An Ermine in Czernopol (7 page)

As I mentioned, we soon knew our hussar's name, that he was Nikolaus Tildy, and that he was an officer in one of the cavalry regiments that had moved into the old, former Austrian cavalry barracks on the other side of the Volksgarten, following the occupation of our homeland. We were further delighted to learn that he lived nearby. Now and then we saw his orderly leading a horse into the barracks. We didn't see the woman in the sled again until later, and then under distressing circumstances.

Meanwhile, something arose between our everyday existence and the world that had produced Tildy, which for us was automatically exotic and full of wonder—something that we interpreted as a secret connection.

In those days, our country's elaborate, unwieldy approach to managing the economy kept a great many people busy. This was not because this system made our lives any more comfortable; rather it was due to a simple inability to think or even act economically—a failing, by the way, which despite all disadvantages did make our lives unforgettably rich in a way that has since disappeared from the earth entirely. For example, if a man offered his services without specifying precisely what these services might be, perhaps by boasting that he was strong enough to lift heavy objects, then no one questioned whether he was really needed but instead went about finding tasks for him to perform, once he had indeed demonstrated that he was as strong as he claimed. A maidservant was hired because she had made a nice and honest impression with her fresh red cheeks, her clean folk blouse, and her neatly combed hair—despite the fact that we by no means lacked for maids already. Another man found a position as a gardener because his face, bright with a simpleminded cheer and sunny to the point of saintliness, along with his gentle manner of speech, seemed clear proof of a green thumb. He was soon unmasked as an escaped convict and a particularly unscrupulous thief and was handed over to the police—much to our regret, incidentally, because we loved him dearly and wound up losing a great friend.

But such gaps were soon filled. And nothing could shake the attraction we felt for these people who contributed little in the way of service to our household but rather used it as a refuge and a playground for their peculiar idiosyncrasies—just like our poultry yard, which was filled with completely useless ornamental breeds of chickens and ducks, peacocks and pheasants—and we were rewarded with an abundance of experiences and exposed to a rich gallery of people, as colorful and aromatic as a bouquet of grasses and fresh meadow flowers.

Thus had we won the affection of a certain Widow Morar, a person of revolting, virtually monstrous ugliness, who was occasionally hired to help on the big laundry days, although she undoubtedly hindered more than helped with her boundless chatter. But she was a widow with three sons, and people generally pitied her. Everyone was in complete and unquestioning accord that she should be supported, and this had become a permanent arrangement, notwithstanding the fact that her sons were long grown up and gainfully employed—one even as a streetcar conductor—and that she was spending everything she earned on senselessly replacing some of her healthy natural teeth with gold dentures. Her husband, a drunkard, had shot himself.

Driven by a pathological need to communicate, she recounted this drama to us over and over, even bringing as evidence a chromolithograph of Christ, at once unsettling and profound, where a bullet had bored a perfectly circular hole the size of a coin right in the sealing-wax-red heart of the savior—his first shot, which had missed. Herr Morar had shot himself when he was in his cups, and spent a long time clumsily positioning his long military-issue rifle. He was unable to hold the gun with outstretched arms up to his temple. As a result, various projectiles had gone into the walls and ceiling, with him falling down each time in the process. Not until he placed the muzzle of his weapon in his mouth—“like a bottle” is how Widow Morar put it—while lying on his back, and using his big toe to squeeze the trigger, did he manage to kill himself. He had locked his wife and children in the next room; they were able to follow the proceedings through the keyhole.

This ghastly experience, which she could portray to few others so often and in such detail—and which appeared to have left her with an affinity for similarly shattering incidents, because she knew of further gruesome accidents, incurable diseases, and bloody crimes to relate—this experience made Widow Morar so attractive in our eyes that every time she showed up we would sneak away from whoever was watching us in order to get near her. Then she would treat us to macabre depictions that, far from repelling us, absolutely enthralled us, because they dealt with life's darkest and least comprehensible riddle—death, which even in childhood seemed so close it verged on horror. But her attraction became utterly irresistible when we learned that Widow Morar also helped out at Tildy's home. What's more: she could boast of being a close confidante of Madame Tildy—to what degree this was true we will yet discover.

