An Ermine in Czernopol (14 page)

Fräulein Iliuţ explained to us that it meant to fall out of one's role, to be guilty of a shameful deed, or else to let something happen that doesn't match what is expected of us.

We searched her eyes to find out what she was trying to conceal from us, but that really was all she knew, and she had no need to reassure us that was the case.

So she wasn't a bewitched princess after all. She was never going to change back from a hunchbacked seamstress into her real figure. Because bewitched people are children's allies. But she was just like everyone else; she, too, was part of the conspiracy of grown-ups bent on convincing children that words and things mean no more than what meets the eye, and that whatever they might sense and suspect beyond that meaning has no reality.

So the world was even more enigmatic than we imagined. And we were being kept from understanding it. And even Fräulein Iliuţ was part of the conspiracy.

Because what Fräulein Iliuţ told us could not possibly be everything there was behind such a phrase as
to lose your face.

In this respect Widow Morar was much more part of our world. She had us repeat the phrase a few times, then closed her eyes and said, very slowly, her golden teeth glowing in the abysmal ugliness of her leathery, shamanic mask: “It means your face is completely extinguished. It means that something is going to happen that will wipe it away, the way a sponge wipes chalk off a slate—or someone wipes away what you've drawn on a misty windowpane.”

“But can you go on living without a face?”

“No. Then you have to die.”

“So how come it's only then that you become human?”

“When you wipe what you have drawn on the windowpane, then the glass is clear.”

Incidentally, the next day we were informed that Herr Alexianu had been dismissed, and that we would have a few weeks' vacation before being admitted into Madame Aritonovich's institute.

T
HE IDEA
that Tildy would be considered a German struck us as so outlandish that we fretted over it for a long time—since in our childish gullibility we took everything at face value, accepting every hint of a possibility as cold hard fact—and led us to observe anything or anyone German more closely. Not without some hostile bias, it seemed at first, ultimately, though, it helped us discover positive qualities that would make it easier for us to accept the illogicalities if they ultimately proved true.

The fact that the Germans had been our comrades-in-arms during the war that had recently run its course and which very much still captivated our imagination, as well as the shared sense of defeat that weighed on our souls—not because we had to bear any consequences but because all our fervent wishing had proven powerless, and so the magical core of our faith in ourselves had been shaken—this had engendered a familial feeling for all things German, though it was not strong enough to drown out a closer kinship to our former opponents. Our family contained Italians and Russians whom we loved as Cousin Luigi or Uncle Sergei, although that didn't stop us from viewing the cockerel-feathered Bersaglieri and bearded Cossacks we knew from the photos of the war as our enemies, but neither did it bring us closer to the men in
feldgrau
who had fought shoulder to shoulder with our own, men who always struck us as slightly wooden, and who never missed an occasion to proclaim how our military prowess paled before theirs. Naturally we inherited our mother's Francophilia, which was shared by her sisters and seconded by Herr Tarangolian's own passionate admiration for the French, for their art, the beauty and richness of their language, their fashion and their cuisine, and which had hardened into one of the preconceived judgments that youth, with its penchant for absolutes, is so quick to grasp, and which despite all later reservations continue to influence our life: the prejudice, for instance, that whoever didn't speak French and wasn't familiar with the French way of life was seen as provincial and uneducated and therefore of little account. The transfiguration in the expression of the men whenever the talk turned to Paris was in no way inferior to the depth of feeling summoned by our aunts when they spoke of Reims and Chartres, or Florence and Siena, and this led us to suspect that these cities would one day become our own places of pilgrimage, similar to the one our Polish cook took every year to the Black Madonna of Cze̜stochowa.

On top of that, Miss Rappaport never hesitated to give vent to her genuine British distaste for the hapless German kaiser, which was only seen as a further attempt to pass as more English than she was, and triggered astonishingly well-informed discourses on the significant role that Jews played in the establishment of the Bismarck Reich. But such silly remarks—which we saw through, and which even Miss Rappaport met with an obtuseness that, while hardly attesting to her intellectual powers, spoke more for her strength of character than for the groundlessness of the insinuation that she was a Jew—could not cancel the reservations we had in our feelings toward things German.

