An Ermine in Czernopol Read online

  In the small market towns the bleached black-and-yellow of the Dual Monarchy still lingered on the tollhouses and state monopoly signs, conjuring echoes of the high-pitched calls of the garrison bugle, long since faded, floating over the colorful rural hustle and bustle as a reminder of the transience of worldly power, like the symbol of imperial sovereignty on a Flemish painting of a census. Even in its deteriorated state this former grandeur was easy to see and hard to forget, not yet fully surrendered to the garish colors of the new rulers, with all their overheated drama. As it turned out, these new rulers, too, succumbed to the charms of a grand imperial waltz, just like their predecessors, and in its blissful thrall let all the overheated drama dissipate in the plot twists of Countess Maritza.

  But landscapes are like people, and inside every face marked by the life already lived lurks another face, which has always been there, and which is destined to reveal itself in time: the face of their future.

  And so the passing seasons brought startling changes to the face of Tescovina. The first gusts of snow blew in unexpectedly from the east, smacking of Asia, and fell on the magnificently protracted blue-and-gold autumn like the hordes of Pechenegs once must have descended upon a Byzantine palace whose columned halls shimmered with cloisonné. Faster and faster it fell, its fury rising into a biting storm that raged for weeks, rending the land to reveal an expanse indescribably more vast than the one veiled behind the tender yellow-and-violet late-summer sunsets, and which promised sparkling cities that towered like Montsalvat, mountains like those of Altdorfer, and happily smiling shores. The new face of the land gaped open like a monstrous yawn; its pull was powerful and sapped at the marrow.

  We experienced it most directly through the change we noticed in our beloved Herr Tarangolian, during his occasional visits to our parents. In the summer these were always very pleasant occasions: the prefect would arrive in a coach accompanied by a pair of pretty Dalmatians that ran between the rear wheels. Herr Tarangolian was only moderately tall, but portly, and there was something undeniably imposing about him, especially when he stepped out of his shiny lacquered Victoria coach. He would lean on the shoulder of the batman who escorted him everywhere like a bodyguard, and as he shifted his weight, the carriage springs would first squeeze precariously low, then snap back up when his foot, in a shoe as shiny and black as the carriage, stepped off the foot-iron. But the official pageantry of his first appearance quickly evaporated, erased by an oddly passé foppishness and ridiculously exaggerated manners. The prefect dyed his mustache and his bushy eyebrows coal black, and, in contrast to the gray, close-shorn stubble on his head, they looked as if they had been pasted on, which gave him the rather implausible appearance of a stage magician. His pearly, perfectly regular teeth seemed so obviously false we were always afraid he might lose them, or, even worse, that they would declare themselves independent and start snapping of their own malicious accord while he was kissing some lady’s hand, which he did freely and with great frequency. But they were genuine, as were his eyebrows, which moved independently back and forth on his forehead, like two fuzzy black caterpillars, lending elegance to his expressions. At least their thickness was genuine, and undoubtedly their color had once been genuine as well. His blackened mustache was no less authentic, for although its delicate ends were teased out with unbelievable meticulousness, they were spun from the strong hair that really did grow from under his bulbous nose.

  In fact, everything genuine and fraudulent about Herr Tarangolian seemed transposed in an amusing, if rather unsettling way, so that what was fake seemed convincingly real, and what was real smacked unpleasantly of fraud. Perhaps this had something to do with his mesmerizing histrionic talent. He could mimic a person or a common personality type with a mere shift of countenance; he was fluent in all languages, reproducing dialects to perfection, and he neither hoarded nor squandered these talents, but utilized them judiciously to further enliven his sparkling conversation without the slightest embarrassment. He was a master of banter and wit and possessed a brilliant mind; his descriptions were striking and his logic compelling, and we loved to hear him talk, even if back then we didn’t understand half of what he was saying. He also enjoyed having us children nearby, and was always very attentive and caring, pampering us with presents and winning us over by treating us on an equal footing, as grown-ups.

  Perhaps the prefect’s overstated politeness, his exaggerated attentiveness, and his general fussiness, which at times bordered on the ridiculous, might incline you to underestimate him. Nothing could be further off the mark.

  I still recall exactly how he smiled as he once held forth on the subject of understanding human nature. “We turn to psychology in the hope of recovering what we’ve lost in the way of direct observation of our nearest and dearest. But the way we go about applying the concepts of this science, it’s as if instead of using everyday knives and forks, we set our table with forceps and surgical scalpels. No wonder we cut our own lips … Someone was recently explaining the theory of compensation to me, which reduces ambition to the manifestation of a secret inferiority, thereby diminishing any aspiration to greatness. But what if the opposite is true? What about someone who is utterly and unquestioningly convinced of his superiority, but comes to the logical conclusion that if he is to live with others he cannot advertise how superior a being he is—would that be an example of what we call Christian humility? … I don’t think so,” said Herr Tarangolian, and his smile became theatrically diabolic behind the mask formed by his mustache and eyebrows—three thick black lines above his perfect teeth and heavy eyes. “No, that would be a heathen way of reasoning. In a Christian world such a realization has to camouflage itself, hide behind the ambiguous pose of the fool or the clown, so it can be passed off without provocation. Dealing with people, my friends, is really nothing more than a question of the price that one is willing to pay. The better you understand life, the more capital you build.”

  I’m certain that Herr Tarangolian wasn’t thinking about himself when he said that, although he was far too profound not to realize—and let show—how much actually applied to him and how much didn’t. In any case, it was entirely in his nature to hand us the key to restricted areas he may not have intended to enter himself. And never was he more dangerous. He left it entirely up to us to decide which was Bluebeard’s secret chamber. And so, when all was said and done, the contradictions inherent in his character were impossible to interpret. For just as his mincingly affected manners and general foppishness suited neither his intelligence nor the gravity of his position as statesman—far more significant posts than the prefecture of Tescovina would later be entrusted to him—at the same time they could not be separated from his peculiar personality, so his empathy, his capacity for sincere friendship, or even affectionate devotion, moving as it often was, came coupled with an extreme unreliability. Behind his permanently unclouded kindness he could be dangerously moody, and everyone who had good reason to consider himself a close confidant of the prefect learned sooner or later that Herr Tarangolian had made a scathing remark about him behind his back.

  I will no doubt sound naïve if I say that his unreliable traits never showed in the summer. In reality they were just as visible then as at any other time, but their relationship to his other traits was different—the distribution of weight, if that’s what it might be called, was different. The change showed chiefly in his dress; after all, it’s an irrefutable fact that despite the equalizing effects of convention, our clothes remain a very telltale expression of character and even affect the wearer, so that, for instance, someone who fancies a tweedy suit of gray, yellow, and blotting-paper-pink, cut in the English style, instinctively imagining himself as one of the aloof sons of Albion touring the Continent, is bound to feel some of their stiff upper lip and dispassionate interest, while the same person wearing krakowiak boots and a corded tunic would unquestionably show a fiery disposition.

  Herr Tarangolian’s own summer dress was distinctly Medite
rranean. His cream-colored suit of raw silk, and particularly his broad raffia-like woven belt with the sewn leather pockets, connected by a threadlike golden watch chain with a double drape, gave him a casual, holiday air that called to mind Adriatic promenades and siestas on hotel terraces in the shade of dusty agaves: a restrained exoticism that tempts one to accept certain things and even reinterpret them. Accordingly, his gallant clichés and charming nonsense seemed, if not natural, then at least in the right place—something like the tinselly polish of a former dragoman of the Sublime Porte enjoying the permanent holiday of the retired Levantine civil servant, a man of some means sitting in front of a street café, staring at the women with the jaundiced, heavy eyes of the liver-diseased, rolling cigarettes with delicious-smelling tobacco drawn from a silver niello case, sporting a freshly bedewed rose boutonnière to match his panama hat and his ebony cane with the ivory handle.

  In winter, on the other hand, Herr Tarangolian looked like a colossal, menacing elemental force. Only then did you notice the rough cut of his face, with its strong cheekbones that seemed lifted by the enormous bear collar of his sledding fur, glowing in the cold like a hot samovar. In this season his protruding stomach, which the summer belt had gently and healthfully kept in check, nearly burst his heavy coat, turning it into an unmanageable hide, thick and prickly, while his white shirt, very spruce and stylish, with stiff collar and starched cuffs, and his glistening shoes with bright felt spats flashed deceivingly from underneath, with the waxy perfection of a horse chestnut glistening through a cracked shell—a tree, by the way, that thrived in our part of the world, and which has remained my favorite, perhaps because the prickly balls encapsulate what always struck our childlike imagination as autumn’s most compressed form, like a pearl; or perhaps because the drumbeat of their falling announces a yearly parting that leaves more behind than merely another summer; or else perhaps because there was something exceedingly human in this downpour of fruit, in the sheer extravagance of flinging these beautiful things to the mercy of a frosty wasteland. I can’t really say why, but then you don’t always have to be able to say why it is you love.

  Along with his sledding fur, Herr Tarangolian wore a creased, melon-shaped cap with ear flaps that were pulled halfway up and stood out like a pair of wings. There was something architectural about it—an odd mixture of cupola and pagoda that called to mind the baked-mud palaces of Samarkand, and Mongols in quilted robes hunched against the icy wind, driving their yaks and camels across the high plains, only instead of a face smooth as soapstone and old as the grave mounds of Tibet, the prefect’s martial mustache and devilishly black eyebrows gazed upon us in strict and terrible judgment.

  The prettily spotted Dalmatians stayed at home; Herr Tarangolian arrived in a sled. Wrapped in his driving fur, the coachman sat enthroned on the box, massive and shaggy, towering overhead like a mammoth. The pitiful batman, by contrast, was blue with cold in his pathetically thin uniform coat. He kept his arms crossed over his chest and his hands buried inside his cuffs, with his shoulders tensed in a high shrug and a scarf wound tightly around his chin and ears. Like some primeval bird, he peeked forlornly out from under his turned-up collar; the brass buttons of his coat had frosted over and had lost their gleam. The humble gratitude with which he accepted a glass of brandy was moving; he seemed not to have had a decent bite to eat for weeks. Whenever we heard about the suffering of the emperor’s great army, which had gone down in the ice of the steppes—about the glorious regiments scattered as food for the ravens, while a small train of the defeated trudged off to distant forests, doubled over against the wind—we always called to mind the prefect’s batman, who even in summer brought us a whiff of martial excitement, with his gleaming spiked helmet. And in that way the tragedy of that campaign always struck us as the victory of gray-white colorlessness over the jubilation of color whose symbols, the flags with their soaring eagles, were left behind, buried in snow and bleached by the icy winds.

  Herr Tarangolian appeared even more massive than his enormous coachman within a veritable bear’s den of furs, foot-muffs, and blankets, which the batman hastily tried to peel off. But the prefect made little headway, since his fingers were so stiff from the cold, and in his frustration he fell into a desperate rage and set upon the furs as if he were attempting to flay the skin off a dead animal. Once he was halfway free, Herr Tarangolian strained to pull himself up and, giving an ice age–like groan of satisfaction at the frosty landscape, set his richly ringed hand on the man’s shoulder for support and stepped off the sled, his enormous weight appearing to press the man deep into the snow. We watched this scene through little peepholes we had revealed with our warm breath in the window of our children’s room; the pane was feathered over with frosty patterns, so that the entire event seemed to take place in a wondrous forest of glittering palm fronds and acanthus thickets, ornamented like the tendrils of an illuminated manuscript, where reality was raised to the realm of fable, and everything seemed sharper, brighter, and more intense: A powerful and mighty man leaning on his beggarly servant … As far as we were concerned, the sheer fact that this servant was a soldier had a ring of biblical righteousness, and that canceled the sacrilege he had committed in our eyes by wrapping a tattered woman’s shawl around his face and chin, as if he had a toothache. What we saw taught us how merciless and unfair the world could be, though none of us could have explained exactly how or in what way. As a result, our eager anticipation of the prefect’s arrival was tempered with a certain apprehension, however captivating we found the man himself.

