An Ermine in Czernopol (53 page)

Thus everything beautiful about this girl was offset by something ugly, and what was undeniably attractive—and that was limited to her figure—was also banal, because it was too much merely in vogue: she was too young, too poor, too uneducated to have a feel for quality. Her jewelry was tawdry and cheap. But it is an old theatrical insight that the best effect is achieved with the paltriest means, and I can only imagine that many women with everything elegant at their disposal except a brilliant sense of style must have secretly envied her, however much they may have disparaged her showy shoddiness.

People mockingly called her “the American girl,” because she claimed to be the daughter of an elegant man who had been forced to emigrate to America on account of some scandalous love affair but had managed to make a fortune worth millions, which she would someday inherit. I never made the effort to discover how much truth, if any, there might be to that claim. Because among all the phantasms we paint on the cell walls of our existence in an apparent effort to expand them and break through to greater things, it is the image of a secret, high-born ancestor that vouches for the nobility of our own character. It is a metaphor, the most obvious interpretation and reinterpretation of our sense that we are of different blood than the masses, or even a pious representation of this, which aims to legitimize the feeling of special distinction through the grace of one's birth. If we still had gods, those among us with a need to feel extraordinary could claim divine ancestry.

I have imagined Tildy's meeting with this girl no less often or thoroughly than his path to the asylum, when he was followed by Frau Lyubanarov, and in some mysterious way the one never fails to strike me as a paraphrase of the other: two scenes from a ballet about the proximity of death in which the dancer-like figures of life and death have been reversed: the one scene consisting of constant motion, taking place within the empty nothingness of insane visions, against the translucent, petrified tumult of colors of the autumn countryside, culminating in the violence of animal-like copulation and a killing without death; and the other a motionless set piece, a study in forlornness—three figures sitting, stiff and ailing, amid the vulgar carnival of a seedy dive, while intense love pours forth from them in barbaric beams, like the jewel-studded halos of Byzantine saints.

The dive, which fate, in its merciless staging, had chosen as a backdrop for this final picture, was called the Établissement Mon Repos and was a holdover from Austrian times, frequented back then by the excessively bored lions of the garrison. Since those days, however, the place had turned shady and somewhat slimy. Apart from a regular clientele of pimps and smugglers, it hardly attracted anyone—at best a few traveling salesmen from the louse-ridden hourly hotels of the neighborhood, and stray packs of drunken students, as well as the paymasters, veterinarians, and staff sergeants of the new regiments, who brandished their sabers and rattled their spurs, boasting and roaring while playing at being officers.

Heralds of a new age had arrived in the grottoes of crude provincial merriment, and the grotesque twist of the Charleston challenged the supremacy of the waltz: rubber-limbed Negroes with large, raftlike feet—only their outlines moving stealthily in a world of reversed light as in a photographic negative, the tortoise-colored Moorish scalps merging with the nighttime umber, so that above the hard chalk-white of the high collars could be seen only the milky half-moon of teeth and the perforated full moons of eyes shimmering like the luminous numbers on a travel clock, and hands invisible when dangling from the sharply turned-back, flapping cuffs—then popping into view when they splayed across the silver sea-horse saxophones like spiders crawling through a shaft of moonlight. Amid the poisonously colored cocktails and liqueurs, against the self-important typeface of the yellowed police regulations pasted next to bouquets of garishly colorful paper flowers at the tarnished mirrors, in the deceptive light of the fly-specked milk glass lamps, above the cracked, faux-marble counter with the constantly dripping and oozing nickel taps, and among the shabby, matted plush of the seating booths, the dubious world of pugilists and flappers was revealed in all its seediness. But at the Établissement Mon Repos, along with the coarse clientele came something tangibly rustic. At the bar they had set up an iron grate for the snacks known as
zakuski
, something to bite into while drinking hard liquor. Braids of garlic and red peppers hung from the lamps, and the syncopated jangle squeezing out of the curved funnel of the gramophone was drowned in the coarse, throaty rumble of Romanian curses. The crude toughness of the godforsaken province was colliding with the victory parade of the
moderne
, and as an abandoned trading post is quickly reclaimed by the jungle, the ineradicable peasant merriment spread over the vestiges of former half-elegance. The only difference between the Établissement Mon Repos and the countless Jewish taverns and coachmen's inns of the disreputable neighborhoods was its shabbily pretentious name.