Nor did this apply to the Germans alone; our encounters with all sorts of nations came first and foremost through their soldiers. In fact, whenever we heard about nations it was in relation to wars. As we understood it, the Israelites first became a nation with the Exodus from Egypt and the destruction of Pharaoh's army in the Red Sea. We first learned of the Hellenes in front of the walls of Troy. Our own nation long ago gave up its mythic origins in favor of some bloodbath. So for us the word “nation” never failed to summon images of an army with its own colors, its own weapons and dress—which amounts to a uniform—that distinguished it from some opposing nation which had set out to attack it—or which it had prepared to defend against.

We knew, as I have mentioned, that our own Uncle Sergei was a Russian. But for us the “Russian Nation” consisted of swarms of regiments of good-natured, misled peasant boys in long coats and stiff flat caps, armed with dangerous, triple-edged bayonets, throwing themselves against our brave ranks in such numbers that they drove our men back—despite heroic resistance—far beyond the borders of our homeland. And only in their wake, as if it constituted part of their train and baggage, could we discern the toyland world of the Russian landscape, with its colorful figures: gruff-happy troika coachmen with ruddy beards dangling over steaming tea, long-haired Orthodox priests, and apple-cheeked women in prim skirts and high-heeled morocco-leather boots—all against a backdrop of small carved wooden houses and blunted onion-domed churches with delicate three-barred crosses.

And after we expelled the martial images from our imagination—which in the innermost depth of our subconscious we never managed to do entirely—when we finally replaced the uniforms with folk costumes and added a few more essential traits—invariably as much a caricature as a display of character—what we wound up with were more or less well-founded generalizations. Considering the fact that, even today, our inner illustrated atlas of the world shows every Chinaman with a queue and every American with a bottle of medicine
cum
spot remover in his pocket and a set of false teeth in his mouth—the prejudices and biases we had back then as children may be forgiven.

We knew the Germans from the wartime illustrated journals, clopping along in marching columns, each man the same height and maintaining the same posture as the next, like so many lead soldiers, each with the same stereotypical stiff and empty seriousness—although not quite as erect and slender as their toy counterparts. Even the gauntest among them had something earthbound and heavy, something clumpish and bulbous, especially when they were weighted down with veritable mountains of war materiel like the little old mothers in the German fairy tales, doubled over under the heavy bundles of brushwood they had packed on their crooked shoulders, a symbol of how oppressed they were by need. And, indeed, our allies seemed burdened by a particular kind of poverty, an oppressive lack, the result of an ongoing and all-exhausting deprivation that was hard to square with the pictures of their homeland, with its productive landscape so rich in mountains, forests, cities, meadows, and ponds. This lent them a pathetic quality—the pathos of a righteous claim that forever remained unfulfilled—a negative dimension, like the reflection of the cathedrals in their celebrated rivers, where the mirrored towers rise high above the old-fashioned world of gabled houses. And just as the flaunted immensity of those great churches, the points and piers, the sharp teeth and deep notches, all seemed rooted in their rippled reflection, so, too, the defensive stance of our brothers-in-arms, so beset with misery, seemed to shoot up from an upside-down image of themselves, a restless delusion welling from a melancholy deep within.

I no longer remember which one of us had the idea that they should all be called
Schmalhans Küchenmeister—
Little Hans Kitchenmaster, aka Short Rations. The name seemed to lie somewhere between the world of fairy tales and the world of insects, ideally suited to express their anonymous, or really absent, character—which scared us. Because the tiny patches of face we could make out didn't seem to belong to them; they appeared borrowed and appended to the uniform, just the way the primitive heads with curly locks stamped out of colorful paper were pasted onto the cotton-wool angels at the German Christmas fairs. If you tried to look at them as human beings it only heightened the impression of estrangement and forlornness. They had evolved from being human into another, perhaps higher, form, into a pupate stage which would undergo a final, glorious metamorphosis, emerging in victory or in death. Simple being had been replaced by purpose, and consequently all character was determined by purposeful things: uniform and equipment. What appeared as ornament and decoration was also in the service of this mission—all those collar insignia and chevrons, epaulets and medals. Even the oak leaves that proliferated from the muzzles of their rifles and on their helmets as they marched off may have been placed there for functional reasons, such as camouflage or to provide a last bit of grazing.

