An Ermine in Czernopol (11 page)

Fräulein Iliuţ looked up at him, and her tormented expression dissolved in a reflection of pure admiration. We could see that she loved him.

But Herr Alexianu stared rigidly ahead, without looking at her.

“Năstase is striving for this highest level,” he said. “But his reasons for doing so are more biological than ideological. This task was assigned to him by nature. Arranging your life according to ideas is a German approach. Our own mentality, which was molded by antiquity, prefers to derive philosophy from life. Năstase is naturally predisposed to create love, despite—or perhaps precisely because of—the fact that he himself is incapable of loving. But he is anything but coldhearted. He acknowledges love as a necessary force, for the exaltation it creates, the animation it brings to our souls, and for its role as a binding force in civilization. But he advises us to be extremely careful and cautious in its use. Just think: if love for your neighbor became truly common, it would mean the end of love as something exceptional, as a special form of affection. This can already be seen in civilized society, in the secular form of the theocratic state. In other words: Christianity is robbing itself of its core, the core of its true ethical initiative. Năstase aims to avert this danger by a rigorous scientific analysis of the subject matter.”

Herr Alexianu went silent with a sullen expression. Whether he noticed how confused his speech had become, or whether he sensed some vague regret, that his ardor had somehow been displaced, perhaps because he made a careless mistake in once again referring to his great master Năstase at the most crucial moment—in any case, what he went on to say sounded bland in contrast to his earlier zeal. He had put away the shears and buried his hands in his jacket pockets. He looked off absently as he spoke, and he held his elbows pressed tightly to his side as if he were suddenly freezing.

“He really is a genius.” By saying “he” instead of “Năstase” he was conveying a certain distance: the self-identification had been broken. It seemed to indicate a diminishment, a falling-off, and this made us sad, just as Herr Alexianu's voice seemed tinged with sadness. “He is the son of rich parents and became independent early on, because his parents died. He was able to live life to the fullest when others were still timid. He knows people's secrets. For example, he distinguishes between two types of women, and claims to be able to identify each at first glance: the ones for whom, in the moment of greatest happiness, the man they are holding becomes only a male—in other words the ones who betray him, just when he is at the peak of his masculinity, with all other men of this world, and the others, who always mean this particular man they are holding and receiving and no one else, and who thus create the image of the male of the species in a mosaic-like fashion. He calls them the scientists, in contrast to the first group, the philosophically inclined women. But this is a deeper thought as well: the loving individual always loses sight of the loved one as individual and only seeks that which is generic, only submits to the general ideal, just as we submit to the most general of all ideals—death …”

For a while no one spoke.

“He talks about all this, and similar such things, in front of women without the slightest embarrassment,” said Herr Alexianu, and looked at Fräulein IliuÅ£ as if he had been frightened by his first original thought of the afternoon. “And they love him. They all love him.” He took up the shears. “But as far as he himself is concerned, he refrains from any kind of reciprocity in love. And he does this consciously and intentionally. He calls it his form of monastic asceticism. It is part of his purity, his chastity, not to love. He despises the idea of
si vis amari, ama.
He says, and correctly, that it is the expression of a half-intellectual, an amateur poet courting the favor of the masses. No, not to love in order to create love, but to conjure love, to arouse love without getting mired in sentimentality—that is the noblesse of a new caste of Brahmins, and Năstase is one of them.”

Fräulein Iliuţ's cheeks had turned a deeper shade of red. She now looked doggedly at her sewing, and we sensed what she, too, must have understood from Herr Alexianu's peculiar lecture—and presumably from that alone: his secret penchant for cruelty, which drove him to seek chastisement. And although we loved her, and were filled with nothing but loathing for our tutor—the same deep-seated loathing we felt when he insisted on showing up our admittedly inadequate gymnastic attempts by dispassionately performing some acrobatic feat, ignoring the fact that he would stretch his tendons to the point of tearing or scrape his hands to the verge of bleeding—even though we were fully aware that he was behaving in a base and perfidious manner, that he was using a person who was utterly defenseless to still his desire, we were completely enthralled and took care not to diminish the spectacle by any slackening of our own undisguised curiosity. Because even if we were wrong in thinking that Herr Alexianu's words were directed against us, we weren't altogether mistaken, since our presence had undoubtedly provoked him to make a display of himself. Among the various experiences we had that summer—and not all were particularly happy ones—we learned that the best way of getting someone to reveal his true colors is to provoke him into showing his concealed disdain.

And so life started to become an adventure, in a way we had never known before. In fact, Miss Rappaport's properly stiff and slightly sour departure—and we never saw her again—contained a grievance and a warning that was all too prescient. Because as the reliably tight and firmly established ring of obligations and activities, with which she had kept our attention focused on a few simple things, loosened, our sudden, unanticipated freedom finally opened the protective enclosure of our garden and released us on the city, bringing us in contact with its people and its spirit. And so Czernopol took possession of us. Once again it was only later that we realized what deep meaning may often reside in a chance nickname, and we had ample cause to regret the departure of our “Rock of Gibraltar.”

Still, the new experiences were not entirely without benefit for us. Because even if it was in many ways risky for us, at our age, to be made witnesses to the kind of dialogue that transpires behind a conversation—and what was behind Herr Alexianu's words was clearly an act of rape—we were also repeatedly able to store away treasures within the cave of childhood that immensely enriched our imagination. The sayings we overheard, the whimsical sentences, the amazing word formations all burst into glowing colors when touched by the magical light of association, something well beyond the logic that Miss Rappaport had insisted on with her determined patience. It was like a star dropping from the sky if one of my siblings actually used in speech one of the words that had so excited us—for instance, when Tanya spoke of a
leap of great capacity
—and if we were able to trace it back, not to the gymnastic exercises which Herr Alexianu had also described as a kind of
capacity
, but to a name—in this case that of a certain Fräulein Kapralik. Of course we had never laid eyes on her, but people said she gave Italian lessons. In any event, beyond our associations with
capers
and
capricious
—expressions our father liked to use in reference to us—her name called to mind a jaunty Capricorn. A similar wealth of associations opened up when a chance overlap in pronunciation created the miracle of fused meanings; for instance, when we heard the newly experienced word
ekstase
—ecstasy—in the name Năstase, which right away seemed to capture this young man's tango-like essence.

For it was mostly names that provided our education with its richest nourishment, by lending essence to whatever ideas they were connected to, and thereby equipping various concepts with content. Our world was constructed from the names of people, landscapes, places, and buildings, and the words that surrounded them, and just as Herr Alexianu, following his grand master Năstase, had claimed, images were at the root of meaning and life. Nor were we ready for any degree of abstraction apart from thinking in images—which is what makes childhood expression so poetic—thus Tanya, inspired by Herr Alex–ianu's lecture to speak in aphorisms, said: “
The world is a door, and I am the keyhole.
”

Encountering such images, we felt like the prince in the fairy tale who eats a special herb or a bit of snake and suddenly understands the language of animals—in our case, we felt we understood an abundance of references to the most sublime things. It was as if we ourselves had thought up such splendor and carried its truth within us: we casually appropriated it and forgot where it came from. This happened very differently from the way we learned abstract expressions from Herr Alexianu and, later, from a man named Adamowski, who was an editor: the enormous effort and strain it took to achieve a precision so hyper-sharp it seemed brittle and therefore ambiguous was absolute torture for us. That manner of retaining sentences and entire conversations made us uneasy; we thought of mistletoe lodging itself onto the branch where a desperate bird had been scraping its beak, and where it continued its parasitic existence, the way these expressions stayed in our memory against our will, a tangle of tendrils that bears no fruit but still contributes a certain ornamental charm, just like the filigreed balls of leaves growing in the treetops of our garden.

“Is your friend Năstase so busy being loved that he doesn't have time to write?” asked Fräulein IliuÅ£ quietly.

“No,” said Herr Alexianu firmly. “He rejects the idea of creating a work. If artistic creation still had some value today, he would set about producing one. But his opinion is that today's consumer of culture is indifferent to the work. The only thing that interests him is the artist—as a particular way of managing one's existence.
What prompted X to write this poem, or Y to paint that picture, and how is it that Z came to compose this sonata?
are the commonplace questions. And the answers are equally shallow:
It was because of this or that painful experience!
All experiences are painful, according to Năstase. By giving artistic expression to their suffering, X, Y, and Z are playing a dishonest trick on their audience, who are inclined to view these works as acts of redemption. ‘I will not publicly nail myself to the cross of my suffering,' says Năstase. ‘I am not here to tend to your average bourgeois citizen before he goes to bed and after he consumes a great amount of pork and beer following a whole day of petty pleasures by providing him the liberating feeling that someone is dying for him over and over … only to be resurrected in glory on top of that. I see through the swindle of this kind of crucifixion. Works of art are the blood of martyrs—the kind of martyrs who are only too happy to spray their blood around and have no illusions what they think of the whole thing.'”

Fräulein Iliuţ looked up at him, frightened, and then over to us, as if to suggest that not everything could be safely said in front of children.

We were to see this fabled Herr Năstase with our own eyes, although not until long after everything had already played out; he was already wearing the mark of Tildy's bullet—exactly like the mark of a Brahmin—on his forehead, just above his nose. For some time he was on everyone's tongue like a popular song, and not at all as the fiery genius Herr Alexianu preferred to see in him, but rather as one of the craftiest pranksters in Czernopol. He left the city soon afterward to marry the daughter of a factory owner in the country. Madame Aritonovich, whose educational institute we attended for a short time, and with whom we remained in friendly contact, sent him off with a dry kind of epitaph: “I wouldn't have even received this man in my bed, let alone in my salon.”

I can no longer say with any certainty when and where we saw him. It must have been on the street, since I can't imagine where else. And it must have been one of those highly charged moments, when his name, which we had heard so often and which for so long had led its own existence inside us, suddenly coincided with a genuine person—a magical act that invariably also breaks the spell.

He was a tall young man with lanky joints, quite elegantly dressed, and very pale. His conspicuously high forehead showed a strong backward sweep. His cheeks and chin were dotted with reddish pimples. “There are skin impurities,” he used to say, “that can be traced to a particularly delicate epidermis. My soul is covered with pimples.” His eyes were beautiful, as were his hands and his hair, which formed a blaze of black around his forehead and temples.

Incidentally it turned out that he had for a very long time been a special protégé of Herr Tarangolian, who appreciated his sense of humor and his witty mind—and this was interpreted as further proof of some of the prefect's completely unreliable traits.

T
HE EVENTS
that would provide such ample nourishment for the laughter of Czernopol were unleashed by a private ball hosted by the commander of the regiment in which Tildy served, a certain Colonel Turturiuk, in celebration of his birthday, which also marked forty-five years of service. The whole neighborhood took great interest in the preparations for this festivity as well as the celebrations that preceded it. Because like most of the higher officers, Turturiuk lived in our neighborhood, on a street named “
Aviator Gavril.
”

This pretty residential street derived its name from a hapless young pilot who was attempting to perform a loop when his plane crashed, killing him on the spot. A small monument of crossed propeller blades marked the place where his plane had hit and shattered, and the Czernopol branch of the national student fraternity Junimea had made vociferous demands that, next to the plaque honoring the sixteen flyers who had died under similar circumstances, there should also be a plaque of shame listing the names of the commissioners who had purchased defective and obsolete material abroad and sold it at considerable profit to the nascent air force. Naturally their demand was never met: the whole matter was undoubtedly just one of the rumors that surfaced in Czernopol at every opportunity and which persisted more stubbornly than any presentation of demonstrable fact, even though no one could cite a specific source.