An Ermine in Czernopol (26 page)

The prefect was practically glowing with joy at how vividly he had been able to summon the character of the man he claimed to know so well. “Of course, it was his pride that drove him to that act of insanity, the pride that had always been his most prominent trait—just like his nose. But it was a clown's nose, you understand, a bluff, a joke for its own sake. By the same token, his pride was not that of a gentleman; it was the vanity of a great bluffer and prankster … the pride of a clown. Once more, and for the last time: he was never anything else but the wild man of the woods who climbed down from the mountains to live among people: a half-child with a fairy-tale imagination, a primitive peasant with a knack for hatching devilishly cunning plots and ruses, and intricate schemes that took a long time to devise and a long time to develop. He was a man full of superstitions, given to drastic images, unbridled emotions, plagued by twisted passions, a soul as coarse and colorful as a wood-block print from a calendar, full of uncouth humor and wily schemes. Ah, I always loved him, this prankster of my homeland, this great and fundamentally humble swindler. Yes, humble. Because what we see as pride was actually his humbleness before the world that he wanted to conquer. And his fear came from this exposed humility. Săndrel Paşcanu's intended scam with the jewels was a childishly primitive attempt at saving himself from ridicule. It was his fear of being unmasked. He feared the spirit of Czernopol: the lurking vigilance so eager to reduce every claim to greatness to its true measure—to the satisfaction of all who are lowly—all in the service of one great unembellished reality. I know of no more potent form of blackmail than this spirit of watchfulness. It extorts tribute from everyone, and especially from those who have managed to deceive it for a while by giving it the run-around. It is a vicious profiteer, and whoever attempts to buy its respect winds up squandering all he possesses and sinking into debts no fortune can pay off. Whoever makes a pact with this spirit is bound to go under, just like Săndrel Paşcanu. Didn't it come to fetch old Paşcanu exactly like the devil comes to fetch a soul? He died on a great slide into the hell of ridicule, and his death was ghastly and grotesque—and thus only then did he finally achieve symbolic status … Ah …” said Herr Tarangolian, “I see that you don't understand me …” He waved his heavily ringed hand in a gesture that was almost dismissive, and then draped his hands over the back of the chair, dandy-like, so that his pretty fingers with their clawlike nails dangled in the air.

“We are trying with all our might to understand meaning of what you say,” said Uncle Sergei. “But as you know:
tout comprendre, c'est tout mépriser
…”

Herr Tarangolian stared at him for a while with inscrutably melancholic eyes. “I think I understand what you mean,” he said. “But is there any other way to understand something except by interpreting it through our own person, or in other words, by uncovering in it the secret we are not willing to reveal about ourselves? Be that as it may, this misunderstanding, if you care to call it that, still gives us information about ourselves. And what else is there, I ask you,
that we truly want to understand
? What I meant to say was quite simple. I found myself moved by Paşcanu's tragedy, by his figure's tragic stature. Because in essence he was anything but the conscienceless rogue, the predator that people make him out to be. Essentially he was soft and gullible and compliant, so compliant that he was all too willing to become what the world he inhabited expected of a man. He was not the vulture that his nose suggested. Quite the contrary: he was a dove—one of the wild and shy doves that live in our forests and that occasionally fly past the city of Czernopol. One could have tamed him and placed him in a garden as a kind of ornament.”

At the time, we were enrolled in Madame Fiokla Aritonovich's Institute, which Uncle Sergei had recommended to our parents as an excellent educational institution. In this matter, our easygoing and charming relative found an unwavering advocate in Herr Tarangolian, much to everyone's surprise.

Madame Aritonovich was a Russian whom Uncle Sergei knew from St. Petersburg, where she had been married to a fabulously wealthy Armenian from Tbilisi and had presided over a large household.

