An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  “Fabulous, Adamchik,” said Theophila. “Ready for print. Amazingly clever. You’re outdoing yourself lately.”

  Disgust filled me with a restless despair. I was now looking openly at Aunt Paulette, no longer pretending that I was reading my book, and I knew at once that she was lost. I understood that what drew her here was a similar despair, although hers was far deeper and more relentless. Her self-contempt formed a bond of kinship with these people. The terrible act of exposure contained in Herr Adamowski’s words must have transformed this contempt into lust. I recalled one of Herr Tarangolian’s lines: “Because if you live in a world so full of disdain and contempt, armed with nothing but your own scorned existence …” and a terrible pronouncement of the smirking Kunzelmann: “Humor is when people laugh in spite of everything …”

  At that moment the doorbell rang, and Herr Adamowski got up, saying, “Aha, she decided to come after all …” and rocked out of the room to open the door for a new guest.

  It was Tamara Tildy.

  She entered with a shy, apologetic smile, nodded to all present, and said, when I was introduced to her, “How is your sister?” She smiled as she explained: “I once wanted to give his little sister my necklace. If I had only done so—but I had mislaid it somewhere, back then. Now I no longer have it.”

  Fellner squirmed in his seat, and Kopetzki choked again and coughed prolifically. Aunt Paulette didn’t move, and Theophila in the taffeta dress was also frozen in a mix of hostile defensiveness and gruesome curiosity that was evident in her hard eyes.

  Tamara Tildy sat down in a chair that Herr Adamowski had wedged into the circle after freeing it from a load of magazines. Fellner came to his aid, brushing off the dust that had collected there with his handkerchief.

  Madame Tildy smiled with strained grace, a little painfully, to each guest, one by one, and as she did so her head rocked slowly and slackly to the side, as if she had just woken up from a deep slumber full of happy dreams—a recuperative sleep following a long, strength-sapping illness. She was dressed in the trappings of a bygone elegance, faded and exceptionally feminine, with an abundance of silk scarves as delicate as veils, now frayed and torn. Her silver brocade jacket was now tarnished to a shade of black that hardly matched the hour, much less her delicate woolen dress, which was light-colored and summery. She was carrying a gold mesh purse, clutching it somewhat frantically, as if she were afraid someone might take it from her; its long chain was forever getting caught in the fringes, corners, folds, and bulges of her overburdened attire.

  “It’s nice that you could make it after all, my dear,” said Herr Adamowski, staggering around to set a glass of liqueur in front of her. No one seemed astounded at the embarrassing way he addressed her.

  “Yes, my friend, I have come to you,” said Madame Tildy gently. “You know that. I always come to you, day after day …” Below her sharp hooked nose, her doll-like mouth expressed a tender irony.

  “Here, I have a present for you,” said Herr Adamowski, placing a delicate, high-stemmed glass of rare shape on the table in front of her.

  “A Murano glass,” said Tamara Tildy in a cheery voice that was agonizingly distant. “From Venice … I’ll put it in my room, in the middle of the floor. It will be very beautiful there, all alone in its beauty.”

  She stared at it for a while, and no one said a word.

  “It will be very beautiful there,” she repeated. “All alone …” She reached for it and squeezed it to splinters in her hand.

  “Oh, I’ve cut myself,” she said, and looked at her hand, which was dripping blood.

  “I’ll bandage your hand,” said Herr Adamowski. He tottered to a chest covered with magazines, and fished a little bottle of tincture of iodine and some bandages out of a drawer. The general silence was so horrible it hurt. It made me hate everyone in the room, including Aunt Paulette.

  “This will burn a little,” said Herr Adamowski, as he first blotted the blood with some cotton wool and then pressed another piece that had been dipped in the iodine against her fingers. He exuded a fatherly, if also awkwardly transparent, authority.

  Once he had cleared the shards of glass off the table, she said: “You can do magic. Why don’t you make it whole again?”

  “I’m not allowed to perform magic in the presence of Fräulein Paulette,” he said, with a toothy smile that was meant to be charming.