  Nor were we wrong in our assessment, although the cause for our misgivings proved different than we had imagined, having less to do with our old friend himself and more with what he left behind—the emptiness that followed his visits. Certainly the dandyish elegance that burst out at us, dapper and dazzling, like a chestnut freshly released from its Siberian shell, was so exaggerated that we became increasingly suspicious it was really a kind of disguise he used to sneak into places, or, even worse, to feign sophistication in order to conceal something menacing. Consequently his banter and compliments, his general bowing and scraping, seemed all the more trite and provincial, especially given his very serious and deliberate delivery—though this might have been attributable to the cold numbing his cheeks and mouth. And so his genuine gravitas, his perspicacity and his prodigious mind, acquired something dangerously devious and inscrutable. But that would have hardly frightened us children. We loved the prefect, and whenever certain of his more dubious traits happened to surface, we were always ready to view them as play-acting—and his willingness to play in that way only made us appreciate him all the more. He was, furthermore, willing to break the rules, and bribed us with huge boxes of sweet-smelling hydrangea-colored Polish fondants in a mix of matte and pomaded hues, and once, to our delight, and even awe, he brought a curly-haired mechanical doll of dreamlike beauty, dressed in luxuriant lace who held a bird cage stiffly in front of her, with a tiny, slender green oriole that twittered and chirped restlessly about, while the doll turned her head this way and that, her round fairy-tale eyes opening and closing at regular intervals, and her left hand beckoning with a very subtle arrangement of fingers, in the best-mannered way of attracting attention.

  Herr Tarangolian always took the long sled ride in the late morning. He only traveled to closer acquaintances, where he never extended his stays beyond what was considered appropriate: he would stop in for an hour or so for tea, but never stay for a meal. After politely imbibing a little liqueur he always took his leave, and once again we peeped through the frosty tendrils on the windowpane as he leaned on his batman and wrapped himself up in his furs and blankets. Then the giant coachman would instantly bring the horses to a quick trot with a slight tensing of the reins and a quick touch of the whip, and, melting into a rainbow of colors, the sled would glide across the icy twines on the window, into the glittering palm fronds and acanthus thickets, and the gray, yawning silence of the snowy countryside
would close over the fading sound of the sleigh bells. The batman was taken along like a prisoner, and nothing remained of the prefect’s visit except the imperturbably beautiful and exemplarily well-bred lace puppet, with her oriole chirping restlessly in his cage.

  Incidentally, back then it wasn’t unusual for us to be afraid, since our hearts were still burdened with the memory of the war: houses destroyed by shells, soldiers’ graves scattered across the country, and dead horses with hideously bloated bodies, limbs jutting out stiff as wood, ants trickling through their eye sockets like red tears. Tescovina had been the site of heavy fighting, and the city of Czernopol could make the peculiar claim of having been vanquished and retaken six times in four years.

  “My dear little lambs,” Herr Tarangolian once said, “they simply want to please everybody. And by doing that they are completely true to themselves … When the commanding general threw his last contingent of reserves against the enemy—that time we had the honor of being this enemy—the fighting lasted no more than half an hour. Afterwards the prisoners were marched back into town escorted by Cossacks; women and old men lined the route to watch the long, sad columns pass. All of a sudden a cheery voice rang out from the ranks of the defeated soldiers: “Riffke, look—I’m back!”

  People laughed hard at the joke, but later it caused someone to observe that the prefect was very witty and entertaining, no doubt about it, but fundamentally banal.

  3 Description of the City of Czernopol

  AFTER all I’ve said up to now, it shouldn’t be too difficult for you to form a picture of the city of Czernopol. Just like all living things, cities are a mix of mind and matter, and their precise interaction is what gives each city its distinctive character. Whether we choose to present one by portraying the other—or vice versa—in order to reclaim an impression of a city’s atmosphere and the nature of its inhabitants is strictly a question of artistic preference.