“If I tell you,” Uncle Sergei declared, turning to our father, who as a result of this description later had cause to say
of course it was all to be foreseen—
“if I tell you, a salon. Not only
société
but artists as well. Writers, intellectuals, theater, ballet, the choice is yours. She has been at university herself, Fiokla Ignatieva, she is very educated person, she knows life, is talented,
une artiste
, she has for instance a certain
faible
for my voice, wanted me to train for the opera,
à tout prix.
She danced, as well, naturally not on the public stage, only in private circles, but for experts and connoisseurs—just ask Krupenski, ask Dolgoruki, ask any of my countrymen here, she had great talent. Legat knew her and was great fan; Cecchetti was an intimate friend: he said it was tragedy that he could not get her for the Maryinsky. She spent thousands on her collections, poets—whatever you wish.
Et une belle femme!
Her neck—I can see like today—her neck was most elegant neck in all Petersburg.
Un cou de cygne.
Nefertiti is nothing compared to her, nothing at all. A neck that makes you wish you were an executioner—
vous comprenez
?”

Herr Tarangolian completed this sketch by saying: “Fiokla Aritonovich is undoubtedly a personality. I have been her friend for years. And”—he said in English—“
she is a lady.
You will not regret your decision.”

Because after the debacle with Herr Alexianu, the question of our further education had become critical. When they implored Miss Rappaport to come back she declined, saying that unfortunately she was about to accompany three charming children of an officer of the British Colonial Army to India. Apart from a postcard with a picture of the Taj Mahal, which we knew well enough anyway from the little forest at Horecea, we never heard another word from her, and because Uncle Sergei assured us that she could not possibly have been devoured by a “tyiger” because tigers despise Jewish flesh, and also even the fiercest beast would be afraid of her, we had to assume that she was grateful to have half the planet between us, and were probably correct.

Madame Aritonovich had begun her institute as a ballet school, which was then expanded to include instruction in French. The institute's popularity increased dramatically, and as a result it had very recently added all the subjects necessary to prepare students for the
gymnasium
and had—undoubtedly thanks to the prefect—been duly licensed.

When further inquiries yielded positive results, our mother and her older sister Elvira went to meet Madame Aritonovich in person. They both returned with the unreserved impression that Madame was “quite
formidable
.”

“
Voilà ce que j'ai dit!
”said Uncle Sergei, triumphantly.

“Perhaps a little too much personality,” Aunt Elvira dared to object.

“
But she is a lady!
” said Uncle Sergei, in English. “Don't you agree?”

“Of course, of course …”

“
She is a lady.
So what else do you want?”

With that our matriculation into the Institut d'Éducation, as it was called, was a done deal. We would have it to thank for a wealth of experiences that were both unusual and, without doubt, also educational.

I don't want to omit how much we were looking forward to the new school, and especially to our future schoolmates. We expected they would also become our playmates, that they would visit us and that we could visit them, and that we would finally be freed from the isolation we had experienced up to now. Our eagerness was immediately dampened, however, when we were told that we would never be allowed to go to school unaccompanied, but would always have to be taken to the institute and picked up later in the day. This supervision ultimately led to discoveries that caused our parents great dismay—though for no reason at all—and that sadly put a stop to our close relationship with our new friends.

Today it seems obvious that we loved Madame Aritonovich from the very first moment, and we maintained our attachment and tender admiration for years, all the way up to our final departure from Czernopol, while she in turn rewarded us with her friendly affection. This is somewhat odd, considering that we must have found the general milieu of the school, and above all Madame Aritonovich's own appearance, puzzling, even frightening.

Madame Aritonovich was very thin, almost disturbingly emaciated, and she was the first woman we ever saw in pants. The day we met her she was wearing a kind of Chinese garment—a three-quarter-length black silk jacket with wide sleeves lined with cherry-red fabric, and broad white silk pants, with high-heeled slippers. She was ghostly pale. Her thick hair was parted severely down the middle and tied in a knot at the back of her neck, so that it lay like a narrow cap of shiny black lacquer on her slender head. She was smoking a cigarette through a thin jade holder the length of her arm.

