An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Because the reality of Czernopol was the street—those wide roads that are life’s thoroughfares, roads that stretch across the boundless countryside and do not end with the death of the wayfarer. It was thanks to these roads that the city had come into existence, having arisen at one of their intersections as a stowing place for those without a homeland, a collection point for those without a home—pulsing with restlessness, spurred by a consuming desire for a vague beyond, for something further, pervaded with the yeasty ferment of discontent. At the same time it was naked and unadorned in its need, burdened with hardship, with the compassionless severity of those who know life, for whom everything is fleeting, every trouble a mere phantom, and all sympathy is rendered invalid by the knowledge that all pain will pass.

  Unlike in other cities, then, where life proceeds agreeably on the streets by day, and only shows its cruel and desperate side at night, and even then keeps it confined to secret niches and lairs that become visible when its veins are emptied, like rats’ nests in drained sewers—unlike in these other cities, the day in Czernopol bore witness to all kinds of reality. Crass, unembellished life, the midday glare, and the street itself were one and the same in Czernopol: they were inseparable. Everything, from birth to death, took place in the open as if in the palm of a hand. Thus, by day the streets of Czernopol were the site of sheer meanness, brutal selfishness, shameless depravity. People laughed, cried, loved, robbed, and thrashed each other at the markets, coupled behind fences, died in the gutter. Purse-snatchers stole the last few coins off poor beggars; murderers fled from their pursuers; obscenities spouted from the lips of young girls.

  And people loved the day and its brash reality. In Czernopol nothing remained unsaid. Nothing was concealed; nothing allowed itself to be concealed. No pretense was admitted, no keeping-up of appearances, no glossing over, no pretext was valid, no deception went undetected. Everything was left mercilessly to its own devices; nothing relied on anything else, and nothing had acquired a healthy distance. All the devices that help us imagine the dark spaces we inhabit as richer than they are—deception, delusion, embellishment—were banned from the glaring light of day. Foolishness was nothing but foolishness, intoxication was only drunkenness, despair was a door that led nowhere.

  Nevertheless, the faces of the people in Czernopol were by no means banal. Their alertness was magnified to an expression of highest intelligence; it came beaming out of them as a dry, bright zeal—in their fervent, unerring gaze, in their delight of exposing things and reducing them to their proper measure—in other words, in their passion for wit, and it was this passion that gave free rein to all the others. The penchant for bluntness found its full, uninhibited expression. People laughed when a coachman took his whip to a blind man who happened to step in the way of his droshky; they laughed about a Jew who was howling because he’d been cheated out of a few coins; they laughed about a passing drunk bellowing obscene songs, while next to him a dog that had been hit by a vehicle kept spinning around his lame rear end, slobbering with pain and biting himself blindly in the flank. The children of the street laughed with the raw, tinny laugh of meanness; their agile, thieving eyes always on the lookout for new cause, and nothing escaped them, no misunderstanding and no confusion, neither torment nor terror, vice nor crime—nothing that was painful, and certainly nothing grotesque, because that was always close at hand for everyone.

  Evening descended over all of that, bringing freedom and release, like the shade of a soothing hand. As its light dispersed, reality dispersed as well, gently felled: what was rude softened, what was close moved away, what was immediate became mediated and indirect. The dimension that that first star acquired for the world was that of heaven—the insight into our own extreme forlornness. The violet blue of the shadows transformed the anxiety of the lonely into another type of solitude. Those who had never escaped themselves now fell back, and by withdrawing they gained the world in its boundlessness. As the earth gradually turned from the sun, they discovered the other side of the planet, and found a place for themselves in its visibly increasing detachment. A sense of yearning permeated their glances and gestures, followed by a kind of tenderness—the tenderness that can only come from the anguish over what can never be reached or realized, and which therefore tastes so much like sorrow. It burst out in songs sung in a minor key, sought refuge in wondrous stories, shrank into amorous whispering. It made people restless, driving them on a search with no particular object or definite goal—and so the evening promenade was more than idle strolling, it was a ritual, in which the restiveness of the lost souls abated, when the raucous mood of a barnyard wedding mixed with the Maytime Devotion of the Blessed Mother.

