An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Still, the new experiences were not entirely without benefit for us. Because even if it was in many ways risky for us, at our age, to be made witnesses to the kind of dialogue that transpires behind a conversation—and what was behind Herr Alexianu’s words was clearly an act of rape—we were also repeatedly able to store away treasures within the cave of childhood that immensely enriched our imagination. The sayings we overheard, the whimsical sentences, the amazing word formations all burst into glowing colors when touched by the magical light of association, something well beyond the logic that Miss Rappaport had insisted on with her determined patience. It was like a star dropping from the sky if one of my siblings actually used in speech one of the words that had so excited us—for instance, when Tanya spoke of a leap of great capacity—and if we were able to trace it back, not to the gymnastic exercises which Herr Alexianu had also described as a kind of capacity, but to a name—in this case that of a certain Fräulein Kapralik. Of course we had never laid eyes on her, but people said she gave Italian lessons. In any event, beyond our associations with capers and capricious—expressions our father liked to use in reference to us—her name called to mind a jaunty Capricorn. A similar wealth of associations opened up when a chance overlap in pronunciation created the miracle of fused meanings; for instance, when we heard the newly experienced word ekstase—ecstasy—in the name Năstase, which right away seemed to capture this young man’s tango-like essence.

  For it was mostly names that provided our education with its richest nourishment, by lending essence to whatever ideas they were connected to, and thereby equipping various concepts with content. Our world was constructed from the names of people, landscapes, places, and buildings, and the words that surrounded them, and just as Herr Alexianu, following his grand master Năstase, had claimed, images were at the root of meaning and life. Nor were we ready for any degree of abstraction apart from thinking in images—which is what makes childhood expression so poetic—thus Tanya, inspired by Herr Alex–ianu’s lecture to speak in aphorisms, said: “The world is a door, and I am the keyhole.”

  Encountering such images, we felt like the prince in the fairy tale who eats a special herb or a bit of snake and suddenly understands the language of animals—in our case, we felt we understood an abundance of references to the most sublime things. It was as if we ourselves had thought up such splendor and carried its truth within us: we casually appropriated it and forgot where it came from. This happened very differently from the way we learned abstract expressions from Herr Alexianu and, later, from a man named Adamowski, who was an editor: the enormous effort and strain it took to achieve a precision so hyper-sharp it seemed brittle and therefore ambiguous was absolute torture for us. That manner of retaining sentences and entire conversations made us uneasy; we thought of mistletoe lodging itself onto the branch where a desperate bird had been scraping its beak, and where it continued its parasitic existence, the way these expressions stayed in our memory against our will, a tangle of tendrils that bears no fruit but still contributes a certain ornamental charm, just like the filigreed balls of leaves growing in the treetops of our garden.

  “Is your friend Năstase so busy being loved that he doesn’t have time to write?” asked Fräulein Iliuţ quietly.

  “No,” said Herr Alexianu firmly. “He rejects the idea of creating a work. If artistic creation still had some value today, he would set about producing one. But his opinion is that today’s consumer of culture is indifferent to the work. The only thing that interests him is the artist—as a particular way of managing one’s existence. What prompted X to write this poem, or Y to paint that picture, and how is it that Z came to compose this sonata? are the commonplace questions. And the answers are equally shallow: It was because of this or that painful experience! All experiences are painful, according to Năstase. By giving artistic expression to their suffering, X, Y, and Z are playing a dishonest trick on their audience, who are inclined to view these works as acts of redemption. ‘I will not publicly nail myself to the cross of my suffering,’ says Năstase. ‘I am not here to tend to your average bourgeois citizen before he goes to bed and after he consumes a great amount of pork and beer following a whole day of petty pleasures by providing him the liberating feeling that someone is dying for him over and over … only to be resurrected in glory on top of that. I see through the swindle of this kind of crucifixion. Works of art are the blood of martyrs—the kind of martyrs who are only too happy to spray their blood around and have no illusions what they think of the whole thing.’”

