An Ermine in Czernopol (38 page)

“Tildy thinks that these verses couldn't possibly come from the same divinely gifted person who wrote a poem like ‘One Drink of Love.'

“The mark of culture in a man,” Blanche concluded with her most beautiful smile, “is not his knowledge. I think I know why you are so taken with Herr Tildy. It's because he has a kind of perfection, as my father has confirmed. He is complete in his form, and so he is related to all other forms of perfection. He is the peak of what we can attain. I'm envious that you know him, and can't wait for the day he's set free so you can show him to me.”

“Can't you ask your father to let you visit the institution just once so you can see him? You could speak with Tildy!”

“No,” said Blanche. “That's impossible. I've always wanted to see the poor souls my father looks after, and to be just as brave as he is. But he thinks I wouldn't be able to stand the impact. I was very sick as a little child. I'm sensitive. It shames me to admit it, but it's stronger than I am.”

A mark of forced concentration showed in her face that made her almost ugly. “Besides, I have to admit that at first I was put off by Major Tildy's intention of dueling with everyone. My father tried explaining to me that the resolve to kill or die for the sake of order and righteousness was worthy of respect. I don't approve of that view, since I detest any kind of violence. But when I started reading about duels I came across a very beautiful saying. You know that Pushkin was killed in a duel. He asked the doctor examining him to tell him frankly how long he had left to live, and when he was told ‘Three minutes,' he closed his eyes and said, ‘
Il faut que j'arrange ma maison
.' That is beautiful. I'm looking forward to when you show Herr Tildy to me.”

Tanya stroked her hair. “You once wanted to tell us a poem that was called ‘Springtime' which you found very beautiful.”

Blanche hesitated, almost a little embarrassed. “I don't want to repeat it,” she said. “It would lead you down the wrong path. It was the first of the poems ascribed to poor Piehowicz and then proven to be not his. It almost pains me to see the miracle shattered like that. As for that poem, ‘Springtime,' the one with the last stanza that so delighted everyone—

we now know for sure that it was written by someone else. He seems to be a gifted poet by the name of Count Karl Berlepsch.”

She must have seen our astonishment, even though we tried to suppress it. “Do you know this poet?” she asked, amazed.

Indeed, we thought we did. In one of the old issues of
Gartenlaube
, which Aunt Elvira had subscribed to, we had come across a poem by Count Berlepsch and had learned it by heart, fascinated and wickedly delighted and simultaneously repulsed by the realization of what was wicked in our delight. Just as the hunchbacked figure of Fräulein IliuÅ£ seemed attractive to me in a way that left me feeling guilty, so this poem acquainted us with a kind of forbidden longing—a longing for the opposite of beauty, and for what consciously and shamefully sets out to destroy it. We didn't know whether we should consider the piece a satire. It addressed the injustices suffered by cavalrymen deprived of their mounts, forced to dig trenches with a shovel, and was composed in a tone people generally referred to as “witty”—a genre our parents steered us away from in no uncertain terms whenever we encountered it. This was not due to the childish silliness of the writing, but because of something worse: a vulgarity of spirit that can infiltrate the soul and as such constituted a latent danger one must take pains to guard against. We had seen this deep-seated vulgarity in the smirking Kunzelmann, and every line of this poem brought him back to us; its bumpy rhythm and dreadful German called out to be recited in Kunzelmann's awful dialect, and we never tired of repeating the lines in his voice:

It continued in that vein, with an orderly who springs “from wing to wing,” and dragoons “who lost their jades,” now consigned to the barricades, where “instead of being tossed off by their steeds,” were digging dirt with mole-like speed.

Enough of that. We took our wicked delight in the jocose grotesqueries that struck us as even more bizarre for having come from the German war camp, from that terrifying world of earth caterpillars and fire butterflies. The verses brought the horror painfully close to the absurd, and what was fearful was brought into the soul-crushing proximity of the ridiculous. We would declaim certain lines in Kunzelmann's voice and intonation, using the raw Czernopol German dialect, lines such as:

or

but it was only much later that I realized we did so out of a particular sense of despair, which often seems far more painful when we are children than later when we are grown. These were idle hours spawning devilment, empty but for a nervous aversion we couldn't explain—not for the world that surrounded us, but for all the awful things that characterized life in this world that we were part of. In such moments we felt the malicious urge to destroy beauty, the craving for satire. And I would later learn that Czernopol's nasty passion for laughter, for mockery and scorn, stemmed from a deep-seated desperation, and probably sprouted from the vast emptiness of the countryside that besieged the city. The threat of this looming emptiness was what made the soul unable to resist the dreadful spirit of the satirical: instead of the little elves known as Heinzelmännchen, we had “Schmunzelmännchen, little gnomes, that by night in secret come,” enlisting “all of Satan's powers to erect a town with towers”—the town we would have to fend against our whole life.

“Satan is coming closer to us, and he is smiling, my little ones,” Uncle Sergei used to say, himself smiling with his irresistible charm. And since we didn't notice Satan hiding behind all the smirking, we assaulted Blanche with rhymes from the dreadful poem, and added insult to injury by reciting them with the crude gesticulation that we had picked up from Solly Brill:

as if Blanche's lovely story of the insane poet and Tildy's noble strivings on his behalf had become a farce, a joke. Even Tanya couldn't refrain from laughing along, in a sudden disregard for Blanche that clearly let it be known that she, Tanya, had little regard for herself in that moment. “You're overexcited,” she said to Blanche, using an expression the grown-ups applied to us whenever our enthusiasm tried their patience, because their souls could no longer summon the same unbridled fervor. Today I know that this act of cruelty came from a different source, a secretly concealed despair with deeper roots.

