An Ermine in Czernopol (30 page)

I feel a little embarrassed when I say “little Blanche,” for although she was probably younger than we were, we never had the feeling that we had to patronize her, or that we even could. She was superior to us in every respect. Just like Solly Brill, and for the same reason: she was thousands of years ahead of us—the superiority of an older race.

We had no reservations when it came to treating Solly, who was a head shorter than we were and almost two years younger, as a superior being. His verdict on Blanche was, incidentally, absolutely matter-of-fact: “A whimsical creature, the Schlesinger girl”—and here he was right—“but intellectually anemic. Not worth talking about.”

So we contented ourselves with greeting her from afar, with a short nod and a quick glance, both conveyed in embarrassment, leaving us even more embarrassed because we knew that she was still observing us with her big eyes. And then the day came when she spoke to us.

It was during Fräulein Zehrer's German class, which usually passed sluggishly, unless it was fraught with the kind of tension that made us refractory and unleashed all the bad habits children are capable of when pressed into a stupid and unenlightened educational mold, although it should be noted that Fräulein Zehrer was hardly the fossilized schoolmarm people are inclined to blame for the shortcomings and taxing boredom of school. She was healthy and red-cheeked, relatively young, blond, even bright. But her unconcealed disapproval of Madame Aritonovich's pedagogical views and methods—which were never presented as a program but simply derived from her unique personality—made her contrary, and thereby inept. She taught in protest, and her protest was as much against Madame Aritonovich as it was against ourselves. Alone among the teachers employed at the Institut d'Éducation—mostly mousy old spinsters or kind, grubby old men—she had trained for her profession and had fallen victim to various modern ideas. Her ideal was most likely a German
Waldschulheim
—a boarding school in the woods with lots of sun, enormous windows, where the walls were adorned with the students' artwork and where the children sat outside in a meadow, singing chorales in a circle—the idyll, in a word, of a kindergarten teacher. The very building that housed the Institut d'Éducation, a dilapidated private home where the only equipment was the barre in the ballet room, must have been repugnant to her. Her revenge took the form of teaching us with a matter-of-factness and thoroughness that suffocated us with boredom. My guess is that Madame Aritonovich probably realized all this, but kept her—or possibly even hired her—for pedagogical reasons, namely to provide contrast, following the only principle she ever did put into words:
Children should not be spared anything.

We were practicing what was called the “spoken essay.” My assignment consisted of retelling the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. I did my best, and when I came to the place where the prince reaches the castle surrounded by thorns, I said: “… and the prince saw before him a sleeping castle, covered with layers and layers of briars …”

“
What
was sleeping?” Fräulein Zehrer interrupted. “The castle?” She turned to the class: “Did you hear that? Have any of you ever seen a castle sleep?”

The class howled with laughter, with Fräulein Zehrer laughing along at full volume. “The people in the castle were sleeping, you
dum–mkopf—
Sleeping Beauty in the attic chamber, the king on his throne, and next to him the queen, her pages on the steps and the guards on the balconies and over the gate, even the cook, who was in the process of giving his apprentice a slap on the face, and the court dog on his chain and the cat at the hearth—but
not
the castle!”

I stood there close to tears, overcome with shame. What hurt me the most was the betrayal of my friends: Solly Brill next to me had thrown his arms over the table and laid down his head, which was red from so much laughing. And although I knew that he wasn't laughing so much at my mistake—which I couldn't consider a mistake—as much as expressing his relief from the deadly-dull torment, which would have made me every bit as cruel if someone else had been in my place, I did feel the stabbing pain of having been utterly and despicably abandoned.

“Now take your seat and think about whether a building can sleep,” said Fräulein Zehrer. “But don't go dozing off on me, you sleepyhead!”

Solly Brill grabbed his protruding ears as if his head were about to fall off. “A sleeping castle! Who ever heard of that! You have words for that, all right! Go to sleep, sleepyhead!”

I was as if blinded.

But when the class was over, Blanche Schlesinger came up to me. “What you said didn't make me laugh at all,” she said. “I thought it was exactly right, and very poetic, a beautiful shortcut that said all that was needed.”

My sister Tanya joined us. “You have a very nice dress,” said Blanche, briefly turning a little red, as if the compliment seemed a little empty. “And very pretty hair,” she added, as a kind of compensation, “and pretty eyes. I'd like to be friends with both of you. Do you want to trade some books?”

We brought her Dickens's
A Christmas Carol
, which she already knew, but was happy to have because of Rackham's beautiful illustrations, and she in turn gave us a very strange book,
God's Conic Sections
by someone named Sir Galahad, who Blanche said was actually a woman. We didn't understand a word of it, but when we came across it years later it seemed like a revelation, and it took us another ten years to get over it.

Because we realized the imbalance of this literary exchange, we next brought her Agnes Günther's
The Saint and Her Fool
, which our Aunt Elvira had found very moving, and which we begged her for, supposedly so we could take it to Fräulein Zehrer. We felt that Blanche was the spitting image of the “little soul” in the book—a misunderstanding that later proved to be quite cruel. That must have led her to judge us for what we were. Her next gift to us was Kipling's
Jungle Book.

But that wasn't all. She gave us Mörike, in homeopathic doses, then Thackeray's
Pendennis
, which to this day remains one of our favorites, and, finally, a volume of selected poems by Goethe, and after that Longus's
Daphnis and Chloë
, in all naïveté and undoubtedly only because of its beauty. We loved her more and more with every book.

I don't know what was more exciting for us back then: the events concerning Tildy, his wife and her father, old Paşcanu, who were often the subject of conversation first at home and ultimately throughout the entire city—or our friendship with Blanche Schlesinger and the other world that she opened for us, the marvelous wonder-world of literature, this real place of refuge for those who have need to flee.

“Come visit us sometime,” we asked her. “We have a big garden.”

She smiled sadly. “I don't think that's possible.”

“Then we'll come visit you, and you can show us all your books and your father's as well.”

“That won't work, either,” she said quietly.

We were inclined to consider her very elegant, because she was kept so isolated. So there she was at last, our bewitched princess, who remained beautiful and noble even though a terrible curse had deprived her of her crown and her rule over her subjects. I loved her, and I loved her name, which I expanded into the name of Parsifal's love: Blanchefleur.

Later, after our friendship had been sundered in the most horrible way and she and her father had left Czernopol, she sent one last book: Disraeli's
Tancred.
As a dedication she had inscribed a few lines from Verlaine:

In the meantime, while we were so absorbed in our immediate concerns, things were happening that would have a far greater impact on us. Czernopol was weaving the background for our myth.

In this city, where whatever didn't take place on the street was indiscriminately dragged into the open, the events that led to the animated conversation between Bubi Brill and his father, which Solly had so masterfully reenacted for us, did not remain hidden for long.

People said that Usher Brill looked up old Paşcanu in order to propose a daring business deal with him. But that wasn't so: old Paşcanu had summoned him.

People knew everything, down to the smallest detail:

On the morning before the night when he paid his last visit to his dead wives in Horecea, Săndrel Paşcanu appeared in the stairwell of his house. He hadn't slept. He stood there, nearly six feet tall and despite his eighty years—or more, since he didn't know his exact age—quite erect, although admittedly one hand was leaning on a rough cane, while the other, as horny and clawlike as the talon of a gigantic bird, rested on the dirty handrail of the wooden staircase, scaring the cockroaches into the cracks. He was wearing the trousers and vest of a suit made of the finest material, of a cut that a dying breed of London tailors is taking to the grave. His shoes, too, with their suede uppers fastened from the side, were almost dandy-like in their elegance. Instead of a jacket, however, he had put on a sleeveless sheepskin, a so-called
cojoc
, which after decades of use hid a fleece that had worn down to a few moldy remnants with the brownish sheen of old bacon rind. His nose was bold, prominent, and vulture-like, and his mustache was white as snow and soft as silk and covered his mouth completely. His black eyes glowed beneath his bushy eyebrows. They were set close together, like those of a lurking boar, wily and dangerous. He was unshaved—white stubble covered his gaunt cheeks. A tall, pointed lambskin cap crowned his skull, which was completely bare; he never took it off, no matter what the season or occasion. He called for his coachman. His voice had retained the power of his youth and betrayed the full tone used by the speech-happy Latins.

He called out three times: “Miron!” Then, louder and louder: “Miron! Miron!”

The
scopit
, who had the same name as Czernopol's patron saint, came waddling on flat feet across the yard. The eunuch's fat rolled up the stairs and was still in motion when its owner came to a stop. Old Paşcanu, who hadn't taken his angry eyes off his coachman, turned around without a word and walked into the next room, rapping his cane against the floor. The coachman followed. The room was in disrepair, with ugly plush-covered furniture, almost entirely darkened by the heavy curtains in front of the small windows. A covered picture hung on the wall—the Titian. Beside it stood a large iron antique safe.

Old Paşcanu stepped into the center of the room and turned around. The coachman had stayed by the door. He was even taller than his master, and his back was so enormous it could have supplied five times the flesh the other had on his bones. When he was behind the two colossal horses, up on the box of the hulking old carriage, he looked natural enough, but on his own two legs he looked like a human mountain. The street boys of Czernopol called him
Gogeamite
, which was derived from the name of the giant boxer Gogea Mitu. His spongelike neck was covered with a network of delicate, sharply etched grooves, as if the skin of the oldest Indian temple-elephant had acquired the rosy color and the tenderness of a suckling pig. His body was shaped like a roller, and was wrapped around several times with a purple sash that must been miles long. His back was like a whale's, beckoning to be harpooned.

Old Paşcanu was clearly tempted to vent his feelings with his cane on that very back. He yelled at the coachman:

“You're sleeping, Miron! You sleep day and night, in the stable and on the coachbox. You sleep in your shoes. You just hang there in your pants and sleep like a pumpkin in a sack.”

“I'm not asleep, sir, I'm awake,” the man said in a fluting voice that spilled out of his throat like some clear oil.

“You were sleeping while I was on my knees praying next to my wives' coffins!”

Miron didn't answer. Old Paşcanu looked him in the eye. His mustache was twitching.

“Praying, you understand!”

“Praying, sir,” the angelic voice echoed.

“Now go to the Jew Brill, you elephant without balls. Go to his house. Tell him to come here right away, before he closes up his shop. Right this minute. I want to speak with him. Tell him to bring his magnifying glass. You wait for him and bring him here. Tell him you've been instructed to go to another Jew if he keeps you waiting. Bring him here. Then, while he's with me, drive out to the Jew Perko …”

“He's not a Jew, sir,” the eunuch objected gently.

“Are you contradicting me? Go to the Jew Perko, I say. Bring him here as well, and keep him waiting until the other has gone. They're not to see each other. Now go!”

“I'm going, sir,” said the voice from the whale, with heavenly unction.

He rolled out the door. Old Paşcanu waited until he'd closed the door behind him, then pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket, went to the safe, and opened it. He bent over, panting, leaning on his cane, and plunged his arm up to his shoulder into the deepest place of the safe. He rummaged around a while, finally withdrawing his talon, which now clutched a fist-sized ball of newspaper. He unfolded the paper. A small box appeared. He pressed his calloused thumb against it, as if testing it, and then deposited the box in his vest pocket. With the fussiness of an old man he then relocked the safe, tucked the keys in his pocket, walked to the desk, banging his cane hard against the floorboards, and sat down on one of the plush-covered armchairs. In this way he waited, in the half-slumber of a very old man, slightly bent forward, lightly nodding with his upper body, with half-closed eyes and an occasionally twitching mustache. As soon as steps could be heard on the stairs, however, his eyes reopened, and his entire life force, sinister and incalculable like a violent force of nature, seemed to flow back into him through the crafty slits beneath his white eyebrows. Only his eyelids opened, nothing else moved. Tilting forward, he lurked like a huge forest creature crouching in the damp coolness of the deep leafy shade, awake and ready to spring out of the underbrush, dangerous, wreaking havoc, dominant. He was very striking. A narrow, dense band of light fell through a slit in the curtain at a slant in front of him.