  Fräulein Iliuţ looked up at him, frightened, and then over to us, as if to suggest that not everything could be safely said in front of children.

  We were to see this fabled Herr Năstase with our own eyes, although not until long after everything had already played out; he was already wearing the mark of Tildy’s bullet—exactly like the mark of a Brahmin—on his forehead, just above his nose. For some time he was on everyone’s tongue like a popular song, and not at all as the fiery genius Herr Alexianu preferred to see in him, but rather as one of the craftiest pranksters in Czernopol. He left the city soon afterward to marry the daughter of a factory owner in the country. Madame Aritonovich, whose educational institute we attended for a short time, and with whom we remained in friendly contact, sent him off with a dry kind of epitaph: “I wouldn’t have even received this man in my bed, let alone in my salon.”

  I can no longer say with any certainty when and where we saw him. It must have been on the street, since I can’t imagine where else. And it must have been one of those highly charged moments, when his name, which we had heard so often and which for so long had led its own existence inside us, suddenly coincided with a genuine person—a magical act that invariably also breaks the spell.

  He was a tall young man with lanky joints, quite elegantly dressed, and very pale. His conspicuously high forehead showed a strong backward sweep. His cheeks and chin were dotted with reddish pimples. “There are skin impurities,” he used to say, “that can be traced to a particularly delicate epidermis. My soul is covered with pimples.” His eyes were beautiful, as were his hands and his hair, which formed a blaze of black around his forehead and temples.

  Incidentally it turned out that he had for a very long time been a special protégé of Herr Tarangolian, who appreciated his sense of humor and his witty mind—and this was interpreted as further proof of some of the prefect’s completely unreliable traits.

  6 Report on Colonel Turturiuk’s Ball

  THE EVENTS that would provide such ample nourishment for the laughter of Czernopol were unleashed by a private ball hosted by the commander of the regiment in which Tildy served, a certain Colonel Turturiuk, in celebration of his birthday, which also marked forty-five years of service. The whole neighborhood took great interest in the preparations for this festivity as well as the celebrations that preceded it. Because like most of the higher officers, Turturiuk lived in our neighborhood, on a street named “Aviator Gavril.”

  This pretty residential street derived its name from a hapless young pilot who was attempting to perform a loop when his plane crashed, killing him on the spot. A small monument of crossed propeller blades marked the place where his plane had hit and shattered, and the Czernopol branch of the national student fraternity Junimea had made vociferous demands that, next to the plaque honoring the sixteen flyers who had died under similar circumstances, there should also be a plaque of shame listing the names of the commissioners who had purchased defective and obsolete material abroad and sold it at considerable profit to the nascent air force. Naturally their demand was never met: the whole matter was undoubtedly just one of the rumors that surfaced in Czernopol at every opportunity and which persisted more stubbornly than any presentation of demonstrable fact, even though no one could cite a specific source.

  The little monument with the real propellers always held a powerful attraction for us. We constantly arranged to have Miss Rappaport walk us past it, and as a result w
e knew that part of the neighborhood and were able to imagine the festive goings-on that had caused such excitement in our servants’ quarters.

  The colonel’s special day began with a processional trumpet serenade early in the morning, followed by a parade at the barracks grounds, a grand ceremony of congratulations, followed by a banquet that the city fathers and provincial delegates attended, and then there were untold other honors. The newspapers published his picture and reported on his brave and simple soldierly life. That evening the Mircea Doboş sports club—of which he was honorary president—conducted a torchlight parade, in which practically the entire national fraternity participated. All this extravagance served only to make the colonel extremely uneasy.

