An Ermine in Czernopol (22 page)

These words elicited an awkward general silence that was finally broken by our mother. She said: “I wrote Aida about it. The poor child follows our lives here with such interest; she wants to know everything that's happening. Perhaps you would be curious to read what she thinks about it.”

She handed the prefect a letter. Herr Tarangolian took it with his fingertips like a rose petal, pulled it close to his face as if he intended to kiss the paper, knitted his eyes and scanned the lines while moving the letter farther and farther away, until it was finally at arm's length.

“You are wearing glasses when you read?” asked Uncle Sergei, curious.

“Not at all, not in the least, my vision is perfect,” muttered Herr Tarangolian with the quick, defensive tone of someone embarrassed. “Although when I am moved—please forgive me but the fate of your dear sister touches my heart so much …”

Our mother took back the letter. “Here, Aida just wrote a couple lines about the matter: ‘I find Major Tildy's conduct exceptionally beautiful and noble. Precisely because he chooses to stand up for L. shows him as a man of chivalrous sensibility, of the sort that seems to be extinct in this new world. Standing up for those who are lost is Christian in the noblest way. I admire Tildy as one of the last men under whose protection women can still feel secure.'”

“That is very deeply felt, and very feminine,” said Herr Tarangolian, after a brief moment of emotion. “Very much Aida with her tender sensibilities. May I ask if she mentions how she is doing?”

“Only two sentences at the end of the letter: ‘I am suffering indescribable pain. Pray for me!'”

Herr Tarangolian, shaken, went silent. “If only we could live our lives all over again from the beginning,” he then said. He got up, came over to us children and stroked our heads. “You, in whom our wasted hopes are resurrected,” he said, full of melancholy. He kissed our mother's hand and left with an elegiac wave.

Uncle Sergei played with the silk tassel of the everlasting match from his cigarette case. “
Eh bien
, a little game of piquet,
ma chère cousine
?” he asked Aunt Paulette, Mama's younger sister.

“You would be well advised to take stock of yourself,” said Aunt Paulette, who flirted with him in a familial, teasing way.

“Is it really necessary for the children to be present after we have eaten?” asked our father, irritated.

“Now that Miss Rappaport is no longer with us there's hardly any alternative. After all, they can't simply be sent onto the street.”

“As if that would make any difference,” our father said, getting up to leave as well.

Aunt Paulette, who was twenty-one and progressive and wore her hair short, leaned so far back in her chair that her neck rested on the back, exposing the beautiful curve of her white throat. “Give me a cigarette, Sergei. And if you want, I'll play with you, but rummy, not piquet. Since we're all having such a good time … Incidentally, what is it that Madame Tildy takes? Morphine or cocaine?”

“Presumably both, my dear,” said Uncle Sergei softly. “A very interesting lady.”

“Presumably we should pray for Tildy as well,” said Aunt Paulette, blowing her cigarette smoke up toward the ceiling. Then, with a lethargic look to the side: “But you have to shuffle the cards well and let me cut the deck three times. Otherwise I won't play with you.”

A few days later, Herr Tarangolian brought the latest sensation: the honor court had been dissolved. Tildy had been ordered to report to the division commander.

Thanks to his remarkably competent sources of information, who apparently had their eyes and ears at every keyhole in town, the prefect knew the content of this conversation and did not hesitate to pass it on to us, word for word.

He began by describing General Petrescu in a few strokes, as a highly qualified, albeit very vain man, one of the youngest generals of the army, with shadowy political ambitions, a sophisticated demeanor, and the oratorical gifts of a Roman lawyer.

