An Ermine in Czernopol (24 page)

Because by the time Paşcanu married the Princess Sturdza, he already owned several other houses, in the city as well as in the country, including a hunting lodge in his huge forests, where princes of royal blood had been his guests. But even at the height of his grandeur he lived in the house by the old Turkish fountain. He clung with great tenacity to that first house, which he had acquired soon after his return from the siege of Plevna, paying for it with shiny Turkish gold coins—coins of shadowy provenance, from uncovered treasure perhaps, or else from a robbery—the rumors about it abounded. And, indeed, the former owner of the house was found a little later, murdered and robbed. And while things like that were not exactly rare in Czernopol, and there was certainly never a shortage of suspects, the crime was popularly attributed to the young new arrival, though nothing could ever be proven against him.

In any event: he stayed, and multiplied his wealth—whatever its origin—by a fantastic degree. No one knew for sure exactly what business dealings he pursued in his early days—and, to some extent, in later life as well—and on that subject the rumor mill was equally active. The fact is that he could never write more than his name. In later years he would have the paper read to him by his coachman, a
scopit
, or member of a Russian religious sect that required men to undergo castration after producing two children in marriage. Săndrel Paşcanu had his business partners read his contracts out loud and immediately memorized the wording down to the tiniest detail.

His main business was lumber. The egregious purchase of entire forests, scandalous con acts, bribes, and misappropriations filled entire annals, from which Herr Tarangolian was able to recite the most amusing entries. Because anything Săndrel Paşcanu undertook had the character of a coup—and often of a caper as well. And for the longest time he enjoyed a fabulous success. Even one of his middlemen came into a sizable—and, as it turned out, more stable—fortune, and in 1916 was raised to the landed Austrian gentry: Baronet Hirsh Leib von Merores—people later spoke of the family's Spanish heritage.

The stories about his two wives, however, were far more exciting and eerily romantic: the legitimate spouse, the born Princess Sturdza, and his mistress, the beautiful peasant girl Ioana Ciornei. He had lived with both at once, and rumor had it that they died at the same time—that is to say, he killed them, or they killed each other. The motive was said to be a fabulous diamond, a single stone of unusual size and unique cut: Săndrel Paşcanu was said to have presented it to the princess the morning after their wedding night, and later to have taken it away to give to Ciornei on a similar, though less legitimate, occasion. Supposedly the two women, whom he forced to live in the same house, battled each other fiercely, and at the center of their conflict was the stone, which became a kind of a symbol, a fetish for conjuring the love of Săndrel Paşcanu.

People said that they conducted their feud with the strangest weapons. For instance, Ioana Ciornei couldn't withstand the princess's gaze and always wore a veil whenever the latter was present, so that Princess Sturdza would lie in wait, ready to reveal her eyes and force Ciornei to her knees and make her give up the stone. Meanwhile, the princess had a very delicate sense of hearing, and couldn't bear her rival's voice: so once the princess had recovered the diamond through the power of her princely gaze, Ciornei would sing peasant songs day in and day out, both happy and sad, until the princess was driven to the point of insanity and would hurl the stone at her rival's feet. In the end Paşcanu is said to have killed them both, or else they killed themselves, their hands so firmly locked onto the diamond that they had to be buried in one coffin.

Of course that was sheer fantasy. After all, we had our friend Widow Morar to thank for most of the stories.

What was true, however, was that both of Săndrel Paşcanu's wives lay buried next to each other in the little forest of Horecea. The oak grove was about a half hour's wagonride out of town and belonged to a small monastery; Paşcanu's generous donations had made the monks eager to do his bidding, and they watched over the grave of his wives like a holy shrine. Apart from that, he was accompanied on his nightly visits by his elephant-sized coachman, who despite his mutilation, which was generally understood to have a mollifying effect, was supposedly as mean and cunning as a buffalo gone wild.

We did manage to visit the mausoleum several times, though always during the day, and without being able to see whatever fantastic things were happening behind the thick tangle of barbed wire. The structure was indeed a detailed reproduction of the Taj Mahal, except for the fact it was made of the cheapest limestone and covered with plaster that had long since yellowed and partially peeled off. It was also very much scaled down in size, so the whole thing looked pretty hideous. The long reflecting pool, where we expected to see lotus flowers, was brimming with frogs and toads.

But perhaps it looked different by moonlight. Presumably the air of danger exuded by the castrated coachman prowling about while his master paid his devotions to the two coffins gave it a bizarre charm. And just as children everywhere challenge each other to venture into the cemetery at midnight, we would say: “I dare you to go to the Taj Mahal at night, to see what old Paşcanu is up to.”

People said he couldn't sleep because of a terrible conscience, that that was what drove him to the coffins of his two loves, and that in his remorse he kept buying new jewels to present to the dead women, hoping for the forgiveness they could no longer grant him. The coffins were supposed to be completely covered with the most expensive gems.

But people also said he skulked around the crypt at night because he wanted his huge diamond back, and that every night he was tempted to open the coffins, but he was always held back by the horror he felt at the sight of the crypt.

Both tales were probably simply made up. But that didn't stop Săndrel Paşcanu from using the first one to his advantage, to give his last coup the aura of romantic extravagance—and thus credibility: he had some middlemen purchase a gem that was worth a fortune, then let out that he was looking for the perfect match, no matter what the price. After that, he tried to sell the same stone to the first seller, through intermediaries, for two or three times the original price.

Old Paşcanu hadn't realized that the trick was one of countless primitive scams known to every jeweler of any stature. After that he tried to dupe his middlemen—and wound up being robbed himself in the most ignominious way. It cost him all that was left of his fortune—and his life.

This all happened at the same time as the events I have already described, shortly after Major Tildy was sent to have his mental state examined at the municipal asylum.

Later people said: “And one fine night old Paşcanu rode out to his two wives for the last time.” And nobody knew that it was true …

Perhaps the moon was out. Perhaps the crickets were chirping their silvery notes all across the fields and meadows of the vast countryside. Perhaps the croaking of myriad frogs in the cattails around the pools and ponds and muddy lagoons of the Volodiak hung like a veil in the starry stillness. No one paid attention to that. That last night swallowed his secret, and never surrendered it.

No one will ever find out what he really did that night, or all the nights before, in front of the coffins of his dead wives.

Perhaps when he came back there was only one star left in the pale sky—the one the wild pigeons had announced, and which they hurried after when it suddenly went out, proving themselves its loyal messengers, always at the ready.

And the colossal horses in front of Paşcanu's old-fashioned, swaying coach stamped their great hooves, raising the dust on the country road that led to the little forest of Horecea and far beyond until it lost itself in the immeasurable expanse of the countryside. What had been a pale-yellow ribbon of moonlight just a little while before, banded by black stripes from the hard shadows of the poplars, was now a melancholy trail in the morning twilight, urging the wanderer to shoulder his bundle and move on, toward that which can never be reached. A black box, framed by the silhouette of the poplars: this is how the old coach looked, coming down this road, thumping onto the planks of the ferry, which was pulled by a wire cable which workers from Frost's Steam Mill had set across the muddy water of the Volodiak arm. The colossal horses snorted down at the water, while the mammoth
scopit
seemed to sleep on his box, his head covered with a narrow-brimmed Russian cap. The water gurgled past the rusty iron drums beneath the planking, and the cable sang quietly. The ferry creaked to a landing on the opposite shore, and while the sleepy sawmill workers patiently waited in the gravel on the bank, Paşcanu's horses clattered up the escarpment and trotted hard and heavy over the wretched cobblestones of the Wassergasse, up toward the town.

On the outskirts of the city, the moonstruck dogs had stopped their baying. Columns of small farmers' carts rattled monotonously on their way to market. In the cellar bakeries of the Jewish quarter, which stretched over five-sevenths of the built-up area of Czernopol, muscular journeymen shoved long peels loaded with kosher rolls, braided challahs, and
kolatschen
pastries into heated ovens, causing the rats to flee into the rear courtyards, where snarling cats waited for them, their backs arched over the remains of fish, and where the whining and bawling of little children mixed with the sad singsong of their mothers and the groaning of their grandmothers and the abysmal coughing of the grandfathers to form a symphony from the dormitory at Saint Bridget's hospice, which was an antechamber of hell.

In front of the Trocadero, on Iancu Topor Avenue, a pack of drunken students gathered, then went rampaging along the park past the provincial government offices, down to the main street, to paint swastikas on the warehouse belonging to Usher Brill. In the garage of the house belonging to the Baronet von Merores, the chauffeur began washing the Chrysler. Further on, beyond the Volksgarten, the buglers blew reveille on the grounds of the cavalry barracks. In their stalls, the horses snorted and ground their teeth, chains clanked, buckets rattled, and from the windows of the troops' quarters could be heard sergeants bellowing at their men, shooing the sleepy soldiers out of the stuffy, sweaty rooms, and sending them pattering into the corridors like a herd of groggy sheep. In the large loop beside the sheds, the first streetcar howled.

At the Bahnhofstrasse, the old-fashioned coach had to cross the streetcar tracks. Perhaps the sleepy
scopit
reined in his team with a loud curse, because a man was walking along the rails, his cane riding inside the groove that was leading him forward, his head aloft like that of a blind man, mumbling Latin odes to himself, occasionally laughing or launching into a song.

It was Professor Lyubanarov, coming home from a long night in the seedy dives around the train station.

The rampaging students recognized him. They danced around him a while, hooting and jeering, without his even noticing. Then they ran ahead to the Ringplatz and reset the switch at the tram stop. They roared with delight when they saw him switch tracks, with all the confidence of a sleepwalker, then let him move on in peace, turning their attention instead to the aurochs of Tescovina, which with lowered horns was trampling the breast of the eagle of the Dual Monarchy. One of the students climbed onto the primal bull, straddling its neck to work his way up to the horns, from where he pissed down onto the pavement of the esplanade in a high splashing arch. Day was breaking over Czernopol.

The coach with the faded violet silk repp curtains and the mice-infested upholstery rattled onto the bend of the narrow street at the Turkish Fountain and pulled to a stop at its crest. The coachman swung his rippling castrated corpulence off the high box and opened the gate with a massive key. Then he led the giant horses by the snaffle into the courtyard. The gate was immediately shut; a heavy bolt slid into place. Săndrel Paşcanu was alone in his home, with his mean castrated servant, his solitude, his senile pride, and his Titian.

W
HENEVER
in later years we thought back on our childhood, painfully recalling its richness and dignity, what we had retained from our youth struck us as an inheritance acquired by devious means. It had so little to do with what we had become that we at times felt tempted to consider it the “literary existence” Herr Tarangolian had dutifully warned us against. The images from those days seem as far-removed as the untold fairy tales and legends that filled it with such wonders. Just like these stories, our childhood may be told and may even come to life in the telling, although the unmistakable quality of its reality cannot be reproduced. And even if this reality is awakened inside us for a few moments, in all its layered complexity, and speaks to us so directly and urgently that it causes us to shudder, what we then hear doesn't seem entirely our own, but rather the voice of the past itself, lamenting that which is lost, and which continues to dwindle into oblivion, with us and around us, with every passing hour.

“We are like the housing of an hourglass,” Herr Tarangolian used to say, when he felt obliged to admit that his memory was beginning to deteriorate with age. “Our consciousness is its narrow waist, unable to hold on to what passes through. Only the distant filling spaces cast back a vague reflection. To perceive something in a way it won't be forgotten we have to become aware of its presence without looking at it. You have to look past something in order to see it in full.”

And indeed: at times we encounter something that happens to correspond to one of those essential images we carry inside us, like iridescent refraction in old glass, so that it lights up within us, for just a heartbeat, setting off a flash of magical splendor, which is as fleeting as an echo and fully out of our control. For we cannot simply conjure at will its momentary shine in all the fullness of being perceived—the unity of color, smell, sound, and touch that absorbs all these characteristics and transmutes them into a single essential core. We are left to the mercy of a moment that resembles the moment when it first crossed the periphery of our field of vision, when we were focused on something else entirely.