  “But if I want you to …” said Tamara Tildy, looking at my aunt. Aunt Paulette met her stare with a similar coolness and indolent calm.

  “Yes, yes, I know …” said Madame Tildy, lost. She got up. “I’ll be going again.”

  “But why? You just got here,” said Herr Adamowski.

  “I have something to do. Something important. Something very important.” She seemed very anxious. “I had forgotten about it when I came. I have to … My dress is full of blood. I have to change.” She left the room without saying goodbye. Herr Adamowski followed her out. We heard him stamping as he walked her to the door.

  “Well, Herr Kavalier, how about another little glass of Cointreau?” he asked me when he came back, and brought me the glass that Madame Tildy had left untouched. “Not a drop of this noble drink should go wasted.”

  The three men, who had been sitting there, dumb as blocks, laughed once again. Herr Adamowski returned to his seat and launched into a long anecdote of excruciating wit that began with the words: “By the way, do you know the story of the two Russians who go to their priest …” Like all bad mimics he grossly exaggerated the Russian accent, going from the highest head note to the deepest bass, and back up to a high-pitched squeal, going so far as to say “saltpyotr” for “saltpeter”—which elicited a new burst of applause. I was relieved when Aunt Paulette was finally ready to go.

  We spoke even less to each other on the way home than we had on the way to Herr Adamowski’s. We were just crossing the street between the officers’ casino and the entrance to the Volksgarten when a caravan of vehicles drove up that we had to let pass. There were several families of Galician Jews, who were coming to town in small horse-drawn carts piled with their meager possessions. Their melancholy dark eyes looked on us as strangers.

  At home, my mother said: “My heavens, the boy is completely pale. Aren’t you feeling well?”

  I said I was fine, although I really felt awful. Tanya steered clear of me and avoided being alone with me for the next several days.

  As a result it wasn’t until much later that I learned about Tanya’s own visit to Herr Adamowski’s:

  During the night, she hadn’t been able to sleep. She was so restless and upset about her clumsy dancing that she was crying. Finally she got up to go to Mama. As she passed Aunt Paulette’s room she heard our father’s voice, very worked-up: “If you go to his place one more time there’s going to be hell to pay. Believe me, I’m not joking. This time I’m serious.”

  Tanya had fled back to our children’s room. In keeping with her romantic nature she began to hatch a plan for getting back at Aunt Paulette for hitting her—the revenge of the proud: magnanimity.

  She was so animated that the next morning she seemed to “melt” into the ballet music. She never realized how beautifully she danced that day. But from then on she danced with the same dedication, until the dancing came to a sudden end.

  That afternoon she had lurked about, hoping that Aunt Paulette would go to Herr Adamowski despite all threats—Tanya had no doubt as to whom she wasn’t supposed to visit again. And Aunt Paulette did go.

  Tanya kept an eye on our father. When he left the house a little later, she went to warn Aunt Paulette. She had planned everything carefully, going so far as to find out where Adamowski lived. She had taken money out of her savings box to pay for a cab—much too little, as she later told me, it would have never been enough. But she couldn’t find one. So she ran, very afraid lest our father should get there first. By the time she reached Herr Adamowski’s she had half fainted. God knows in what situation she expected to find Au
nt Paulette there. In any case, not in the company of Messrs. Fellner, Leutgeb, and Kopetzki, and Theophila in the brown taffeta dress. Utterly taken aback, they let her in; naturally she didn’t explain why she had come. It wasn’t until the general astonished merriment had subsided that she was able to tell Aunt Paulette in a few awkward sentences what had driven her there. Aunt Paulette stared at her a while with cold attention, then tilted her head back and laughed out loud.

  Nevertheless, she was considerate enough not to tell the others what she found so funny. Tanya was deposited in a corner with some books and a glass of Cointreau, just as I would be later on, until Aunt Paulette decided to leave.

