An Ermine in Czernopol (16 page)

We observed them in profile, with stomachs protruding and knees angled forward, holding a field marshal's baton or a cigar that emitted a fine fuse of smoke, greeting the parading battalions or departing trains encrusted with troops, weapons, oak leaves, lady Samaritans serving coffee, mothers and brides, and wagons where we could make out the load capacity
6 horses or 42 men
, and over that:
Berlin–Paris
, or
Leipzig–St. Petersburg
, which we involuntarily completed with the words
and back.

Or else the men themselves, the commanders of the army, boarding a special train, seated
en face
, their faces pressed into a stiff, double-chinned dignity, casually saluting, hands in tight nappa-leather gloves raised to the covered spiked helmet, and then presenting a staff officer frozen at attention two miserly leather fingers to be shaken in absolute obedience.

That was the pose we found most revealing, as the two men descended from the train, their short legs carefully searching for the next step, dressed in the opulently red-brocaded breeches that were gathered below the knees in bulbous leather gaiters that reminded us of the parchment wrap used for serving fried chicken legs, staring pompously ahead, necks rigid, past the troops standing at attention.

We found them colossal in a strangely buoyant, cloudy way. Their cigar-smoker stomachs didn't seem to pull them down but to propel them forward. The sight of them always brought to mind the happy silly couplet from “The Aviators' March”:
In der Luft, in der Luft fliegt der Paprika / auf zum Himmel, Himmel, Himmel, hipp hurra!
—because we always expected them to suddenly float off the train step and soar over the train cars, into the cheery shrapnel-clouds of the blue sky, while the befuddled staff officers held tightly onto their helmets and gaped at them with open mouths like fairgoers surprised to see the balloon lady carried off by a gust of wind while clutching her colorful inflated cluster. Perhaps then the strained satisfaction would finally break loose and spread roguishly across their faces, merry and optimistic like the happy end of some droll fairy tale. Because as it was, when they stepped out of the train, harnessed by an iron sense of duty, shackled to the earth, they displayed a bombastic sullenness: their swollen and corseted bulges tugged against their moorings like captive hot-air balloons that make their anchor lines work all the harder the closer they come to the ground—up to the last stretch, which is accomplished through what might be called a mutual understanding about weightiness, so that the landing occurs with an impressive sense of ceremony. The caption of this particular picture reinforced this idea:
Their Excellencies were greeted by an escort.

And once on firm ground, these balloons, which were the color of pea-sausage, churned and billowed with a mistrustful glance at the honor guard, to keep themselves at a safe distance, possibly afraid that the saw-teeth of helmet spikes and bayonets might tear open their envelopes. A platoon commander marched behind them with drawn saber, as if on guard to make sure no one had the mischievous idea of uncorking their excellencies' shoes from the leather spats so all their hot air would come hissing out.

We had to be careful not to allow the comical aspect of such impressions to distract us from the very serious side of these German field marshals. Their pomposity, which was both amplified by what was funny about their puffiness, and at the same time defused by the dozily comfortable, feather-bed-and-pillow quality of their well-padded, ponderous, and broad-hipped figures, was downright misleading.

Because we merely had to imagine this honor guard barking three
hurrahs
and then starting up one of their foot-stomping, manically clipped songs—songs that subtly drew us into their grinding rhythm, stirring us in a bad way—and right away all the horrors of this war were present once again: the swarms of iron termites awakened and jolted into action, the highly explosive larvae crawling toward us out of their trenches in the cratered fields, dangerously primed and ready for detonation at any minute, while in the background, streams of columns flowed in to fill the underground reservoir.

Then the scenery quickly darkened; the cheerful white fluffs in the sky gave way to a stormy, leaden gray that loomed overhead and threatened catastrophe—gathering towers of darkness, magically lit from beyond the black depths of the horizon, gaping wide open in the mythical drama of some primal hour. Like dark-purple cloud gods, the brothers Ludenburg climbed out of the hissing iron caterpillars of their special trains and descended to the waiting hosts, charged with an elemental voltage, their legs rooted in the Leiden jars of their spats, their hands strictly insulated in their nappa-leather gloves, as if the slightest contact with the earth might set off shocks that could destroy the world. The spikes on their helmets spewed secret codes to the lightning bolts that lay ready and waiting. Iron hailstones crackled inside their dagger scabbards. The bags under their eyes were heavy with a menacing gloom. We now knew why they were always sniffing at their mustaches with such disgust, as if they—one crimped, broad, and brushy and the other short and bristly—carried some repulsive odor: they sensed the acrid uncertainty of their existence.

And their officers were the angels that proclaimed their will to the divisions: the triple “Hurrah!” of the troops was like a trumpet blast, a signal that the larvae-men would pour over the earth by the hundred thousand, that the lightning bolts would smite the ground, thunder would roll, missiles would come raining down … This was no longer merely a struggle to overcome a foe: it was a mythical event, a violent impregnation: blinding impacts would light up for a fraction of a second, while the mole-crickets prepared the earth, sinking their teeth into it, devouring it, exploding it and themselves in giant fountains, churning it and plowing it and finally fertilizing it with their own remains in the name of the deity who had called down the iron rain.

So even in this war we found a new kind of beauty, eerie and cruel and exhausting—a different possibility of beauty, which caused us anguish, which seemed to be constructed of a more solid reality, and which positioned itself behind every other image of beauty, shining through, dissolving, distorting, and making them cruel with satire.

Later, when those images no longer carried the same weight and force, but—as with everything experienced early in life—were removed and reflected many times over, suspended, as it were, one of us made the pronouncement that everything undergoes the same transformation as our perception of the war, as if Altdorfer's
Battle of Alexander
had been repainted stroke by stroke by Breughel the younger, known as “Hell” Breughel—who would have also depicted the humor in the horror, which was always present and intensified by the dreadful surroundings.

In this way we finally stumbled onto the secret we had sought so urgently and persistently without achieving anything more than a vague intuition. I'm talking about the physical principle that kept the whole mechanism running, the interaction between the beingless larvae and their
grand leaders
—as well as its metaphysical sense. And we found it in the tension between chaos and order in that mythically monstrous picture of battle. In an instant it became clear to us that the nearly—but not quite—perfect uniformity of the advancing columns, dissolving chaotically in the clash of the fronts, reformed itself after the battle in a far more perfect form: as the utterly precise, utterly indistinguishable rows of crosses in the heroes' cemeteries, where the lines spread out into a broad perspective, moving in its spare monotony, cut at right angles and chopped in blocks, so that an absolute order was finally achieved.

And so the highly explosive iron larvae, the unreleased fire butterflies, for whom the intensity of life was compressed into the fraction of a moment before bursting into flame, and who had caused us to realize, in the strangest way, what it meant for them to
light into the enemy
, were granted one last metamorphosis toward perfection.

With that the sacrifice acquired its valid symbolism—along with its meaning. Little Hans Kitchenmaster died so as to rise again, purified, in perfect orderliness. Even his dearth and deprivation found its apotheosis in the divine acres where the crosses sprouted like seeds at measured angles.

The brothers Ludenburg, too, moved from the windy reaches between thunderhead gods and light-headed balloons into a firmer station, which did acquire a kind of high-priestly consecration—as the highest functionaries of the total order.

Nevertheless, back in the days of our childhood, we were still disinclined to fully abandon our perception of
beautiful war
, which we saw expressed in Tildy, the hussar,
pliant as a windblown sleeve
and ready to strike—exuding the aura of a bold and shiny knightly past. In him we rediscovered the grand fluttering of silken banners embroidered with gold, the flash of the saber wielded by a man's hand, the mystery of bloodletting, and a different proximity of death that made one proud and unworried, because it was fervent, full-blooded, and full of life.

Nothing we thought we knew about Tildy fit with the impression we had acquired of our German brothers-in-arms. But it was even harder for us to imagine him alongside the Germans of Czernopol.

T
HE CITY
of Czernopol cannot be imagined without its Germans. Franconian settlers directed to Galicia under Kaiser Joseph were among its putative founders, and their descendants comprised nearly a third of the population. Of course, they became so mixed with the original inhabitants and other migrants who arrived before or after, and their language was so corrupted, that they could hardly be considered children of the same nation as the famous stone Horseman inside the Bamberg Cathedral—though that didn't stop them from invoking him and all other good Germans as part of their crude and pushy jingoism. But today a pedigree like that is hard to believe even for the ones who stayed in Franconia, so that it's tempting to suspect some puzzling cosmic event caused one large nation in the heart of Europe to be replaced overnight with a different one, completely alien and incomparably inferior.

The head of the ethnic confessors, the honorary president of the German Men's Chorus and the Turnvater Jahn Athletic Club, a fanatically nationalistic polemicist and fervent anti-Semite, was a certain Professor Feuer, whom we called “Champagne Bottle” because of his steeply falling shoulders. I have difficulty describing him because his external traits—and undoubtedly his character as well—seem such a clichéd picture of the disciple of Wotan and the cranky high school teacher: tall and ungainly, with enormous feet in ridiculous orthopedic lace-up boots, with a cycling jacket and a broad, Odin-style slouch hat over his petit bourgeois clothes, and their stiff propriety stood in contrast to the threadbare condition they showed from everyday use. He would step along, craning his head like a madman, casting fiery glances this way and that, his long white neck jutting out of his collar like a singer preparing to deliver the highest note his vocal cords can muster. But it wasn't just his dress, bearing, and demeanor that made him seem comically operatic and anachronistic: he was one of those men whose bodies never reach their full maturity, or else skip over manhood and proceed straight to a eunuch-like old age, while they themselves remain stuck in a transitional period of development, like giant boys, who along with their laughable and pronounced erotic traits have something angelic about them. Not until later, long after we had left Czernopol, did we realize how much he looked like Strindberg: he wore the same thick, salt-and-pepper mustache, with the ends loosely brushed up and recurved like cupid's bow, and a soft, reddish, and seemingly moist little spot beneath his lower lip. Perched above his finely modeled chin like that, framing his responsive, highly elastic mouth, the beard seemed as fake as the beards donned by participants in historical pageants, the sort who reenact the Swedish siege of Rothenburg, when after everything has ended they sit down in the pub, in full costume but with none of the fun and foolishness of carnival, still ostentatiously seeking respect for the greatness of the past which they embody—while wolfing down sausage and swilling beer.

Perhaps Professor Feuer knew of his resemblance to Strindberg and deliberately cultivated it, because if I remember right, the impression was undeniable. It could be seen in his conspicuously small, nervous hands as well as in his unusually handsome forehead and his soft, defiant mouth, but above all in his eyes, their fundamental tragic crazy-headedness, which had also given the brilliant
Son of a Servant
his torn, youthful expression. We of course had never even heard of Strindberg, and had certainly no inkling of his importance, so we were unable to transfer the respect for the original onto his Czernopolite doppelgänger—in fact, later just the opposite would happen—and so Professor Feuer's exaggerated soulfulness struck us as hilarious—I can no longer remember whether on its own or if we were influenced by some ironic remark, a sardonic smile, or simply a general repudiation on the part of the grown-ups, presumably never voiced, something children always keenly sense. Because for a very strange reason, namely his strident anti-Semitism, the mere mention of his name at home evinced a silent but clearly palpable disapproval. This must seem odd, to say the least, considering the continued digs against the hapless Miss Rappaport, which were hardly evidence of an unbiased attitude toward the Jews. But in families with a strong sense of identity you frequently find the strange tendency to appropriate the most common and widespread maxims on decency, honor, virtue, or taste, as well as all manner of questionable attitudes temporarily in vogue, and consider them a kind of familial prerogative—with the result that any attempted influence by so-called outsiders is rejected as presumptuous and unseemly. Such an attitude is widely but mistakenly designated as
conservative.
While the family members usually reacted to supposed infringements of this sort with no more than raised eyebrows and a tense, oppressive silence, the servants reacted with considerably less restraint, as they considered it their privilege to keep guard over everything in the house. And in the same way that our cook, for example, felt excited that our much wealthier neighbors served game the exact same way we did, so our coachman gave us a stern lecture about how inappropriate it was for someone of Feuer's social position to broadcast his political views.