An Ermine in Czernopol (18 page)

Their clumsy formality, and above all the sheepish way they exchanged awkward glances in an attempt to arrive at some secret understanding, made the Feuer children unsympathetic. Even so, for a while we felt tempted to make friends with them, because our only playmates, the Lyubanarov daughters from the
dvornik
's hut, had been sent to relatives in a vicarage in the country. But our tentative approaches were nipped in the bud by Miss Rappaport. Without ever coming into contact with them, our governess had determined that the young Feuers were insolent and uncouth, although whenever our paths crossed, the older girls never failed to curtsy, blushing as they did, while poking their younger brothers in the ribs to remind them to remove the caps from their blond heads. But a single ridiculous incident, which Miss Rappaport could not get over, confirmed her prejudice. We once ran into the entire horde of Feuers as they were chasing a field mouse through their garden and across the street. The mouse had slipped into a hole along the embankment of the ditch on the other side of the street. While the majority ran back home to fetch a spade to dig it out, one of the little girls bent over the hole and tried to coax the creature out by tenderly saying “Meow!” As far as Miss Rappaport was concerned, this innocent mistake was proof of unbounded stupidity, as well as an ingrained cruelty. From then on we were forbidden to have anything to do with the inhabitants of the miraculous house.

Every day at noon we saw Professor Feuer walking down our street after finishing his classes at the boys' lyceum. He was always in the company of another man, whose name, as we learned, was Adamowski—the chief editor of the
Tescovina German Messenger
, the third German-language newspaper in Czernopol, and the only one not edited by Jews. One of Herr Adamowski's legs was shorter, with a clubfoot, which was shod in a cork boot that was bulky but nonetheless insufficiently padded. While Professor Feuer strode ahead with his back straight as an arrow, draped in loden and wearing his slouch hat low over his handsome forehead, the much shorter Herr Adamowski tottered alongside, struggling to keep up. His dress, which was oddly thrown together, had a certain shabby elegance: along with a heavy plaid ulster with two rows of bumpy leather buttons—the kind of coat that in those days was seen only at very sportive events—he wore a very modest silk scarf, a so-called collar-saver, boldly tossed around his neck, as if he were dressed in top hat and tails, stepping from the grand opera into the pale gaslight of the Parisian night, heading straight for the Moulin Rouge. A monocle enhanced this image of the bon vivant, as well as a beret on top of his faded and straggly hair, which he combed back. The strain of firmly maintaining his monocle between eyebrow and cheekbone had frozen his otherwise labile face into a teeth-baring grimace that also formed the backdrop for a whole array of rapidly changing expressions which flitted like shadows over the fixed scenery of his face. He wore his beret slanting over his right ear, angled so that it pointed to the source of his affliction, and as he walked he would swing his short leg forward, like a pendulum, his progress punctuated by the dull thud of the cork sole. His grimacing face reflected the broken lines of this movement, which, despite all the swaying, was quite rhythmic, as he tottered alongside the erect Professor Feuer, speaking to him through bared teeth, rising at his side and then humbly descending. A bamboo cane served as a support. He always carried a bulging briefcase that was buckled and fastened with complicated locks.

Before telling about one very confusing run-in with this Herr Adamowski, I have to mention another man who also came from the German settlement at the edge of town, where he had a large garden plot with beautiful fruit that he delivered to our house. His name was Romoald Kunzelmann. Several times a day the small cart that he called his
taradaika
came clattering up to our house, because apart from delivering fruit he helped out in all sorts of ways, as gardener, plumber, paperhanger, cartwright, hauler, and even once as a skinner when our draft horse died from colic in its stall. Although we had been forbidden to watch the sad operation, we managed to observe in detail how our coachman and Herr Kunzelmann loaded the gigantic carcass onto the
taradaika
with the help of some ingeniously constructed winches, and covered it with a few old sacks. The little Polish pony, a mare we called Kobiela and were much attached to, waited between the shafts of the
taradaika
, and the undaunted bravery with which she had dragged her fallen big brother from inside the stable, moved us as much as the lyrics of the song “Ich hatt' einen Kamerad.”