  Night in Czernopol was also beautiful, although the moonlight found no cathedrals or palaces it could infuse with reverie and transform into the charnel architecture of exquisite dreams, and only gave a shabby gleam as it hit the stepped tin roofs that rose from the area around the train station and up the steep escarpment by the Volodiak. At the top of the hill its merciless beams fell on the ugly tenements, cutting their banal silhouette out of the horizon, and exposing the battlements of the Metropolitan’s Residence as the fakes they were. Then it lifted the bulbous dome of the synagogue from out of the jumble of gabled and flat-topped boxes, and, a few streets further on, the toy stone towers of the Catholic Herz-Jesu Church and St. Para–chiva, which towered over the synagogue in stark pathos. The moonlight dripped down the firewalls at the Ringplatz without having any poetic effect on their plainness; it collected in a milky puddle on the filthy paved esplanade in front of the Rathaus; it cast the finely etched shadow of the basilica of St. Miron across the mangy, enclosed square of grass; and finally faded away behind the complex of provincial government buildings and the flat temple of the officers’ casino, darkening into the olive tone of tarnished silver in the Volksgarten as it mingled with the foliage that was swaying in the night wind.

  And yet it was as if the vast surrounding countryside had taken a blot of shame compassionately into its lap. The black forests of the Volodiak hills seemed to surge closer, having sent narrow spits and isolated islands into the wasteland of stone, tin, and mortar, each tree fanning out into the night as though by some great accord, a chalice of living darkness rich in mystery. The ring of fields closed more tightly around the town, drowning its bare ugliness in their richness, and the same wind that combed the silver ears of grain far away, carried off the gutter-like stench from the Jewish courtyards, mixing the biting odors of dishwater, rotten fish, and rancid sunflower oil, of garlic, mare’s urine, and cat feces with the aroma of earth, hay, and fir resin. Puddles that by day were as brown and foamy as beer glistened like ponds, like pieces of heaven accepted into the earth, and the enormous stillness of the star-studded night lay over Czernopol—punctuated by crickets, shrouded by the sound of frogs, as soothing as a mother’s lullaby, unbroken except for the occasional clatter of hooves of a droshky hack driven to exhaustion, or by the distant, forlorn howl of moonstruck dogs, baying in dismal futility.

  At times like that mothers would occasionally turn to their unruly children, if they refused to go to sleep, and frighten them into silence by raising their fingers to their lips and saying: “Shhh! You hear those hooves rattling? That’s old Paşcanu—and he’ll come and get you if you don’t stop crying.”

  Because at night was when Tamara Tildy’s father used to set out in his old-fashioned, heavy coach, pulled by two colossal horses, to visit the mausoleum of his two wives in the little woods of Horecea.

  Only little is known about the early history of the city of Czernopol. A half-day’s march north, on one of the Volodiak hills, lay the ruins of an old watchtower, known as the “Zitzena Castle.” According to local folklore, the name came from when the Turks destroyed the fortress. A child had been stolen and placed in the forest: it was hungry and cried for its mother’s breast: “Zitze! Zitze!” In her desperate search the mother is said to have heard her child, and as she pressed forward,
offering the source of nourishment, she kept calling out “Na! Na!”—which in Tescovina means, more or less, “Here you go, have at it!”—but she never found her little darling.

  The legend proves little except the unreliability of folklore as a source for historical research. And as interesting as it may be to know which voivode had the watchtower erected, whether the Poles, the Hungarians, or the Turks themselves—what is certain is that the city of Czernopol was no more than a few hundred years old, and probably entered European consciousness far sooner owing to its fondness for anecdotes than on account of any historical significance.