  Turturiuk exemplified a type of soldier that even then was obsolete. He was just as famous for his coarseness and gruff good-naturedness as for his thick-headedness, which was extraordinary even by the standards of the cavalry—a bowlegged peasant whose mouth was the bravest thing about him. He kept his massive backside straight as a board, with his two overly long arms lunging forward; he had an enormous potbelly and an apoplectically red head of stubble, as well as a mustache that stuck out like a pair of buffalo horns. The elegant hussar uniform refused to fit him; it would burst at the seams at every one of his impetuous moves, and the gold-braided collar cut into his bull neck so much that it was unclear whether the purplish tint of his skull was really due to his temperament or perhaps to strangulation. He would unbutton it at the first opportunity, revealing the gray wool of his chest, which he would then scratch with his fingers to produce an audible rasping. With his saber dragging between his bowlegs, wearing neither cap nor gloves, which he constantly took off and immediately mislaid, only to demand in his smoke-ridden drill-sergeant’s roar that they be found immediately, he looked like one of the Cossacks in Repin’s famous picture. But he also had something of Balzac in his house dress with his fat neck, and indeed, his rough manner concealed a tender nature in need of love.

  At an advanced age he had decided to marry a lady who, though she lived in the capital, came from a highly unsophisticated background—a step which made him quite sympathetic but was hardly beneficial to his career in an army that had to catch up in matters of prestige, as well as everything else.

  The time of Repin’s Cossacks, too, was nearing its end. In short, Colonel Turturiuk was standing on shaky legs in more than one sense, and he feared, not without reason, that the only reason for all the fuss was so that he could be sent off all the more quietly into retirement afterward.

  As usual in Czernopol, this was a public secret, openly circulated by all and everyone. Of course the servants knew every detail of what was being provided, and how and where Madame Turturiuk had obtained the fancy food for the enormous cold buffet, and where the colonel had procured the wine and liquor—and they debated fiercely among themselves as to whether it was proper to borrow a neighbor’s bathtub to keep the suckling pig on ice. Similarly, Herr Tarangolian would sit in people’s living rooms and go over the list of invitees with malicious thoroughness, never stinting in his highly amusing explanations as to why each individual had been invited. The ball was staged on a scale that would give the city something to talk about for weeks and in the end did the colonel more harm than good by setting off a public guessing game concerning the source of funding.

  As an active member of the national student fraternity Junimea as well as the Mircea Doboş sport club, Herr Alexianu had been among the invited, and, incidentally, this was the only known occasion when he made use of the socks that had been set out for him. He stayed through the entire affair from the very first minute to the very last, and didn’t show up at home until two days later, whereupon with head still throbbing he managed a hasty hour or two of lessons before repairing to Fräulein Iliuţ’s sewing room, where he delivered a detailed account of the evening.

  In this way we learned more about the events that had already been rumored through the house and which had sparked our curiosity all the more because any questions were dismissed with a sentence or two.

  Nor could Herr Alexianu resist whetting our curiosity to the point of torture; without paying the slightest attention to us, he turned to Fräulein Iliuţ and gave a colorful description of the ball, from the arrival of the guests to the high point of the evening, which, according to him, occurred after the military band—which played smartly enough, if a bit too briskly—was replaced by a group of Gypsies led by Gyorgyovich Ianku, who was quite famous in Czernopol at the time, and the more stilted members of the company had left. Only then, according to Herr Alexianu—in other words, only once the younger guests had won the upper hand and were able set the tone—did the fraternal and familiar atmosphere come to life such as the colonel had had in mind from the beginning. The older company lingered in the rooms on the ground floor, with the still-impressive remnants of the cold buffet. In the meantime the younger and more enterprising guests moved upstairs, where they could go on dancing, if they so desired, or spread out comfortably on the sofas to listen to the Gypsy violins in the muted light of the stained-glass lamps.

  Perhaps it was on account of his headache that Herr Alexianu’s report failed to show off his usual stolid gymnastic determination, and was instead tinged with something brooding, unresolved, and even agonizing. For us, however, his depiction was so powerful we never forgot it. Summoning the atmosphere of those advanced hours, when the festive lights shifted into a mystical glow, he managed to conjure the night as it rushed along, with all its tender and awkward moments stirring amid the commotion, how the surfeit of light and color blended into a golden undulating fog in the blinded eyes of the partygoers, occasionally pierced by the musical rhythms slipping in and out of perception—when the overwrought and sensitized nerves take up a life of their own within the twirling bodies, a life that proceeds like a strange and deep conversation on a skittering vehicle, remote and yet unmistakably clear, when finally, as Herr Alexianu quoted Năstase, “man in his most advanced state returns to his cave, where he transforms the horrors of the world into religion”—in other words, when the hour of drunken melancholy sets in, in which loneliness, the inner cage from which there is no escape, “turns into desire and torment and consolation …”

  Herr Alexianu even allowed himself to be carried away enough to describe the Gypsy fiddlers, “whose music weeps even when it’s joyful.” To relieve his headache, Fräulein Iliuţ had persuaded him to place a moist cloth on his forehead, so that his fanatical gymnast’s eyes stared out like the feverish gaze of a wounded soldier in the field hospital.

  During this phase of the festivities, he went on, Major Tildy could be seen examining a picture hanging between two tapestries, with his uniquely unmoved and arrogantly expressionless manner—what might be called his “English” face—while Năstase and his friends were sitting with a few ladies on the sofas. The picture in question was the kind of enlarged photograph they sell at fairs, with an artificial background; it showed a peasant couple in traditional dress in front of a well, framed in unfinished birch twigs that overlapped at the four corners.

  People were dancing in the next room. Gyorgyovich Ianku’s curly black head was visible through the open double doors, snuggled against his polished, chestnut-colored violin, rocking back and forth, utterly abandoned to the rhythmic swaying of a tango. The cimbalom player, who had a bean-sized purple-brown growth hanging from his lower lip, watched the tender intertwining of the dancing couples with olive eyes sticky with melancholy as his felted mallets raced over the strings, hammering out bewilderingly fast cascades of melody. Everyone had yielded to the magic of the very popular tango, and joined in on the refrain—“when the streetlights start to glow / and the evening shadows fall”—and consequently Tildy’s aloof manner, the unseemly attention he was devoting to the family picture, seemed conspicuous and somewhat offensive.

  Colonel Turturiuk, a supremely cordial host who constantly encouraged his guests to eat and drink by setting an excellent exa
mple, himself noticed Tildy’s rigid and much too prolonged examination of the picture. With the tip of a napkin stuck in the opening of his full-dress uniform tunic, long since comfortably unbuttoned, carrying a full glass in his left hand and swinging a partially gnawed turkey leg in his right, he approached Tildy and addressed him, as Herr Alexianu reported, with a moving mix of good-natured annoyance and gruff reconciliation—“that kindness of character,” according to Herr Alexianu, “which blithely and directly dismantles the barriers of mendacious convention that serve to divide people, which is proof that our nation is truly still a child, and an expression of its admirably unspoiled character.”

  I will recapitulate the small scene as related by Herr Alexianu, eyes fixed, the damp cloth clinging to his forehead, his face showing an occasional twitch of pain.

  Colonel Turturiuk (approaching Tildy, raising the turkey leg above his shoulder to point at the picture): “So, you’re getting a close look, eh, Tildy? Getting a good look, Niculaie, my son. But do you know what you’re looking at? No, you don’t. You don’t know who those two people are up there. Shall I tell you? Do I, your colonel—do I, Mitică Turturiuk, dare tell you who they are?”

  Tildy collected himself, very correctly and properly, in his unique, provocatively expressionless manner—his “English” face—displaying a nonchalant polish that according to Herr Alexianu would have been considered ironic coming from anyone else, but from Tildy, who was known for being incapable of irony, could only be taken as an attitude of supreme arrogance. Meanwhile the colonel continued, raising his voice: