An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Frau Lyubanarov glanced at him tenderly as he passed by, then focused her smile on the batman, who was following the prefect with a large bouquet of flowers, loosely wrapped in crackling tissue, along with several unwieldy packages tucked under his arms. Her goat-eyes took in his strong neck and strapping legs with appreciation. He pulled himself together like a soldier snapping to attention, turning red underneath his spiked helmet; he seemed on the verge of hot manly tears, humiliated, emasculated, and ashamed at having to perform the duties of a maid in carrying such fragile trumpery. With great effort he kept his eyes fixed dead ahead, his heavy boots stamping defiantly on the gravel.

  And so they passed, one after the other, the master and his servant, dancing like marionettes on the string of a woman’s smile, until they reached the house and were safely removed from the singeing gaze on their backs.

  Herr Tarangolian had come to say farewell.

  “Take this visit,” he said, “which may seem somewhat premature, in the spirit in which it is undertaken—namely as an expression of my inner need to thank you, and to bid you adieu before all others, and not at the last minute. I may be recalled tomorrow or a year from now—I confess that I have only been informed in confidence, albeit from a highly reliable source, that this is something I must reckon with. I don’t need to tell you how painful it will be for me to take my leave of this city, and especially of you. I am being moved, as they say, up the ladder—hélas—and I would be lying if I were to say that weren’t some solace. But believe me: it is a very weak consolation. Even if I have no desire to hide my pride at being granted a chance to serve my country in a position of greater responsibility than hitherto—perhaps yet as a minister—you realize that my heart is here, and here it will stay forever.”

  He handed us his abundant gifts, and I received what I considered the most beautiful of all—the unabridged edition of A Thousand and One Nights, which was immediately taken into safekeeping, for when I would be “mature enough.” Herr Tarangolian was served some of his favorite walnut liqueur. He lit a cigar with delighted meticulousness, crossed his legs, and leaned back in his chair. Giving one of his black eyebrows a diabolical arch, he let his eyes wander from face to face, meeting each of our gazes and then moving on, in one quick, intelligent sweep, as if they were registering once and for all the fixed points of furniture, the corners of the room, the windows and doors, arranging them in a linear plot that would serve as an abbreviated diagram, like a stenographer’s shorthand, until finally, glassed over in a kind of blank meditation, they came to rest at the glowing tip of his cigar. The smoke rose in a fine perpendicular thread, billowing into a veil-like ribbon that trembled in tender, wrinkly grooves. All of a sudden we felt the space surrounding us, the room where we had been with him so often in the commonality of the old friendship we took for granted, a powerful presence, a spatial reality we had never fully appreciated— as if it had never been real. And, strangely, this freshly produced reality imparted something peculiarly false: it was as if the curtain had risen dramatically on the last act of a play that had begun with the same set, and as if all of us—supernumeraries and principals alike—found ourselves arranged exactly as at the beginning, tasked with working out some inner drama—a highly effective director’s trick that had the immediate consequence of seeming untrue. We became sentimental: in other words, we supplied an artificial melancholy with the first motivation we were able to summon. We thought about our hapless Aunt Aida, whom God knows we had missed too little hitherto: now her death acquired the significance of a practically spiteful martyrdom, and seemed to us like an irreplaceable loss that demonstrated how hopeless life had become, and how the connections between us had been torn once and for all.

  Herr Tarangolian was clearly the instigator and moving force behind this dramatic effect, its director and lead actor in one and the same person, and when he launched into one of his entertaining philosophical monologues, his words also struck us as deceptively meaningful and spruced-up for effect. Not even our usual pleasure in hearing his euphonic voice—the Latin love of hearing oneself speak that we so enjoyed in him—could release us from the unease we felt that everything he was saying, everything he was alluding to and everything he was concealing—and thus the entire situation in which his speech proceeded—was only for appearance, alleged and pretended, and in a way that twisted reality to such a degree it could no longer be grasped. This uncanny feeling went to the root of our being, calling it into question, as if it were merely an assertion, a claim, as if our existence could be replaced by some other at any time—although without altering the inevitable course of events. In this way its essence acquired a deeply ironic character.