The swarming ranks industriously and dutifully trickling onward called to mind a millipede or a column of termites. A teeming mass fused into a single organism, so that if you removed an individual you would find him tied and bound with multiple strings and bulging straps, in places roughly armored—we had been told that most of their equipment was made of paper and cardboard—or webbed together in a felt cocoon. Mess kits jutted out of the taut bulges of blankets, tents, and coats rolled and wrapped around their knapsacks, forming bumpy shields on their backs, while the stumpy cartridge pouches dangling in front of their soft bodies like rudimentary prolegs further enhanced the image. All their gear—rifles, bayonets, wire cutters, spades, satchels, canteens—was either tied down or stuck inside cases and sleeves, and as such became prickly or sagging outgrowths of the integument. The segmented rings of wound leggings bulged over huge hobnailed boots: serrated grips on the busily creeping claws. The spiked helmets had cloth coverings that made them merge with the head into something that seemed even bigger, the spike lending no more than a nascent sense of form, an embryonic physiognomy. We knew that the poor Germans had evolved to this stage in order to be
brought into action
, as the expression went, and we asked ourselves if the miraculous butterfly would emerge in the fiery, starlike blooms of bursting grenades and the fountains of glowing shots—so that in some sense they were larval fireworks, each equipped with a life of its own, firecrackers accoutered with movement and will.

We had no other way of explaining why they were so extraordinarily dangerous, and the images we saw of particularly effective units only substantiated our belief: shock troops—or, rather, what was left of them—whose heroism consisted in conquering or reconquering a section of trench, or retaking an elevation or a spectral bit of forest that was nothing more than a numbered grid on a map, in a war that had stretched across the continent, stiffening into a motionless dragon whose teeth were sunk into its own coiled tail. Not only was the landscape where this had happened pitted and perforated as if by a plague of gigantic caterpillars; there was no stem left standing, not even enough earth intact where one might sprout; barren earth yawned out of the craters of a lunar landscape; what had once been a tree lay uprooted across muddy puddles, or else its stump rose into the dead sky—defoliated, torn to shreds and shorn of bark, a withered ghost. Bits of flesh stuck on the barbed-wire thorns bore witness to the greed with which the devouring plague had fallen on the land. And as though this radical feeding had finally stilled their hunger, they now seemed close to the longed-for release from their larval state. They were in the process of breaking out of their confining husks. Their field tunics had burst open across their chest, revealing other protective membranes: shirts, undergarments, flannel warmers in the earthy colors of their reptilian existence. Their leggings had come apart, and what had once been tight and bulging now shook loose and fluttered, hollow and empty, in a universal process of peeling and flaking off.

Meanwhile, they were straining under so much military equipment that we had difficulty imagining how it could all possibly be used at one time: we figured it could only get in the way during a surprise attack. Nevertheless the long snakes of the machine guns' cartridge belts draped over their necks, the ammo pouches and the massive pistol holsters on their hips, the clusters of hand grenades in front of their bodies seemed like viscera turned inside out, entrails expelled during their metamorphosis. Everything about it was highly volatile, just a moment away from exploding: all these pouches and pockets and cases, seedpods that would soon flower into flame.

We were particularly taken by the young noncommissioned officers: slight, gangly figures so completely bloodless they might have sprung from the soil of the trenches and crater-fields instead of a mother. Their boyish faces seemed permeated with the dematerialized glow of quintessential, dreamlike obsession. Peering out from under the shading brim of their hugely oversized steel helmets, with buckled chinstraps, they stared in our direction through white, ship stoker's eyes, emaciated by unimaginable privations and filled with an ashy ecstasy, as if the white-glowing lava of horror had entered the landscape of a human face. But because we had been assured that they wrote the most beautiful poems, or at least carried the same with them in little volumes—because they fought to
purify the soul
more than merely to win the war—and hence their rather certain death was not only a casualty of enemy fire but a sanctified sacrifice on the
altar of the highest human values
, we felt obliged to somehow square this spirit with the horror. And while we agonized over these terrible impressions and tried to discover what about this spirit was so terrible it would lead men to literally ignite themselves like gigantic fireworks, our inability to understand formed a secret repulsion that combined with guilt over our own inadequacy to create a mixed emotion of respectful awe and absolute horror.