An Ermine in Czernopol (29 page)

“Yes, but none of that excuses the fact that a gross injustice has been committed, that it was all completely unwarranted!” exclaimed our Aunt Elvira. “You can't just pack a man off to the asylum because he makes you feel uncomfortable.”

“My dear friend, if you had to decide his case, would you send him home right now?” asked the prefect, with an ironic look.

“You don't expect us to believe that they're keeping him there out of kindness, do you?” asked Aunt Paulette, the youngest.

“I don't expect you to believe anything. I only said that he is being treated with consideration and tact.”

“So he has no idea what's happening outside the walls of his confinement?”

“I don't believe so.”

“But that's even more horrible, if that's possible! Isn't anybody thinking about his poor wife?” Aunt Elvira was outraged.

“On the contrary, everyone is thinking about his wife.” Herr Tarangolian seemed to enjoy the general silence that followed his words.

“Permit me,” he said after a while. “Could he be of any help to her?”

“That's not the question. But at least he ought to be given a chance to try.”

“Unfortunately that's impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible.”

Herr Tarangolian shrugged his shoulders and busied himself with his cigar.

“Won't Major Tildy demand accountability when he's dismissed?” asked our mother. “A man of his character will consider this the worst thing that could be done to him, obstructing the performance of his duty.”

“Demand accountability from whom?” asked Herr Tarangolian.

This time the silence proved a little embarrassing, full of hidden shoals—there was too much being unsaid. Our temperamental Aunt Paulette couldn't bear it any longer.

“I hate you, my dear old friend! Admit that you have your hand in it. And not for Tildy's sake. You're no angel. But because he's in your way somehow, because he doesn't fit into one of your intrigues. The notion that he's being spared out of consideration while he's actually being kept locked up in a nuthouse as long as possible is a perfidious hypocritical pretext. Admit it—you are a devil.”

“I don't feel close enough to the beyond to say which category suits me best,” said Herr Tarangolian. “The only thing I know for sure is that you, my dear young friend, look as much like an angel as a human being possibly can—although perhaps one of Lucifer's entourage …”

“A fallen angel, in other words,” said Aunt Paulette drily. The comment unleashed a palpable wave of embarrassment.

Herr Tarangolian acted as if he hadn't heard her. “
Ach
, my child,” he said. “Be annoyed, be indignant, wax righteous with anger, champion all that is noble and good, or else the opposite—at your age everything is beautiful.”

“Do you know much about the institution?” asked Uncle Sergei, interested. “What I mean is: Do they not have methods? Straitjackets for raving madmen and such like? Or perhaps they are using certain therapies such as electrical shocks?”

“You can rest assured none of that will be applied to Major Tildy,” the prefect said with enigmatic irony.

“Naturally!” exclaimed Uncle Sergei in all his disarming naiveté. “I am asking only out of curiosity, medicinally speaking, you know.”

“Naturally,” said Herr Tarangolian.

“I have the picture you requested of Aida's grave,” our mother said. “The gravestone is up now. My relatives wrote that it turned out very nice.”

“You are kindness in person,” Herr Tarangolian mumbled, moved, as he kissed her hand …

Aunt Paulette reclined her bobbed hair against the seat back and stared up at the ceiling with arched eyebrows.

“You have very beautiful throat,” said Uncle Sergei.

“Are you tempted to sink your teeth into it?”

“Paulette!” said our mother. “If I might ask, would you help the children with their schoolwork this afternoon—or better yet, why don't you go up right now, you'll have the whole afternoon to yourselves.” She turned back to Herr Tarangolian: “It's really a terrible shame that Miss Rappaport couldn't come back …”

Aunt Paulette got up. “A terrible shame,” she said. “And no one has more cause to regret it than I do.”

She shooed us upstairs. “Incidentally, even when the dear departed Rappaport was with us the brood was always sent out only when it was too late.”

“An excellent educational method,” said Herr Tarangolian. “Children can never be corrupted early enough. On that matter I agree entirely with my friend Fiokla Aritonovich.”

“Paulette, please!” said Mama.

Aunt Paulette opened the door and let us out with an ironic bow. She didn't exactly hate us, but she made no secret of her indifference toward us, and of the fact that recently we had become downright burdensome. It was also clear that it was only reluctantly that she undertook the task of helping us with our homework and otherwise standing in for the absent Miss Rappaport. But perhaps she was simply venting her general displeasure at us. She was twenty-five years old, very pretty, full of joie de vivre, and unspeakably bored in our household, which was anything but companionable. Apart from Herr Tarangolian and the occasional relative from the countryside, no one came to visit us, and it didn't occur to anyone to pursue some social connections or visit friends in town. Although the household was large and busy—we were still a large family, including the help, and we did include them, a whole tribe—nothing could hide the fact that the empty space around us was expanding to the point where we felt entirely alone and utterly isolated.

We had yet to endure the painful experience of seeing such an entity as seemingly natural as our own family dissolve and disintegrate. In later years we told ourselves that we had parted from nothing more than a beautiful delusion, that the nestlike warmth we remembered from our intact home had never truly resided between its walls but was more the product of the warming rays of our childish bodies, our liveliness and open-mindedness, and that what we experienced was therefore the only natural outcome—namely, that we grew colder, along with the world around us. But no matter how reasonably we bore that in mind, it failed to assuage our homesickness—any more than a secret suspicion we shared that none of us would ever be capable of erecting anything as solid, sheltering, and warm as our childhood home.

Or should we already have had some feeling, some premonition, of what it was that made Madame Tildy so cold?

Meanwhile, Uncle Sergei seemed to show more understanding than might be expected from the implacably cheerful and charming countenance of an unreformed rogue. The accidental silence lasted for several minutes and at one point suddenly became palpably oppressive, without anyone being able to say why. Then Uncle Sergei blew a few rings from his cigarette in faux contemplation, puckering his lips in a kind of artful parody and sending the smoke off into the past, while quoting: “He who doesn't build a house today will never build; and he who is alone will so remain …” He reached his hand out to Aunt Paulette, who was resting her head against the back of the chair and staring at the ceiling, and said with exaggerated sentimentality: “Give me your hand,
ma chère cousine
, in order to warm me.”

Aunt Paulette didn't move. Uncle Sergei raised his eyebrows very high and then sang, as mellifluously as a tender Pierrot, and bone-chillingly off-key, “
Là ci darem la mano
,” then sighed and got up. We knew he was going to play cards. Our mother stood up with him and left the room under some pretext. We knew that she would slip him a little money outside.

It may have been a mood like that which led Aunt Paulette to go and visit Tamara Tildy. She hadn't told anyone her intention, and we didn't learn of the visit until a few days later, and then quite by coincidence.

The conversation proceeded the same as most of the conversations that took place in our house did, and exactly the way, strangely enough, we would recall later on: assembled in the so-called
salon
, drinking black coffee after dinner, a group of people sitting motionless, silent, and fossilized. The only thing that occasionally enlivened this group was the presence of Herr Tarangolian, but after Aunt Aida's death his visits grew less and less frequent, and finally, after a difference in opinion that had become all too clear, they ceased almost entirely. We were always inclined to think that this increasing stiffness in the lifeless room didn't start until after Miss Rappaport had left us—which is proof of how much we are prey to optical illusions whenever we look back at the past.

The conversation was trivial and disjointed. Sentences such as “Will you have some more coffee, Sergei?” and “Thank you so much, Cousin Elvira!” floated randomly on the surface of a sluggish silence. Aunt Paulette, her head resting on the back of her chair as usual—which earned the undisguised disapproval of her older sisters—interjected: “Do tell me if you should ever win anything at cards, Sergei. I'd like to borrow some money from you.”

“You know, my angel, I never win. Alas.”

“It might happen yet. If you cheat as cleverly as you do when you play rummy with me …”

“Why do you need money,
moye serdtse
? A woman who has your beauty has everything.”

Aunt Paulette said nothing.

“I understand,” said Uncle Sergei after a while. “She is not doing well? She is always hungry?”

“Yes, she is hungry.”

“Oh-là-là,” said Uncle Sergei. “But this hunger is very hard to still. Very expensive. The games I play are for kopecks.”

“You sometimes see a doctor, by the name of Zablonski or some such?”

“You are speaking of Madame Tildy?” our mother said, not without a certain edge. “Have you seen her?”

“Yes, I went to visit her,” said Aunt Paulette with unabashed nonchalance.

“To visit her?”

“Yes, the day before yesterday. There was already someone else there as well. A certain Herr Adamowski, an editor from what I understood. He was performing magic tricks.”

“He was doing what?”

“Magic tricks. He pulled a sugar-egg out of his nose, and other unappetizing and boring things. Card tricks, too. You should avoid him, Sergei, if you run into him in one of her circles. He's better at it than you. You can recognize him by the fact he has a clubfoot. And a monocle. Both are hard to miss. Incidentally, Tamara Tildy seemed to be thoroughly amused by the man. She was practically bubbly, witty and charming. And the old Morar woman was lurking like a spider. When you look at her she closes her eyes and smiles. Her gold teeth are so bright you have the impression the sun is rising.”

“She waits on her, from what I hear,” our mother said.

“I think they sleep in one bed, if you can call what I saw a bed.”

“It's horrible,” our mother said. “By the way, children, you haven't been outside all day. Go play in the garden until Aunt Paulette calls you in to do your homework.”

If someone had told us back then that Aunt Paulette would wind up marrying Herr Adamowski, and then only after she'd been his mistress for a long time and under circumstances very embarrassing for all of us, we would have considered it the product of an unsound mind. We once spoke about it with Madame Aritonovich.

“What's so hard for you to understand,” she said, “about your aunt falling for this man? Tamara Tildy fell for him as well.”

“And?”

Madame Aritonovich smiled. “Didn't you ever notice how fascinated Paulette was by Tamara Tildy, from the very beginning, the same way you were fascinated by Tildy?” Except she was fascinated the way one woman is by another, through constant secret comparison, relentlessly lying in wait for the moment when she might emerge triumphant. She was younger and more beautiful, and that made her envy all the more bitter—that gives it an edge right away … You understand what I mean, Tanya, don't you?”

Tanya didn't answer.

“Of course,” the rest of us said. “And we could have understood it if she had taken Tildy away from her when he came back. But not this clubfoot, this salon-buffoon.”

“Tildy!” said Madame Aritonovich, almost disdainfully. She looked at Tanya. “You know what I mean, yes?”

Tanya still said nothing.

“Wait until you are twenty-five,” said Madame Aritonovich. “Live with relatives when you are young, beautiful, and at the peak of vitality but unable to move freely. Your expectations from life have been curtailed. Meet a man you find repulsive in every way—physically, mentally—but who has conquered the woman who makes you uneasy, because you sense that you have something in common, if nothing more, or nothing less, than a seed of the same despair. What will you do? You take revenge for this despair that she has beaten you to. You will want to hit her where it hurts the most, on account of your own despair … I don't expect you to approve, I only expect you to understand … Ah, but sadly you weren't in my school long enough, you little titmice, back then.”

The platitude that “You never can tell” could be aptly applied to the short time we spent in Madame Aritonovich's Institut d'Éducation, and we could count ourselves lucky that we didn't know back then how soon we would leave it. Because we were happy there, apart from a few very mundane childish worries—minor aches that later struck us as ridiculously trivial, though at the time they seemed as bitter as any sorrow yet to come.

One of those early pains, which I alone experienced, was responsible for our friendship with Blanche Schlesinger.

For a few weeks we had tried in vain to get to know her. But she was as retiring and shy toward us as she was toward all the others, and, moreover, we felt awkward and embarrassed by our attempts to approach her, and especially by our poorly feigned casualness. This was a technique we had picked up from Solly Brill, and to us it seemed a wonderful way to overcome embarrassment. But while such spontaneity was second nature to him, we were never to fully master it, not even later on. Nor did it work in the least bit with little Blanche. When her large, knowing eyes met our own, when we saw her sad smile that seemed to say “Don't try to disguise anything, don't put on an act, tell me what you want from me and I'll do it if I can, if it isn't too loud or garish,” we were stopped in our tracks, succumbing instantly to a sensitivity against everything garish, loud, or direct. For we had seen, often enough, how just one excessively familiar word or overly intimate gesture could cut to the quick, wounding a person where he was at his most vulnerable, at the core of his personality. And having to watch Blanche's eyes grow a shade darker, or her smile turn more sadder, while knowing that whenever things remained unsaid that should have been stated hardly helped us overcome our shyness—well, it only made things worse.