in the evening, to return home just before dawn, dead drunk, a staggering colossus spewing Greek and Latin quotations along with spittle and the last of whatever rot-gut he was drinking. We once ran into him on his way home like that. His expression was one of heartbreaking inner turmoil.

  Later, someone told us the story of how he turned to the bottle. He came from the humblest origins, received a scholarship for talented students, and graduated with distinction. Full of enthusiasm, he began to teach. His sole passions were his love for his people, the eternally oppressed Gorals, and for classical antiquity. He was dirt poor. His one yearning was to see just once with his own eyes the glory of the temples and palaces, the figures of gods and men from that bright dawn of Europe. With a group of students he saved for years until a trip across Italy finally materialized, taking him as far as Naples. They visited Rome, they saw Herculaneum and Pompeii and Paestum. And there, after a scorching-hot day taking in the endlessly astonishing harmony of the column shafts and their crowning pediments, Professor Lyubanarov got drunk for the first time.

  This didn’t require much: his life had been practically ascetic up to that moment. And, besides, he was intoxicated already: by the beauty, the sunshine, his own happiness … perhaps also by Pompeii, this city
of death so horribly alive, by the ghosts of the former houses full of color and life, and the human castings—because it’s not the people themselves we see there, frozen in the most convincing poses of death, but rather baked and sintered masses of calcium and silica that gradually seeped into the decaying forms, as the liquid metal for a bronze statue replaces the wax melting out of the mold—so perfect, that the jaws still have teeth and the fingers of young women still wear their rings.

  And the people of Naples: Roman faces in the rags of our Americanized civilization; a girl in the lobby of the train station calling out in an inimitably melodious voice: Claudio! … the rickety two-wheeled vegetable carts, which the drivers would leap onto at full speed, laughing and shouting jokes over their shoulder as they steered through the commotion with mystifying skill; the horrible metal hackamore bits that insure the delicate horses are kept rearing up furiously like the steeds of a quadriga …

  They had pulled him out of the tavern where they had stopped. In the courtyard he vomited onto a half caved-in wall. Stars shone overhead, and the fragrance of mold and burning, of spices and swamp, urine and oil and wine and smoke and wind and sea, enveloped him, the desolate jumble of tavern voices and the tender humming of a wistful song and the rush and rustle of the great tranquility under the glassily transparent sky. And here, in front of a remnant of wall soaked with ammonia, between the latrine and the pigsty, he discovered antiquity. And from then on he drank desperately, in a fury of self-destruction.

  We never learned what brought him to Czernopol, or how and when he met his wife. She was more beautiful than I can describe, with a peasant-like freshness in shape and stature and in her coloring, in her pitch-black curly locks and in the resplendence of her skin, colored like honey and pulsing with warmth from the sun and her own blood, and which called to mind the magnificence of a young pastoral deity. She had exceedingly clear, almond-shaped eyes—the goatlike eyes of goddesses—and a pale mouth that peaked up at the corners into a secretive smile, like an archaic head of Hermes. Her hair rested on her short forehead like a permanent wreath, with curls that dangled around her temples, then were pulled back coquettishly to reveal her delicate ears, and finally cascaded across the nape of her neck like the gentle grasp of a man’s hand. And all of this rose out of a majestic pair of shoulders the color of ripe golden corn, out of the splendor of two vivacious breasts, the absolute embodiment of motherliness, and which she displayed with the most beautiful frankness whenever the opportunity arose.