  The Tescovina Germans enjoyed taking group hikes to the ruins of Zitzena for their solstice celebrations and similar folkloric occasions. The Turnvater Jahn Athletic Club, the German Men’s Chorus, and the German Women’s Chorus would set out with their flags and beer wagons, merrily singing their way through the Ruthenian suburb at Kalitschankabach, despite the fact they always encountered a few heroes of the Romanian Mircea Doboş sports association or the Junimea fraternity who saw fit to spoil their innocent joy, and which usually led to lusty fistfights. The representative of the German minority, a certain Professor Dr. Hodelein, whose name with its unfortunate overtones the nationalistic circle around Professor Feuer jokingly romanized as “Testiculescu” because of his alacrity in accommodating the new sovereigns, would then have occasion to appear before Herr Tarangolian and submit a formal complaint.

  These fights usually occurred near a pub, known to be the place where Săndrel Paşcanu first appeared among men. Widow Morar told the story best: how the pub maid had gone to the well and come back screaming, because evidently a bear or, even worse, a forest spirit known as a djuglan was bending over the wooden bucket to drink from it; how a few brave men had gone out, and how they, too, came back running into the house, afraid, because the giant had turned around as they approached, and he had been without a face—a black head without mouth or eyes, only a white beak jutting out. Then the presumed djuglan had raised its hands, parting its long black hair, which had fallen over his face while drinking, shoving the two halves aside like curtains, revealing a mouth after all, and a pair of glowing black, but actually gentle, eyes, and what they had thought was a beak was really his nose. They invited him to eat, and he stayed. He was young and strong as a bear and useful around the pub. But one day he up and left, to join the soldiers fighting the Turks, in the last of those wars, when the Ottomans were beaten and lost the fortress at Plevna and wound up leaving the country, or perhaps he had joined the robbers; in any case, when he returned he was a rich man and had married a princess.

  If you drew a straight line from that pub across the city of Czernopol—something like the flight of a wild pigeon—directly on the other side of town you would come to a small oak forest called Horecea, where Paşcanu had built a mausoleum for his two wives, modeled after the Taj Mahal. The house where Paşcanu lived lay almost exactly on this line as well.

  Later, once we had finally outgrown full-time supervision, and were occasionally able to roam through the city, we often visited this house, to see if we might catch a glimpse of something behind the windows or in the yard, some particular feature of the environment where some of the most exciting events of our childhood had taken place. It was on a crooked old little street, in the neighborhood around the so-called Turkish fountain—we had no way of knowing whether it really dated from the time of the Turkish occupation or not; things in Czernopol rapidly acquired the patina of great age. The buildings of that neighborhood had gabled fronts that faced the street, in the old-fashioned way, with a wing off to the side for stalls, just like a farmhouse. The large gates, which usually had an entrance door cut in, were made of mighty planks and covered with wood-shingle roofs. They were covered with layers of paper an inch thick: movie posters, advertisements for Passover matzoh, death announcements, slates of candidates of various parties, and wanted posters—all scribbled over with obscenities. The street descended with the escarpment; powerful streams of sewage flowed down the gutters of the bumpy cobblestone, which was only visible during the spring thaw and was otherwise covered with coarse, ankle-deep mud or else floury dust. The back boundaries of the yards ran alongside a beautiful old Jewish cemetery where birch trees shaded the slanting gravestones. We were told that most of the surrounding buildings—and especially the former stables that had been remodeled for human habitation but were in great disrepair—housed the rooms used by the neighborhood streetwalkers. Large feral cats lurked in every corner, coupling every night with loud passion, multiplying without restraint. A single lantern, completely at the mercy of the street urchins and their throwing-stones, cast a dreary light lengthwise down the ridge of the street, which curved off into the thick darkness on either side. Looking the other way you could see the five onion domes of St. Parachiva towering over the rooftops, a ridiculously atrocious construction of brightly glazed brickwork.