  They met our father on the corner of the street, where he was standing and waiting. He was very dismayed to see Tanya together with Aunt Paulette. But he said nothing about it. Aunt Paulette shot him a mocking glance and said, casually, “I took Tanya along to visit my friends. She was an excellent guard of honor.”

  They went back without a word, along the way that Tanya had run in great fear, alone for the first time in her life. Later she told me that she had felt a deep sympathy for our father, a practically excruciating love, almost more than she had ever felt before.

  She also knew then that Aunt Paulette was his lover. I wasn’t to find out until later. And then I would also learn the bitter truth that for all those years we had been living off of her inheritance: hers was the only one, of all our mother’s sisters’, that had remained intact.

  Tanya later smiled at her childish adventure, which had had none of the expected drama. But she was never able to recall running to Herr Adamowski’s apartment with complete calm. She told me that the worst thing was how artificial her emotions had seemed to her—because all her fears were riddled with doubt. She didn’t know for sure if our father’s threat had really been meant in earnest, if Aunt Paulette even needed to be warned—she even doubted the reality of her immediate fear that she would be missed at home; or that they’d look for her and find her before she made it to Herr Adamowski’s; or that the policeman who saw her running might mistake her for a thief and chase her. Until then she had strolled through life smiling, as if through a garden, and it wasn’t the discovery that the garden also contained terrors that erased the smile from her face—every terror had only made it seem more wondrous—but rather the discovery that the colors of all its flowers, from the tender, gently gleaming ones to the ones that glowed with dark mystery or the terribly garish ones, seemed to have acquired a false sheen, and all because of some mysterious fault of her own. It was the same thing, she said, when she saw that the roses surrounding the Madonna in the Herz-Jesu Church were made of dusty, faded crepe paper: then, too, she had cried, because she knew that she was only acting her passion, and that in reality she had lost her faith long before. In Herr Tarangolian’s words, her existence had become literary.

  The only thing that had remained real was her deep, sympathetic love for our father on the way back. The two of them had to wait for one of the caravans of wandering Jews to pass, just like the one Aunt Paulette and I would meet a few days later. And they, too, felt oppressed by the stares of unfamiliar eyes. Tanya noticed that our father avoided meeting their eyes, and that his doing so made him angry and irritated. She realized that he was avoiding contact because he didn’t want to give up an animosity of his own making. And in this way she recognized how people create enemies out of their own despair: our father’s pride was clinging to what he could despise so that he would not despise himself, and his anger was setting the stage for his hate, and insuring that these people were worthy of his detestation.

  Tanya had taken our father’s hand and held it tight until they were at home, “bleeding in contempt for my own generosity” she said.

  17 Many Eyes: A Sports Fest in Czernopol

  LONG AFTER we had left Czernopol, whenever we thought about the Jews in those surroundings, what always came to mind, from all the myriad faces and figures, was the otherness of that gaze. The Jews were many eyes. We told ourselves that for them we were probably also many eyes. Because nothing gives a more painful demonstration of how far apart we humans truly are than eyes peering out at us from the mask of a different race.

  Their gaze hits us like that of a prisoner looking through the bars of his cell. We consider ourselves free, and view others as free as long as we can see through their faces, because they have been shaped in the same way that our face, which we cannot see, has been shaped. But where a different world has left its imprint to obstruct our vision, we recognize just how much we are trapped behind our own masks.

  In fact, we never truly love the other, but merely the different world he represents.

  Back then I loved in the way all children love: greatly and with passion, and in no way childishly but with all the desires and hopes, all the disappointments and pains, and all the tensions of Eros, though still removed from any sexuality. But the ardor of desire never treats physical proximity as anything but an allegory, and can neither be stilled by an embrace nor by a kiss, although it plunges into such contact like a thirsty man cooling not only his lips but also his eyes, forehead, cheeks, hands, and heartbeats in the reflection of a fountain. Our appetites expire. But those who maintain an inner need for tenderness past childhood will end up among that select unhappy group of those who will always and forever love.