  “Indeed,” said the prefect, “it is so difficult for me to part from Czernopol that I don’t know whether I should be grateful to my friend Petrescu or hold it against him. Because it’s to the general himself and no one else that I owe my upstairs plunge. In any case, I am bound to him—in the true meaning of the word—bound by fate, as rivals always are. But I have my own understanding of this rivalry, which couldn’t consist in anything other than our love for Czernopol. I sincerely regret that such a capable man must atone for a mistake with a banishment that cannot possibly advance his outstanding qualities. For my part, I have complete understanding, even the highest respect, for his foolishness. His rash decision, which was unilateral and against my express orders, to unleash his troops during that wretched night—supposedly to restore the order that was never seriously endangered—the spontaneous and fateful stupid act of an otherwise intelligent man, I beg you, can only have one cause—jealousy. And not political jealousy. No, no! It was General Petrescu’s jealous love for Czernopol that we have to blame for most of the forty deaths that night. And it fell to me to play his rival. Not that I would have given him any reason to begrudge my clear affection for this city. Oh no! For that, Czernopol is far too loose a mistress, who is so generous with her love that it would be petty to attempt to hoard it. A mistress somewhat like Madame Lyubanarov there, leaning so charmingly against your garden fence. Who—apart from a fool like Tildy—would forget himself so far as to be jealous of someone like that? But don’t forget: we are in large part Latins and Orientals. Our jealousy is directed less at a particular person, the given favorite of a mood or of an hour, and more toward the impulse to love that which we love ourselves. As a result this blinding passion also sharpens our sight. We suffer whenever we sense that someone else understands how to love better than we do. We expect so much from our love that love tendered by someone else always seems better than our own. Well …” Herr Tarangolian smiled his most inscrutable smile. “I may flatter myself that in my love for Czernopol I conquered even a general. I simply knew the better way to love. My friend Petrescu wanted to be master over this city. He wanted it the way a soldier wants his mistress: wild but submissive, untrue but devoted, contemptuous but full of admiration for him. I, on the other hand, love her the way she is: moody, because she cannot find release, because she is unreliable, because she is helpless and crafty and treacherous, because she is fundamentally chaste. You don’t believe that—you are smiling at my remarks. I won’t be able to convince you. But love doesn’t make one blind, as people say—on the contrary. It concentrates all our attention on one object that we see with greatly increased focus, because it is we who discovered it. Our love is an expression of our having perceived things in that object that no one else sees. Its monomaniacal character might make us blind to the rest of the world, for a while—but it only seems that way, because in fact we never do see more of the world than its surface, anyway. In love, however, we see the essence of the object of our affection. Because I believe that the only true love is the approving kind, the kind that lets something be the way it is. I have never wanted to change Czernopol in any of its qualities. The idea of order as perceived by the military mind strikes me as inapplicable, both in regard to women and to the world at large—and especially this world right here. To force it wou
ld require violently changing its nature—and that would be tantamount to destroying it. To create order in Czernopol would mean to kill Czernopol. It would mean strangling its spirit in the name of some imagined, abstract form. You may have your own thoughts about the spirit of Czernopol, but permit me to declare how much I revere it—that’s right, revere it—because I see our infamous street-character as one of the primal forms of the great Eros, as the wellspring of all living spiritual fertility. I see it in what I call ‘the drunkenness of the sober’: in a nagging, alert skepticism toward everything, and, above all, itself. Nowhere fully settled, nowhere secure outside of this skepticism—and therefore without any respect, fear, or awe, ready to get mixed up in anything and prepared for nothing—that is impressive … You might accuse me of loving chaos. That’s not true. I merely believe that nature’s idea of order is stronger than that of human beings. And I owe this insight not least to Czernopol. You consider its spirit corrosive. I do as well. Except that I consider it a kind of destruction that is more economical than our measures to guard against destruction. General Petrescu’s praiseworthy attempt to spare the city a bloodbath, which would in fact have been satisfied with a few broken noses, cost forty lives. The spirit of Czernopol seized these forty deaths—you can call it corpse-robbing as far as I’m concerned—and made a joke about it. That sounds despicable, but may I remind you how much sorrow, what abundance of painful experience is required to produce a joke? Generations sink into their graves before the grotesque quality of a particular human situation that might have been the original cause of their torments, or even death, becomes clear enough to be expressed in humor. While the laughter it triggers cannot cause a single tear to become unshed, it does forgive all fault. For Czernopol it only took forty dead people to create a symbolon—an allegorical seal for the grotesque of a human, all-too-human situation. A story is making the rounds that on that night a giant policeman—in other words, a defender of order, sent in to protect the Jews against the anti-Semites—raised his rifle butt high and started lambasting away at a small Jewish man, who cried out ‘Stop! What’s going on? I’m not a Nazi!’ To which the policeman replied, ‘But I am!’”

  With the exception of Uncle Sergei, no one laughed, but Herr Tarangolian didn’t seem to have been looking to elicit merriment at all.