“You are a charming little flock of chickadees,” she said, with a voice that was alarmingly full and deep. “You, there—come here!” She pulled my sister Tanya over, ran the tip of her fingers along my sister's dangling arms, then took her hands and raised her arms up to her shoulders. “Stand on your tiptoes!” she commanded.

Tanya obeyed. Madame Aritonovich took Tanya's right hand in her left and held it tightly by her fingers at a graceful angle over my sister's head, then spun her in a quick turn, quite firmly but also amazingly tenderly. Thus supported, Tanya performed a pirouette as if entirely on her own, one that was full of grace.

“Well, that certainly looks promising!” said Madame Aritonovich past her cigarette holder to Herr Tarangolian—the prefect had offered to introduce us. “What natural poise, don't you agree,
Coco
?” She released Tanya with another artful swing, as skillful and gentle as before.

“She reminds me of myself at that age, although I was perhaps somewhat less naïve. In any case, five or six years later my father said to me:
Si tu continueras comme ça, tu finiras dans un bordel.
To which I replied:
En tout cas ce sera un bordel de premier ordre.
”

Herr Tarangolian tossed his head back and laughed, his pearly teeth flashing beneath his dyed mustache. “That's delicious, Fiokla, delicious! And your father?”

“All he said was:
J'en doute.
But this one here could really become something, don't you think,
Coco
?”

She turned to us: “Did you understand what I said?”

We had understood everything except for the word
bordel.
But her voice was so natural and had such a winning authority, that we would have gladly confessed if we had understood it. However, we had very little interest in that, distracted as we were by the discovery that one could call the prefect, whose first name was Constantin,
Coco.
We found this absolutely delightful, because the nickname made us think of a large, intelligent, and multicolored parrot, and in this way we gained a new and very informative image that illuminated the character of the prefect, and for a long time we only referred to him as Coco.

Incidentally, Madame Aritonovich didn't leave any time for an answer. She said: “As I told your mother and her rather sour companion—what do you think, Coco, it was probably her sister, no?—anyway, as I explained to the two ladies, the most important thing a good school can teach is a small dose of cynicism. Do you know what that is?”

We said we didn't, and were very eager to learn more.

“That's the word used to differentiate smart people and dumb ones. Please take note of that, because we'll never speak about it again. Perhaps people will tell you something completely different later on. And when they do you should think of me. Or else think of the story about Queen Victoria and Prince Edward. She caught him cheating at cards. “Do you know what happens to little boys who cheat at games?” she asked, in English. To which he replied: “Yes—they win.”

She turned to a young person who had witnessed this exchange with undisguised disapprobation—one of the teachers, as it later turned out.

“Be so kind as to show these little titmice the classrooms, Fräulein Zehrer. And don't let them know that from now on they are my favorite students.”

As we later discovered, this was something she said in front of all her new students. But Fräulein Zehrer, who was our German teacher, made it very believable by treating us especially badly from then on.

And I remember as if it were today that we suddenly saw how beautiful Madame Aritonovich was—in an entirely different way than the somewhat shallow white-golden good looks that had been our only model for beauty up to then. She was so thin that the delicate bone structure of her skull seemed to be covered with nothing but skin—or perhaps just a layer of powder. Her face was a death mask; only her eyes were full of the splendor of life. Her mouth was large and very mobile, with thin lips. When she closed it, there was something strained or even exhausted in its expression, which immediately vanished as soon as she smiled or began to speak, and both things happened the moment she looked at you. Her neck—the same neck that caused Uncle Sergei to wish he were an executioner, really did stretch in an almost alarming fashion from her shoulders, longer than Miss Rappaport's, and incomparably more attractive. We realized that the spirit of a woman could be seen in her neck. Even later, after Madame Aritonovich had aged abruptly and hid her neck under rows of thick fake pearls—“my tortoise neck” was how she put it—it was still full of grace and poise, and ennobled by the shimmering pale-blue lines of two veins that emerged below her cheeks and ran to her collarbone—the runes of the
sangre azul
, which had given the light-skinned Goths the name “Blue-bloods.”