Yet nevertheless … later on, when I was a young man, I often visited the place in order to imagine Tildy's last night as vividly as I could, and on one of these occasions, over the door to the steps that led to the rooms upstairs that were rented by the hour, I discovered the picture of a hussar.

It was the photograph of the German crown prince wearing the uniform of the Danzig “Totenkopf” Hussars, a color print, evidently cut out of a journal and set in a cheap mahogany frame with no glass.

He sat his mount with his legs extended, with long thin tube boots casually stretched into the stirrups, with fully slackened reins. His horse was long-necked, with spidery legs as in the engraved portraits of earlier derby victors, idealized to the point of caricature: with its neck flexed to the point of overbent, and its barrel showing a shark-like taper, its small head reaching past the loose reins into the landscape, saying nothing. The prince looked lost on this horse: aloof in the saddle in his Attila-cape, which was as festooned with knots and braids and tassels as a Turkish crescent—and, above all, his fur-trimmed collar, which seemed too tall and too tightly strapped below his chin, made him look like something between a gingerbread horseman and an organ grinder's monkey. The prince's alarmingly narrow and overly long face was turned completely toward the viewer. From beneath his ponderously heavy fur cap, adorned with the pirate skull and crossbones, the prince's gaze was gentle and calflike: shy, intimate, tender and surprised, exactly as if he had emerged from the depths of a fairy tale or risen from the fabled waters of some unusual form of existence to appear in this strange world of humans—a child of the Merman and Mermaid Rushfoot, sticking his head out of the pond's reedy overgrowth, curious but hesitant, uncertain whether to dive back into the water or jump into the lap of the unfamiliar creature suddenly standing before him, asking for love.

The enchanted aspect of this fairy-tale calf had a somewhat repugnant effect that called to mind Professor Feuer's neck straining out of his Byronic collar—the sight of which once led Uncle Sergei to note that while people of other nations are moved by the sound of the songs they sing, the Germans are moved by
themselves singing.
The crown prince seemed silenced forever, as if by a spell, but there was something offensive about his desire to communicate in such a tender, familiar way, by jumping right into one's lap. It seemed like a betrayal of his princeliness; it suggested that he wasn't entirely without a self, that he wasn't one hundred percent
the Crown Prince
, that his unassailably superior surface could be marred by the impurity of being human. As a result, even the ultimate expression of his princely character —his undeniable elegance—seemed oddly fake, becoming a gesture somewhere between escape and devotion, between the self-renunciation of pride and that of love, which clung to him like a kind of secret need. What was imploringly shy and vulnerable in his forget-me-not gaze seemed painfully intensified by the overly tall collar of janissary-like splendor, which seemed to crown all the braids that joined at the breast of the cape: he looked like a child in carnival costume who has been shaken out of the happy magic of the disguise by some brutal event.

Neither then nor today can I believe that it was mere coincidence that Tildy's last night and the love that made him
human
took place beneath this picture. The more I studied it, the more it seemed to be a vanishing point, the place where all the lines of my hero's story converged. And I studied it with a degree of thoroughness I had retained from my childhood. No matter how passionately serious and conscientiously we pursue our later occupations, nothing can compare to the patience—and therefore the evenhandedness—we show during childhood, in the raw process of assimilating the world. Childhood is pious in the true sense of the word,
because to be pious is to be patient while gaining awareness.
As children we refused to let go of what we observed until we had completely assimilated it. This was not a logical process but rather some kind of metachemical one: we grappled with what we saw, grappled with ourselves in our attempt to understand, we took the time to absorb what we observed, in an act of layered copying that left it intact and whole, but nonetheless dismantled it into its constituent elements. And so it remained deposited within us, in a different aggregate state, a kind of labile composition of molecules, until some stimulus—some related image, a sound, the tone of a similar voice—precipitated a kaleidoscopic cascade of corresponding images. It was always an act of
musing
, in the true sense of the word, when we observed something, focusing all our senses on the secret essence that all connections and all things possess.