  “I can’t think of anything more characteristic for Czernopol,” he said. “This joke, filtered through forty dead people, seems like an ideogram of our city—a single image containing all the elements of its spiritual structure. It calls to mind the strange alternative posed by Tildy, by which I mean his either/or—whether the solution is about justice or about a joke. Nowhere is the deadly comic quality of the grossly unjust made so clear as here, but only as a joke, in the moral function of wit, in its lightning-flash illumination of the one true and incontrovertibly genuine reality in the paradox. What does it mean, then: destruction, decomposition, decay? I recall finding a leaf that had decayed down to the veil-like veins of its ribs. And in that state of decomposition it had become uncommonly beautiful, a natural work of art, reduced to its most essential, highly ordered and compacted into an idea. But again, it was only a paradox of itself, in the uselessness of those same ribs that no longer held anything together, the joke of a leaf, so to speak—rather in the way a skeleton is a macabre joke of a human being. And still it seemed to me that the greatest possible justice had been done to the leaf, by the manner of its destruction into this basic sketch …”

  Herr Tarangolian studied the intact ash-cone of his cigar, lowered it carefully to the ashtray, and tapped it off.

  “Please forgive my boundless chatter,” he said. “I’m letting my emotions get the better of me. Partir, c’est mourir un peu, n’est-ce pas? Because you are always parting from yourself … Perhaps everything I think and say is wrong. Perhaps”—he arched one of his magician’s eyebrows—“my thinking is intentionally wrong and my speech a deliberate lie—in order to deceive myself. I am leaving this city and have to hold myself accountable for the state in which I leave it. Perhaps”—he smiled broadly, so that his all-too-perfect teeth appeared under his blackened mustache—“perhaps I am removing myself from all accountability by claiming that our human idea of order doesn’t exist at all except in our minds, in our thinking, in the artificial sketch—in other words, not in nature but only in art. That leaves it to whim whether we act in one way or another, depending on how serious we are. Because what I truly believe is that we are not capable of comprehending the world, but merely of interpreting it—and, to be sure, the simpler our interpretation, the better. The more resolutely our interpretations vanish into one point, whether it carries the name of God or is merely some symbol for relative nothingness—the more stable the earth is under our feet. It is the privilege of the dumbest as well as the wisest to have firm ground beneath their feet. Both live in the blessed state of simplification. And it makes no difference whether they inhabit the center of this world—which we are told is a sphere—or the outermost surface. After all, this sphere may also be conceived negatively—not imagined, but conceived—so that the periphery may just as well be considered the middle, and the center its surface …”

  Herr Tarangolian took his leave, and remained in Czernopol for years, without ever revoking the legend of his imminent recall—and without renewing his former friendship with our parents’ household. From then on we saw him only rarely; he no longer mixed among the people like Harun al-Rashid disguised as an idle bon vivant. In time his appearance acquired a legendary quality: we would gape in wonder at our close friend from a long-vanished past whenever we happened to catch sight of him, driving by in his elegant black barouche, with the gleaming brass-crowned lanterns and the cinnabar whirlwind of spokes, the batman seated gruffly and martially beside the coachman on his box. And when once or twice he did appear on some extraordinary occasion in his full presence, it truly was as if he came riding in from some distant place, paying the honor of a special visit that seemed to demand appreciation. From then on he was removed from his old sphere into a new and higher one, and over the years he acquired an unusually high—and, for Czernopol, essentially unique —prestige. After that we never referred to him anymore as our friend, Herr Tarangolian, or even disrespectfully as “Coco,” but reverently, as the prefect. But later on, shortly before he left the city to become a government minister, he had become such a popular figure and public institution—a figure so steeped in legend it was impossible to imagine Czernopol without him—that the gently ironic nickname had become common currency. Even the newspapers took the liberty of referring to him as “Our Coco” in the headline of an article on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday.

  “Perhaps we should all let ourselves be ‘recalled,’” said Madame Aritonovich once—incidentally the only person he visited with any regularity, albeit at greater and greater intervals. “Because sooner or later the hour comes when our lives want to step into a new phase, completely of their own accord, and all previous connections are rendered null and void. Why not give fate a little help? One day all the old meadows are mown and we have to look for new ones—the same nomads we always were, incapable of cultivating our field.”

  And as before, on the winter days when the prefect would come to visit and we would peep through the feathery patterns of the frosted windows as he climbed back onto his sled, eerily swathed in blankets and furs, and drove off into the white-and-gray snowy landscape—so now, with his parting from our lives, we felt the emptiness racing in, as though we had been abandoned to the merciless elements, to an all-powerful nature where humans, and with them all measure and order, had moved on, never to return.

  19 Frau Lyubanarov Goes to the Asylum; Tildy Shoots at Năstase

  WITH ITS profligate smile of spun light, which was both captivating and a little suspicious, like Uncle Sergei’s sentimental charm, autumn scattered its deceptive riches, dusting the profane tin roofs with its cheap gold leaf, and sprinkling its chromium-yellow, blue, and ochre-
brown hues on the streets like confetti from a carnival, a parade of paradoxes—a motionless riot of color, a silent din, as dramatic as an attitude en pointe, and just as the ballet position becomes transformed by the cryptlike emptiness behind the sets, this autumn display acquired an unreal dimension, under the glass dome of the blue, silken skies where the crows were gathering.