  Like all children and tender lovers, I also loved not just one, but many at once. I loved Tamara Tildy on account of her excruciating inner turmoil and the feminine tawdriness of her lost and faded elegance, and I loved Frau Lyubanarov because of her honey-colored eyes and the glory of her naked shoulders, because of her ample breasts bobbing in the near-transparent embroidered peasant blouses that she favored, and on account of her smile so full of shameless enticement, sweet and beguiling like the sound of a flute. I loved Aunt Paulette for her dark, lazy brittleness, the strong eroticism of her large girl’s body and the cold mockery in her eyes. From time to time I also loved—though guiltily and secretly distraught over it—the seedy charm that emanated from Fräulein Iliuţ’s misshapen body, her clear scent of womanhood, and also her beautiful eyes. And I loved Blanche.

  I dreamed about them all, held each of them in my arms, let them engage me in the ever-alluring game of being ignored and then noticed, overwhelmed by their sudden acknowledgment, after which they would give themselves to me. This didn’t take on any concrete sensual image in my mind; what I experienced was the foretaste of a certain bliss, of unity not only with the beloved person but with the universe, a rising and setting, a kind of sensual death, which scared me and immediately made me wish that my beloveds would marry me and live with me a long long time.

  Not that I was unaware of how absurd and embarrassingly comic the idea was that Frau Lyubanarov or Aunt Paulette might love the boy I was in any other way than one loves a child. But as the actors of our waking dreams, we are both their most extreme abstraction and their most distilled essence: we are I to the very core, ageless and sexless as the angels, but for the innate wisdom and stupidity of our sex. Never is our self-awareness more pure than in these images that our fantasy fashions from our desire, and at no time is our knowledge of ourselves more clear. Because in the staking and claiming of the world that is our childhood, everything remains image and parable. Including the plunging together of lovers, which produces nothing more than itself—the image of love.

  When I thought about Tamara Tildy, this image of love was full of enigmas, of unrest and torments, but it was also ready for a redemption that superseded all reality—a combination of deep bewilderment and Easter-like promise. If I thought of Frau Lyubanarov, it was of a pagan sweetness, of the spirit of the flesh smelted into the scent of honey and the crimson haze of sensuality: my breath basked in the grassy acerbity of her hair, my arms and hands surrendered to the deliciousness of smooth skin pulsating with sunlight. When I embraced Aunt Paulette, it was with a fighting, destructive passion, an angry ardor that opened wounds until our foreheads l
eaned together out of exhaustion; sometimes I dreamt of both of us dying, of an acknowledgment that came too late, as we expired. When I dreamed of Blanche, however, I was torn by the ache of eternally unresolved difference, the need of two great solitudes meeting only in the gaze of a single yearning. She was the most painful and the most beautiful, the most knowing of all my loves.

  I can picture her face, in which only a few, barely discernible differences of proportion, of expression, of lines, caught my eye, kept me from seeing through her mask. It was without a single disharmony, unlike, say, in Tamara Tildy’s face, whose hooked nose shot out of the doll-like oval as if of its own accord, razor sharp. And still there was an awe-inspiring otherness in the relation of her broad and not very high forehead to her narrow cheeks, of her fine, long nose to her large, overripe, and expressive mouth, in the beautiful almond cut of her eyes and the alarmingly rich framework of her firm black and very curly hair—an otherness that she seemed to recognize in herself and which evidently caused her sorrow, and threw me back into my own otherness causing me a similar sorrow.

  Even in my dreams I never dared touch her. If my mouth moved close to hers to kiss her, her countenance would dissipate like breath on a mirror. I was only able to imagine her from a distance, and always alone: I pictured her in the flowery meadows of a gentle landscape—a German landscape, the East being too garish for her tender magic. She was not of the willowy slenderness that you see alongside an oasis, a gracefully angled arm propping a tall jar. I know nothing about her body; today I can’t picture how she moved and probably could not do so back then: she would sit or stand in a German world of gentle hills, flowery village greens, distant spired cities, in pale shades like one of Dürer’s early silverpoints—lonely, sad, but accoutred with the quiet and delightful certainty of our love.