Petrescu's nimble ability to empathize was evident in the manner he received Tildy, who, without realizing or intending it, had done the infantry officer a great service, since the breaking scandal gave him the chance he had long been waiting for to “give that stable of studhorses a good grooming.” The general chose to hold the interview informally; he approached Tildy, shook his hand, and with polished nonchalance offered Tildy one of the chairs that faced his leather-topped desk. In order to fetch a small box of cigars and a bottle of cognac he stepped upstage to the little cupboard where he kept these gentlemanly fortifications, and this maneuver allowed him to make a very effective entrance as he commenced his speech:

“Let me just say, Tildy, that I am very glad to have an occasion to meet you, regardless of the circumstances. Your outstanding reputation as an officer has made this a long-standing wish of mine. Nor am I merely paying you a compliment. In fact, I should add that I have another motivation as well. The incidents that led me to request your presence, incidents which are certainly regrettable but by no means earth-shaking, and which we will have sorted out in no time, since I'm certain we share the same opinion—these events will inevitably bring the issue of your nationality into the debate. I'd just like to say that I have the greatest possible respect for men like you, who have demonstrated enormous political understanding by placing their faith in our new government, which is both more stable and more just than its predecessor—men who may speak a different mother tongue than the people after whom our new country is named, but whose allegiance to our new state is no less steadfast, because they love the land of their birth and the people among whom they were raised. Such chosen devotion is evidence of a civic virtue that I respect far more than the chauvinist nationalism of those who maintain that merely because streets and currency have been renamed, or because police regulations, tax acts, and public warning signs have been translated into their language, they then have the right to bash away at their fellow citizens of different ethnicities. I confess quite plainly that I don't know what to make of the concept of a state built on minorities, unless we examine the question qualitatively and not quantitatively, and in my opinion the single deciding factor should be the individual commitment to upholding the state. All that by way of introduction. Please, help yourself if you'd like a cognac. The glasses are lady-sized, but as your commanding officer I order you not to draw any conclusions from that.”

Shallow though it was, one would have expected Tildy to acknowledge this joke, which was clearly made with the good intention of keeping the atmosphere as casual as possible. But nothing of the sort happened. The general, meanwhile, showed great aplomb in covering up the gentle irritation he felt when he realized—unexpectedly but perhaps insightfully—how ineffective his charm was proving. With a practiced voice, whose melodious tone was ready to swell to its forensic fullness, he said:

“Let's get down to business, Tildy. The fact that I approve of your conduct—down to one or two formal errors, or let's be frank about it, clumsy mistakes—I hardly need to tell you. It is our task to bring esteem and respect to the army of this young state, from within as well as from without. It is completely natural that an officer should defend his family's reputation with a deadly determination. In other words: it should be absolutely clear that I am grateful to you for providing such an example to your comrades-in-arms. But as I mentioned: in your very understandable agitation, you managed to commit one or two clumsy mistakes. First: you should have realized that Năstase would not accept your challenge—Colonel Turturiuk is absolutely right on that account. I don't need to lecture you that not just anyone may be deemed worthy of crossing arms with an officer of our army. Even so, perhaps Năstase could be given the benefit of the doubt: he comes from a respected family, is educated, has a certain social polish. But he is young—a flaw I would happily share with him, incidentally …”

Tildy's countenance remained unchanged. The general waited a few seconds in vain for a kind remark, then brought the fingertips of his hands together—he had seated himself in an armchair across from Tildy—and went on, a little dampened, with his extremely well-turned speech:

“You should have taken this youth into account, Tildy. You should not have given Năstase the possibility of treating a challenge to a pistol duel as a trifle. You should have castigated him on the spot. Then it would have been up to him to challenge you. Had he not done so he would have passed judgment on himself. You might object that it would be unseemly to hit someone in the house of your superior. But you yourself, Tildy, rendered this argument invalid by slapping Alexianu, who was in no way involved. So up to that moment the case was a complete muddle. What saved it—and you see how open I am being with you—was your challenge to the colonel. I'm sure you realize that you will have to bear the consequences of such an action. I will take pains that they don't exceed the bounds of the routine disciplinary actions. But only because I am in complete agreement with you that this is a question of principle. The honor of an officer is sacrosanct. In that regard I am completely on your side. I will not hesitate to support you in front of all authorities including the highest. Just as a matter of principle, you understand. That is why I ordered the honor court to be dissolved for the time being. It will be reconvened at the appropriate time in a different form and given greater powers. At that time all sorts of items will be brought to the table. Until then you are to hold yourself ready. Once again: I find your conduct not in the least reprehensible, apart from the ineptitude at the beginning. As I said, it's a matter of principle. Because the idea that you would feel your honor had been wounded …” The general smiled. “
Entre nous
, Tildy—for that I consider you too smart, too superior. Because it would be a very strange place indeed to keep your honor hidden—”

At this point Herr Tarangolian interrupted his report and said that it would be impossible for him to repeat the general's joke. We children were sent out under some pretext or another.

But we soon found out what the general had said. Of course it cost my sister Tanya a golden heart with a Madonna medallion, which she used to bribe Uncle Sergei. But we had long gotten used to slipping him little pieces of jewelry, which we would then claim to have lost, and at times, too, the contents of our piggy banks, so that he could play his cards, and in this case we would have been ready to give up much more to hear the words that sealed our hussar's fate.

And so we heard them. And we also heard what followed.

The general said: “It would be a very strange place indeed to keep your honor hidden, Major Tildy—
between the legs of your sister-in-law.
”

At that, Tildy jumped up, grabbed his shako and gloves, clicked his heels together and left the room without a word.

One hour later his challenge was delivered to General Petrescu.

That same afternoon Tildy was arrested and placed under observation at the municipal asylum for the insane.

O
F ALL
the birds that dwell above cities, pigeons are the serious patricians. They are linked to the Baroque, which opened and softened the craggy, narrow world of gables to provide a clifflike homeland, full of accommodating hollow nesting places and hideouts, as well as platforms, ramps, and stages where they can collect, cuddle, and strut with pigeonly self-importance. Because unlike the shy and furtive tree dwellers of the parks and gardens, who whoosh back and forth to create an abstract tapestry, as if weaving the bare wintry branches into the green leaves; unlike the tireless gulls of the ports, who glide up and down in waves that mimic the surface of the restless sea, pigeons are steady and gregarious, they like a show of fussiness, and move sprightly and coquettishly, their bodies quivering like a cluster of lilacs, their nimble feet pattering, and their small heads always bent in a tender curve.

Swallows and falcons belong to Gothic towers, creatures of a different sphere, of reverie, natives of heaven for whom diving through the boundless sky is pure ardor translated into movement. Jackdaws are the denizens of abandoned buildings, crumbling walls, and barren, defoliated treetops—oddball artists of flight, playful bohemians of the air—while the starlings form a quarrelsome proletariat that goes whirring off the rooftop gutters to scrap over a bit of straw lying in the dust. Pigeons alone display a cultured, bourgeois behavior, showing grace and circumspection in a firmly ordered world, politely stepping aside for you on the squares, where they have descended in swarms, trickling over each other, nodding their heads, cooing as they bow deeply to one another; and the slightly coarse clapping of their wings carries them to the stony saints gesticulating on the cornices, breathing gentle life into their isolation.

The pigeons above Czernopol were wild and fast: they flitted high overhead as if sweeping past inhospitable territory, in arrow-straight paths, from the range of hills along the Volodiak to the scattered oak groves of the great steppe across the river. Only a few would from time to time drop to perch in the crowns of old beeches and poplars that lined the main roads out of town, just for a brief rest. You seldom saw them by day, except when they cut across the pale, early-morning sky, or just before evening, when the heavens turned the color of their plumage, without smoke, and a first star appeared, magically, as if announced by their flight.

We always treated that first star as a mystery, a deeply mystical occurrence. We could never pin down the moment it actually emerged, in a sky that was the same sky that had passed through the day, but had taken a giant step back, so that it was now deeper by a whole heaven's breadth, and open to newer depths beyond. This star that appeared without warning twinkled with the magic of something placed in the world complete and fully formed; it was simply there, and required no becoming. And even if we told ourselves that we could discern these new reaches only because our eyes had acquired a fixed point with which to gauge the distance, the actual appearance of that star would forever remain a mystery of creation. Beyond all scientific explanations, we realized that all new creation necessarily enlarges and enriches our own world by bringing new dimensions.