Because in actuality we were taking revenge for something beautiful that had been destroyed, something that had been the epitome of beauty in our childhood: that image of the hussar in front of the lance-leafed pickets along our garden. Tildy had become entangled in a farce, in a joke. He was attempting to coax beauty out of the mouth of a crazy person, and this beauty had been proven counterfeit; what's more, the true creators of this ostensible beauty were on the same level as the smirking Kunzelmann: they were his German brothers. We no longer saw Tildy on his horse: the line

cruelly exposed a deeper meaning, replacing the hussar's beautiful feat of derring-do with the foolish act of a simple-minded cavalryman like the ones sitting in the Trocadero. The hussar had dismounted and was rooting in the mud. Tildy was mixed up in a
literary
quarrel, and consequently became the victim of ridicule, as a cavalryman.

Once more it was only much later that I would again encounter the tragicomic figure of a hussar lost in a world devoid of poetry—in a photo of the German crown prince, which I happened to see in the same seedy dive at the edge of town where Tildy's fate would be determined. But back then we were unconsciously taking revenge on Blanche Schlesinger for the fact that the poetic symbol of our childhood had been destroyed. We had no idea what had caused the destruction, only a vague intimation that this figure had been stripped of its poetry—the hussar had dismounted and had become the gambling buddy of the German count with the Kunzelmann-like verse (“
what makes men today are spades
”) which added the macabre humor of the Ludenburg brothers floating off into the air to the absolute horror of the earth caterpillars exploding into fire butterflies. Tildy was caught up in everything that he had opposed as
the hussar
: his poetry had become embroiled in a literary controversy; his struggle for justice had been derided as untenable, he himself had fallen victim to Czernopol's dominant reality, which was that of the smirking Kunzelmann.

Unschooled in literary fairness, we didn't ask whether the conclusions we had drawn were false, whether the abstruseness of an occasional verse—that was clearly “witty,” although perhaps out of desperation—gave us the right to pronounce judgment, as though its author were unworthy of producing anything more beautiful, whereas what came out of the mouth of the poor insane locksmith Karl Piehowicz had to sound like it issued from the wellspring of beauty itself, as in the poem “Springtime,” (“All that is heavy sinks away from the things that expand”) or if the desperate wittiness of that shoddy effort from the trenches should be allowed to call Tildy's noble efforts into question. In the poetic justice of childhood, which has its own laws, judgment had been passed on our hussar in the poem out of
Gartenlaube
, to which the great poet Karl Berlepsch had signed his name: “Into the dust, you proud rider!”

For that we took revenge on an innocent party—as always happens when taking revenge—namely Blanche. Only later did we realize this, and understand at the same time that our revenge was just, at least in the poetic, fairy-tale sense of childhood, because she had functioned as the
messenger
of the destruction of this poetry.

During these weeks two exciting events occurred, subsequently telescoped in memory in an odd and unsettling way due both to the turbulent events that followed and to our later illness. The first involved Herr Adamowski's second visit; this time he was received by Aunt Paulette alone, that is to say accompanied only by Aunt Elvira. Our mother, whose relationship to her sister had become strained after the awful scene with Tanya, had excused herself with an obvious pretext and arranged an outing for us children, which ended up being canceled because of an unusually violent storm. The intense tropical downpour made such a spectacle that we completely forgot our disappointment at the missed excursion, and when it started to clear up after two hours of pouring rain we ran into the garden to see the damage that had been done. The drains were all stopped up; the water was foaming past the sandstone plinth of the lance-leaf fence like a wild brook and had formed a small lake on the lawn in front of our house. Keeping our feet dry required all our skill and attention, so that we didn't notice what was happening around us, and didn't look up until we heard a high-pitched woman's laugh. Then we saw Herr Adamowski trying to navigate around the deepest puddles and streams, awkwardly on account of his deformity, while underneath the arc of water still cascading from the eaves of the
dvornik
's hut was Frau Lyubanarov, leaning against the wall as usual, laughing out loud as she watched Herr Adamowski.

He appeared not to take offense at her rather tactless amusement, but merely trudged ahead, rocking from side to side, swinging his cork-soled boot into one puddle after the next. When he came close to where she was standing he stopped, leaning with his hand against the wall. She studied him with her golden, goatlike eyes.

“Well, old goat-hoof,” she said in a guttural voice. “New paths to travel?”

“Your lack of shame is magnificent,” he said. “You know that your blouse is wet and wrapped on you like a skin—that you can see right through? And you're not wearing anything underneath.”

“That's why I'm standing here. I like it when people see me.”

“I know. And who do you think will see you here?”

“Whoever comes by. I'm not picky—that's something you should know as well.”

“And you never get enough?”

“Do you ever get enough?”

He bared his saw-teeth. “I never get enough from you.”

“And from that fool who poisons herself and stumbles through the streets like a drunk woman—what about her?”

“Whom do you mean?”

“Come on, let's not pretend. You know as well as I do who I mean. I'm talking about my little sister, the fine lady. The major's wife, who's so far gone as to sell herself to you for a little pack of powder. Who's finally landed completely in the mud. How is she in bed? As good as I am? I can do it even when I'm drunk—but her? It's only you men who can't when you're plastered.”

“They ought to tie you to a stake and burn you. If you had lived a hundred years ago they would have done it, too.” He shoved his face right next to hers. “Where'd you come up with that?” he asked.