But back then could we have had any doubts? Everything about our hussar and the woman in the sled seemed so much like a fairy tale that we would not have been amazed at all to see these two mixed up in the strangest circumstances—and especially with a woman such as Widow Morar, whose mysterious ugliness made a mockery of any true human form, and put her in the company of djinns, ghosts, and demons from
A Thousand and One Nights
, not to mention her inner psychological connection to the eerie and the horrible.

In short, what we now heard about the woman in the sleigh, whose face we hadn't seen, hardly helped bring our fantasies to a more down-to-earth reality. Her beauty was something we took for granted: we had never expected anything else. But just to have something concrete in mind, we asked: “How beautiful is she?”

“As beautiful as your doll with the bird,” said Widow Morar.

And of course we had known all along that she had some secret suffering—“a disease of the heart,” as Widow Morar put it.

“Can a doctor help her?”

“No, said Widow Morar, closing her eyes and smiling knowingly, almost happily. The fire of her gold teeth transformed her amazing ugliness into the mask of a shaman. No, it was not a sickness that could be cured by any human art or wisdom: Madame Tildy was born a Paşcanu.

That was news to us, though not surprising. Who else could the woman be but a daughter of the man whose celebrated rise to immeasurable wealth had made him as legendary as his wild life and, in the end, his grotesque downfall! Naturally, at the time we still had no idea about his touchingly ridiculous and dreadful end; we only knew his name from phrases that had become nearly proverbial: “Rich as Old Paşcanu,” or “a fox, a tiger, a wolf … a real Paşcanu.” Or else: “A peasant, a
muzhik
with no more manners than old Paşcanu,” and, finally, “as love-crazed as old Paşcanu.”

He had had a mausoleum built for his wife—a certain Princess Sturdza, the mother of Madame Tildy—in a small forest at Horecea, just out of town, modeled after the Taj Mahal. People said she lay there covered with jewels. But he also buried his mistress, a strikingly beautiful peasant girl with the common name Ioana Ciornei, right next to his wife. It was on her account that Princess Sturdza had died, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. People spread all kinds of rumors about the true purpose of the devotions he used to say at night, in the presence of both coffins, while his extraordinarily mean coachman, a castrato of elephantine build, kept close watch on the building. In Romanian, “
taci mahala
” means “keep quiet, outskirts” and people found hidden meanings in the overlap of pronunciation.

“Does she see her father often?” we asked.

“Never. She hates him.” Widow Morar closed her eyes and gave a gleeful smile. “She despises him. She calls him her mother's murderer.”

“Does she cry much because of him?”

“Never. She never cries. She is the kindest, happiest, wittiest creature, chirps like a little bird. Only now and then she …”

“
What
now and then?”

“Now and then she locks herself inside. She reads in her books. Her rooms are full of books—books not even scholars can understand. No one understands them but her. She knows every author and every scholar, whatever language they may have written in. She can recite what they wrote word for word. They make her melancholic, and you can knock on her door and rattle the handle but she won't answer. The orderly keeps having to break down the door to make sure she's still alive, and then they find her lying on the floor, unconscious, or else she wanders out and speaks in tongues, words of deep meaning, just like the monks at the monastery where pilgrims visit, when they're in a religious rapture. When she's in that state she tells people their true names. To me she always says:
I love you, for you are marked.
And isn't it true that I was marked by suffering on the day my blessed husband rolled on the ground like an animal attacked by wasps and tried to drink his death from a rifle? We saw it all through the keyhole, my sons and I, we bruised our heads trying to see, all the while wailing and screaming … ”

“And her husband—Major Tildy?”