From then on, Herr Kunzelmann had for us a slight air of horror, which made his irrepressible cheerfulness all the more unsettling. His creepiness was different and far more disturbing and upsetting than what we experienced when Widow Morar told her hideous stories. Because while our chatty friend with her tarnished golden smile whispered her message of death like a magnificently glistening promise, an Easter secret that the angels had proclaimed to her sternly and severely, Herr Kunzelmann seemed intent on keeping it hushed in a low-down, tricky way, and in doing so made it all the more frightening. The same day he carted off our dead horse, he came rattling down the street, sitting on the box of his
taradaika
; when he saw us at the garden fence he gave a sharp pull on the reins and brought our Kobiela, who had been trotting faithfully ahead, to a sudden stop, pointed with his whip to the load behind him, and called out to us, waving, in the harsh, coarse dialect of the Tescovina Germans: “Hey there, if you think you're smart, what's in Kunzelmann's old cart?”

We didn't have an answer, and he didn't seem to expect one. He reached under the empty sacks that a little while earlier had covered our horse's carcass and held up a limp piece of skin, which we recognized from the mane and ears as the hide of our old horse. “Little miss sees and starts to cry,” he sang out, “but all that's left is horsey's hide!”

We knew that Herr Kunzelmann thought it clever to speak to us in painfully contorted rhymes loosely borrowed from Wilhelm Busch, whom he evidently considered the favorite poet of all children who understood German, or at least as a great magician of a language that was perfect for fostering an air of rascally conspiracy. Unfortunately, in our case neither assumption was correct. Nothing bothered us more than the ambiguous irony of this ostensibly smiling philosopher of the little man, whose gruesome, sentimentally internalized misanthropy not only made the all-too-catchy rhymed and illustrated stories embarrassing, but also called into question the purported moral. We were far more aware of their crudity than that of the much more drastic
Struwwelpeter.
That a child who sucked his thumb had it cut off, or was burned into a heap of ashes as a result of playing with matches, we accepted as fairy tale: it was transported to the realm of the unreal, and so, despite the lasting impression it made, it had little actual effect on our childish soul. Even at their most gruesome, the
Struwwelpeter
rhymes, in a book where cats cry, a hare shoots at a hunter, and Saint Nicholas finally shows up to punish the bad boy, were clearly cartoons. The bloody, knocked-out tooth, on the other hand, which seals Busch's utterly mean story about the boy with the peashooter, and which is described with gleeful realism, came close to making us feel physical pain and mutilation of the most brutal and direct sort, no matter how fascinated we were by the sight. And just as we had been bothered by Max and Moritz getting ground up in the mill, the death of Fips the Ape tormented us our whole life long: it was an overly enigmatic satire, in which bourgeois morality triumphed over a clever, comical, intelligent, and obviously loving animal.

Back then we didn't realize what made these craftily unfolding cautionary tales so perfidious, and at the same time so great—though very bad reading for children—at least when viewed in the light of intellectual refraction: namely, that in the world of Wilhelm Busch it is people—and petty, dumb, and vengeful people at that—who punish the wrongdoers, whereas in the more innocent moral fairy tales, the higher power of good always sends out an avenging angel, albeit often in foolish disproportion to the incident at hand. But we did feel the strange impotence of hatred that seeks to still itself in humor, thereby robbing both of any claim to purity. We felt the meanness of the souls that he created and had made to act so true to life that they were indelibly etched in our memory, equipping us with the dubious pleasures of boorish situational comedy as well as a cynical, worldly-wise attitude—the worst bastard offspring of a casually smirking worldview. A little later we were led into the morass of scornful tolerance, which attempts to placate all the indignation of a wounded sense of justice with the logic: “What do you expect? That's the way the world is. You can't change it. And would it be any better if you could? It's smarter to laugh than to cry your heart out about it.” But in those early days we suffered from our inability to excuse the baseness, especially as we wanted so much to see everything resolved in pure cheerfulness—for instance in the story of the two dogs Plisch and Plum, which was utterly ruined for us because of the ending: we despised the converted boys who, like the dogs, had had their good behavior beaten into them, and their only reward was to look on happily as their beloved dogs were sold off to the eccentric Englishman.

And then there was the malicious laughter with which Herr Kunzelmann accompanied his quotations, his menacing index finger with its horny and permanently dirty nail, the bad German he spoke when making pronouncements such as “But the children start to plan again more and worse shenanigans” or “The best is written here in stone: leave what's well enough alone” in order to jokingly dissuade us from pranks we neither intended nor ever committed; and, finally, his compulsive bad habit of expanding each verse with nonsense syllables and thereby ruining it, occasionally to the point that it took us hours to reconstruct the original form—that was enough to elicit a strange antipathy mixed of disgust and attraction, both for Wilhelm Busch and his dreadful interpreter. But the unfathomable tastelessness that Herr Kunzelmann committed by showing us the hide of our dead horse, which he crowned with the concluding citation “No matter what you think or say, death is always in your way!” whereupon he once again gave the reins a lively jiggle to bring our Kobiela into motion, and drove away laughing—we considered that a desecration, and it upset and depressed us for days.

It's worth noting that years later, and ever since, I was to absolve Herr Kunzelmann of blame, thanks to a certain gesture of my sister Tanya, which freed us from any psychological burden his action might have imposed on us—if, contrary to the custom in Czernopol, we were to consider the man's lowliness a fault. This absolution was rendered without any intent on Tanya's part, simply as a result of her grace and its liberating power. I am speaking of the absolute politeness with which Tanya once took an apple from Herr Kunzelmann. It was an apple of choice beauty, an early variety we called “paper apples” because of their tender-brittle linden-colored skin. One day Herr Kunzelmann, whom we had avoided for a long time, surprised us while we were deeply engrossed in one of our games. There he was, apple in hand, out of the blue, looking us over one after the other, as if he were Paris and had to decide who deserved the apple. Finally he handed it to Tanya. And while the rest of us waited for Tanya to politely decline, she took it, completely unchallenged, her eyes focused on its immaculate beauty, then curtsied politely and turned back to us, expecting us to continue our game. She had gently crossed her legs in a pose we would later develop more thoroughly during ballet instruction at Madame Aritonovich's institute, and her slender body, already quite tall, supported her childish head with its abundance of brown hair the way the smooth stems of parrot tulips carry their full and richly feathered blossoms. In her simple play-dress she seemed as sexless as an angel. I can't say I was aware of the grace of this image back then, but I held on to it, and it returns every time I think about the majesty of a child. Such was the power of Tanya's grace that even Herr Kunzelmann lost his crude compulsion to utter something shallow; he stepped away without a word, his leather gaiters cautiously departing our field of vision. Tanya held the apple for a while, then ate it up without a glance. From that day on we no longer avoided Herr Kunzelmann. And yet even without agreeing to do so, from then on we called him, with the thin edge of our earliest derogatory irony, Schmunzelmann, or “the smirking Kunzelmann.”

But now to the incident with Herr Adamowski. The sight of the ill-matched couple he formed with Professor Feuer—“a horse and a cow on the same shaft,” was how our coachman put it—always brought us to the garden fence when Strindberg's doppelgänger and the hobbling journalist passed down the street around noontime. Moreover, by nodding and blinking and baring his teeth at us, Herr Adamowski had given us to understand that he well knew the cause of our curiosity. Then he would exaggerate his laborious gait, rolling his eyes and puffing out his cheeks when he rose up on his healthy leg, powerful yet still woefully short next to the tree-sized Professor Feuer, and shaking his head and letting it sink to his shoulders in distress when he then went back down on his short, crippled leg. He would look straight at us and laugh by baring his sawlike teeth and squinting through his flashing monocle. His grimaces were so sudden and darting, his expression so full of mystery and expectation, that we had the impression we were looking into a whirling wheel of fortune, from which the thick red winning number would jump out at any moment. He raised his rubber-tipped cane to his beret and lowered it again as if saluting with a sword. As with the Wilhelm Busch illustrations, we were at once fascinated and repulsed. Out of politeness we soon managed to return his greeting, which he acknowledged with a broad, obliging smile, which strangely reminded us of Widow Morar's golden mouth. But we never greeted him out loud; we bowed or curtsied in silence, out of fear that he otherwise might say something to us.