  Paşcanu’s house was larger and more solid than the ones surrounding it, and furnished with slate tiles rather than the usual tin. An ancient acacia stood in the courtyard, practically devoid of leaves. In no way did this building resemble how we imagined it ought to look—as the town house of the richest man in the province and the husband of a Princess Sturdza. The front wall had lost all its stucco except for bits around the first window, and the bare bricks gave a desolate impression indeed. In the Austrian times the gatehouse had contained a kiosk that sold tobacco, stamps, and salt from the state monopoly; the wooden shutters still bore the weathered remains of the once black-and-gold paint, in slanting stripes like on a sentry’s hut. In the early 1880s this house may very well have seemed the epitome of patrician dignity and well-established tradition, at least to an adventuresome shepherd boy who had only recently emerged from the forests; the black-and-gold-striped kiosk in particular must have made an impression on him, as an institution of the state, so to speak. Incidentally, Princess Sturdza never lived there, though it was rumored that a famous Titian, a painting worth millions, which Săndrel Paşcanu had bought for her, was still hanging in the house.

  Because by the time Paşcanu married the Princess Sturdza, he already owned several other houses, in the city as well as in the country, including a hunting lodge in his huge forests, where princes of royal blood had been his guests. But even at the height of his grandeur he lived in the house by the old Turkish fountain. He clung with great tenacity to that first house, which he had acquired soon after his return from the siege of Plevna, paying for it with shiny Turkish gold coins—coins of shadowy provenance, from uncovered treasure perhaps, or else from a robbery—the rumors about it abounded. And, indeed, the former owner of the house was found a little later, murdered and robbed. And while things like that were not exactly rare in Czernopol, and there was certainly never a shortage of suspects, the crime was popularly attributed to the young new arrival, though nothing could ever be proven against him.

  In any event: he stayed, and multiplied his wealth—whatever its origin—by a fantastic degree. No one knew for sure exactly what business dealings he pursued in his early days—and, to some extent, in later life as well—and on that subject the rumor mill was equally active. The fact is that he could never write more than his name. In later years he would have the paper read to him by his coachman, a scopit, or member of a Russian religious sect that required men to undergo castration after producing two children in marriage. Săndrel Paşcanu had his business partners read his contracts out loud and immediately memorized the wording down to the tiniest detail.

  His main business was lumber. The egregious purchase of entire forests, scandalous con acts, bribes, and misappropriations filled entire annals, from which Herr Tarangolian was able to recite the most amusing entries. Because anything Săndrel Paşcanu undertook had the character of a coup—and often of a caper as well. And for the longest time he enjoyed a fabulous success. Even one of his middlemen came into a sizable—and, as it turned out, more stable—fortune, and in 1916 was r
aised to the landed Austrian gentry: Baronet Hirsh Leib von Merores—people later spoke of the family’s Spanish heritage.

  The stories about his two wives, however, were far more exciting and eerily romantic: the legitimate spouse, the born Princess Sturdza, and his mistress, the beautiful peasant girl Ioana Ciornei. He had lived with both at once, and rumor had it that they died at the same time—that is to say, he killed them, or they killed each other. The motive was said to be a fabulous diamond, a single stone of unusual size and unique cut: Săndrel Paşcanu was said to have presented it to the princess the morning after their wedding night, and later to have taken it away to give to Ciornei on a similar, though less legitimate, occasion. Supposedly the two women, whom he forced to live in the same house, battled each other fiercely, and at the center of their conflict was the stone, which became a kind of a symbol, a fetish for conjuring the love of Săndrel Paşcanu.

  People said that they conducted their feud with the strangest weapons. For instance, Ioana Ciornei couldn’t withstand the princess’s gaze and always wore a veil whenever the latter was present, so that Princess Sturdza would lie in wait, ready to reveal her eyes and force Ciornei to her knees and make her give up the stone. Meanwhile, the princess had a very delicate sense of hearing, and couldn’t bear her rival’s voice: so once the princess had recovered the diamond through the power of her princely gaze, Ciornei would sing peasant songs day in and day out, both happy and sad, until the princess was driven to the point of insanity and would hurl the stone at her rival’s feet. In the end Paşcanu is said to have killed them both, or else they killed themselves, their hands so firmly locked onto the diamond that they had to be buried in one coffin.