“Oh, he is a true cavalier,” said Widow Morar and opened her eyes wide, transfigured. “He stands before her like an angel dressed in armor and keeps silent. Even when she drums away at him with her fists, he stands there without moving and says nothing. Not until the devil inside her has been bested and she crumples onto the floor and whines. Then he orders what has to be done, in his calm and clear voice. And never a word afterward, never a complaint from his lips. Nothing happened. He speaks to her the way you would speak to a princess, to the Sturdza that she is. He approaches her like the imperial sword-bearer approaches the emperor, he opens doors for her and always lets her through first, he straightens the chair she sits in, and when she speaks to him, he stands at attention as if before his general, even when she's being playful and joking with him—because she really is like a little bird. He bends over to pick up her book or handkerchief, when she willfully tosses it away, picks up the pearls from her necklace that she has torn because the mood struck her—he bears it all without a word, like a soldier, all you can hear is her little twittering voice and her laughter, not a sound from him, even his spurs jingle quietly—they have thick carpets—until she shuts her ears and locks herself back inside her room.”

We listen in rapt attention. For a long time, whenever we were left to ourselves, we played out the image she had depicted: the princess and her knight,
the angel dressed in armor, the imperial sword-bearer
. I was completely at the mercy of my sister, Tanya, and I hated the fact that she always insisted on playing the major.

What we learned about him on the side came from a different source. I say on the side because neither did our curiosity drive us to learn more about him than we knew, nor was it likely that our image of him could be more complete than it already was, in its unalterably memorable details. But once, when Herr Tarangolian managed to win us over with one of his jokes and unlocked our most secret thoughts, we asked him if he knew Tildy. The prefect answered right away, courteously and willingly, that he was well acquainted with the major and knew him to be a very excellent soldier and a gentleman of the first water, a worthy role model with admirable traits, above all an outstanding horseman; but then he turned to Uncle Sergei, a distant relative who lived in our house as a Russian emigrant, and switched languages, evidently forgetting that we could also understand, and called Tildy a
strange saint.
From the conversation that followed this casual remark, we were able to make out the following:

Tildy had been an officer in the Austrian service. Almost nothing was known of his background. He was not from Czernopol, and the Hungarian name suggested other roots than Tescovina. The landed gentry did not recognize him. Apparently he came from one of those noble but thoroughly impoverished families whose only achievement consisted in sacrificing themselves in the service of a banner, and as a result had acquired a certain aloof self-contentedness and a smoldering pride. We could see his ancestors arrayed before us, in miniatures and lockets: haughty, smug women with pious airs, with occasional traces of a former youthful beauty tempered rock-hard by a strict and stringent life, and swarthy men with the puckered look of the brave, whose only passion is to demonstrate their courage, some surprisingly coarse, with round skulls, massive faces, and martial mustaches, others of more noble cut that comes from the knowledge that early in life they will carry out their assignment to die a model death. One of these may have been Tildy's father.

And he himself: a childhood in unquestioning obedience; women of almost painfully solemn bearing as the object of the highest respect; perhaps a secret understanding with his mother that was never expressed, a shyly restrained tenderness; and an adolescence in iron discipline, total commitment to duty. But all within a world of splendid style that brooked no skimping: amid the grand waving of the pure flags, across the fresh expanses of the horsemen's dawn, overrun by a festive swarm of brightly colored uniforms topped by a blaze of glistening helmets.

And then came the war.

He was said to have served in an excellent regiment, albeit one which had been subjected to the harshest censure. Evidently, during the war-of-position in Galicia, after the last great cavalry battles had been fought and the war had become a troglodyte affair, an attack couldn't be carried out because one sector's officers were conducting a race behind the lines with gentlemen from the opposing regiment of Russian guards. The men were sent to the Isonzo Front. Tildy must have been still young at the time.

Whether his homeland, like ours, was occupied after the collapse of the empire, and ceded to a new state, was not clear, because no one knew for certain where he came from. In any case, the fact that a former officer of the Dual Monarchy was so quick to accept service in a different army was not seen in the best light. Despite all the presumed reasons that spoke for him—and on close inspection none spoke against him—he could not shake the odium of the renegade.