With some pain I recognized in the photograph of the German crown prince our
hussar
, albeit distorted, caricatured to fairy-tale proportions, but for that reason eloquent—a revelation of his
essence.
I glimpsed once again the lost poetry of our childhood and realized what had brought about the loss: our defense against the despair that lies at the root of existence, a defense undertaken in the spirit of Czer–nopol, of the world, against the threat of the void. My eyes had begun to see, they had ceased dreaming in the presence of the dreamed; they recognized their vision as fantastical and now smiled at it with the envy of the impoverished, and opposed it with the weapon of the poor: irony.

I also saw that this impoverishment had been bequeathed to us along with what was German about our childhood dream—that peculiarly German fairy-tale quality, bewitched and enchanted, split between dream and nightmarish reality. Our reluctance to view Tildy as a German matched our unconscious struggle against what was German within ourselves. We were more deeply related than we wanted to admit to our comrades-in-arms, the caterpillars that exploded into fire butterflies, and we were closer than we would like to their self-destructive being, so full of despair. We had seen their other face in the hussar, and were forced to recognize it as the figment of a German fantasy, which was dashed not so much by the contemptuous reality of Czernopol but by the worldly-wise smile of Prefect Tarangolian.

The curtain of darkness that had fallen after Tildy's shooting of Năstase, and his subsequent disappearance into the twilight, now rises on a new scene, when his eyes meet the eyes of the streetwalker at the side of the drunken Professor Lyubanarov, in the smoky half-light of the Établissement Mon Repos. I never made the effort to find out what had driven him there. With the conscientiousness that for years bordered on an affliction, I gathered what information I could about his last night, I never thought to look for a reasonable explanation for that. The most obvious was that he followed Professor Lyubanarov to that place. But this—like all obvious things—was misleading. Where else could our hussar have met those eyes, and where else could he have met his death than here, under the picture that surrendered its
meaning
to me? He met her eyes in an unguarded moment—when they were observing him. He couldn't know that she was very shortsighted. The unfathomable enigma found in all eyes that are wide open and set far apart was magnified by the veil of her myopia, and that must have affected him as it did every other man who met her gaze directly. Between these eyes, the base of her nose seemed a little broad in relationship to the fine tip and the delicately flared nostrils—so that she looked short and childlike. The girl had turned her doll's face in the potlike hat toward Tildy, from the side, in a gesture of lazy curiosity born of boredom. She only understood Ukrainian, and although her attention was openly directed to the room and the men who were drinking and roaring, she made an effort not to appear impatient, out of a kind of professional courtesy, as long as she was afforded a place at the table of the enormous drunkard Lyubanarov, where she entertained herself attempting to decipher the effect of the professor's speeches—German interwoven with snippets of Latin quotes. The high collar of her coat was snuggled against her cheek, with its shabby yellowed bit of ermine fur. Her young girl's mouth, smeared with lipstick, was slightly open, in an expression of the gentle, almost tender irony with which one listens to the sound of boastful words in a foreign language.

Because Professor Lyubanarov was spouting languages she did not understand, in the unmistakable, pathetically high-flown speech of the chronically inebriated. The diatribe of habitual drunkenness flowed from his trembling mouth, punctuated by facial twitches and wild fits of laughter, which he slurped back in with rattling sobs; by visionary gestures; by grand, overarching gesticulations and sudden moments of glaze-eyed stupefaction. Full of torment and desire, he delivered his confession, replete with self-accusation and self-humiliation, with the embedded rage, scorn, megalomania, and orphic tones—the nonsense and profundity of a blind seer, who gropes through the purplish surge of dissolved connections and suddenly uncovers a brilliant insight for which he first finds wondrous words that then dissipate in confused speech. He had taken hold of Tildy's arm and gripped it tightly as he spoke with manic, desperate urgency: