An Ermine in Czernopol (17 page)

The Feuers lived in a house not far from ours at the edge of the villa district, in an overgrown garden, a house we liked very much. The properties there verged on the first fields, which were parceled off into small plots planted with cabbage and turnips, corn and potatoes with meager yet tender-colored blossoms, blossoms which, full of yearning for faraway places, bounded out into the open country as it stretched away, wave after wave, until finally lost in the promise of the horizon. The land at the town's edge was mostly in German hands. A belt of settlement connected the city to the countryside: half peasant, half small-town, it lacked the tidy, toylike quaintness of the small country towns and showed all the signs of poverty and neglect of a remote province. Even so, thanks to its lush and sprawling vegetation, it fared much better than the average proletarian outskirts, where the mangy city limits resembled the edges of a living, festering wound in the landscape. What the corrupting proximity of the city—and particularly the city of Czernopol—had done to spoil the pleasing solidity of the German farmsteads was offset by the peculiar romance of natural decay, which is entirely different from the desolate squalor spread by the wastefulness of civilization. Here weeds unfolded into their full plantlike beauty: seas of nettles broke against the walls of half-collapsed sheds and barns, their deep green stalks forming a dangerous deterrent; morning glories whose touchingly timid flowers turned their heads in shame from the matted greed of their tendrils as they angled up the rotting fences; silvery-gray thistles that had changed the acanthus of Corinthian capitals into a knightly array bristling with points, clinking and clanging, breaking out in helmet-like metallic buds with plumes waving in the breeze; and, once opened in full flower, the heraldic black-and-gold discs of sunflowers, towering overhead on succulent stalks, replicated in wrought-iron patterns as though for an altar. The unpruned fruit trees were webbed with ivy that reached into their branches. And in their shade, the fat, soft grass, knee-high and gently bent, showed runic traces of life, like spoor from a game trail, where some human had passed. All this gave the garden an enchanted, fairy-tale-like quality.

This neighborhood attracted us as powerfully as home did the prodigal son, though it wasn't until much later that we understood why, when we realized that what we were seeking in the garden was actually within ourselves, and not because it offered a world of freedom, or because it was a paradise for adventure and play—which it was, with the dense row of hazels along the silky gray weathered picket fence, the thickets of rustling cornstalks strewn with giant striped pumpkins ripening on rough, bristly vines that twined across the ground like wondrous tropical flora—and we looked on longingly every time Miss Rappaport led us past. But strangely we were most attracted by the garden when this splendor of self-sufficiency, lapsed into a run-down slovenliness, was disrobed of all of nature's magic, in the bare seasons on either side of winter, in early spring or very late fall. In other words, when the buildings scattered among the defoliated gardens and barren yards lay lonely between the muddy paths, and the gables stood forlorn against the never-ending background of empty fields striped with monotonous rows of dead stubble. The bleakness of the clay mines at the small brickyards, displaying a Chinese succinctness, seemed filled with some deep-seated meaning, one that reduced all life and the entire world into a stark formula, as did the emaciated, bony, bent-over figures of goats tethered by the edge of the path, with their swollen bellies and heavily pendulous udders, nibbling the last meager herbs. In the evening, the reddish lights of the petroleum lamps glimmered in the windows of the pitiful shops, glowing our way like the stigmata of poor people's humility, pinned at the base of the enormous sky as an admonition that despite all irreconcilable differences, and no matter how far apart our worlds might be, we were united by the same abandonment.

The Feuers' house lay exactly between this very mundane edge of town and the manicured villas masquerading as lordly manors. Their garden abutted the orchards of a man named Kunzelmann, of whom I will speak later. Only when the trees were bare could we see enough of the unusual building to satisfy our admiration. The moderately large house was covered with wooden shingles from its base to the ridge of its roof, shingles that overlapped like the scales of a dragon, and it was adorned with countless balconies and balustrades, turrets and towers topped with weather vanes, and fortified and decorated with fretsaw work like a cuckoo clock. Nothing could charm us more than this confused and overly ornate hybrid of Black Forest cottage and late-medieval castle in miniature, constructed with the carefree randomness of childlike fantasy—the ideal playhouse if a child had the manic patience to dream up every ornate detail. They said that Professor Feuer and his older children had acquired and rebuilt it without expert help. The surrounding garden was large and every bit as untended as most gardens in the neighborhood, and the house seemed enchanted, like the playful grottoes or pavilions hidden away in the remote corners of abandoned and overgrown aristocratic pleasure parks.

The house gained a special charm thanks to a saying over the entrance, burned into the wood in ornamentally entwined Gothic letters:

Miss Rappaport was extremely disconcerted by the word
Sälde
, which she didn't know, and she finally read the complete works of Richard Wagner, with a dictionary close by, to see if she could guess it from the context. Meanwhile, she had been told that Professor Feuer himself was the author, because he had written a book,
Wälsung und Waibling
, published by the
Tescovina German Messenger
with support from the German School Association, in which he proved himself a true aficionado of alliteration and a master of poetic haziness permeated with the mystic magic of dawn that lit the primal oak forests of German fairy tales. Of course no one had any clue as to the content.

Despite our own constant curiosity, however, we were not dying to know or find out who was a
Wälsung
and who a
Waibling
, or decipher the riddle of their relationship. Nor were we anxious to hear the results of Miss Rappaport's philological investigation concerning the word
Sälde.
We loved words like that precisely because we didn't know their meaning and because the sheer sound of them, which would have evaporated the moment it was filled with some explicit meaning, not only gave our imagination almost limitless room for play, but magically opened a door for us into secret regions.

Listening to the sound of rare words with unclear meanings was one of the secret passions we pursued with a dangerous devotion. We considered them treasures, like the oddly shaped and colored things we collected and kept—potsherds, pebbles, twisted roots—not only because they provided the most vivid models for our imagination, but especially because in their fragmented state they suggested a final form that was all the more perfect; they were, for instance,
more
barrel or glass or stone or root than the usual objects of their kind. As the relics of an ideal design, they seemed to promise more information about the objects as they were meant to be. Just as an old coin long retired from circulation but of obvious fine alloy flashes unexpectedly in a handful of change, all the more promising the more its once-clear features have become blurry and worn under a patina of long disuse, and just as its value is all the more exciting because it is unknown—so rare words would occasionally pop up in everyday speech, and immediately command the high price set by our hopes for something marvelous and wonderful. And as with the money that—all too seldom—passed through our hands, nothing could compare with the glittering gold ducats and twinkling silver talers of our play chips as symbols of the most lavish wealth, precisely because these could not be tendered or traded, they were money in and of itself, and so there was nothing we craved more than words with meanings we never discovered or had lost due to a misunderstanding or mutilation—or, even better, words that had been freely invented and were thus words in and of themselves, vocabulary that no one took away from us because they were “complete and utter nonsense.” Words like that were capable of harboring more than a single sense. Not that they could be given any arbitrary meaning, but their meaning could be expanded arbitrarily. Their sound alone, the rhythm of their syllables, the body of vowels curving around the framework of the consonants, contained more than just the vague outline of a presumed structure: their foggy, diffused appearance enclosed every shade of the moods they strove to inhabit. Nothing seemed more worthy of contemplation than Lewis Carroll's “nonsense” lines from “Jabberwocky”:

Enticing and foreboding, conjuring the light and shadow of that fabled forest and the grotesque, fairy-tale-like slaying of a dragon, each and every one of these glimmering words had been made up, none of them was real, and we knew that—but the last thing we wanted to do was deny ourselves the reassurance of their pretend meanings by dismissing them as nonsense. That would have meant abandoning our secret hope that they might be part of some higher language, a special lingo for the initiated, for which there was no key, but which we expected to understand at some miraculous moment, as the apostles understand the language of all people at Pentecost. A language with an undeniable splendor all its own, with a relative absolute value like that of our play money, with no value but its own worth, which could be set as high as we wished.

So ingrained was our habit of trying to force meanings out of words we didn't know that we often had to endure Miss Rappaport's reproaches that we were too vain to admit our ignorance. But it was not a matter of childish vanity or childish pride—a pride, incidentally, that is more immediate and therefore purer than later in life—that kept us from admitting this. Nor was it our disappointing experience that the answers to our questions usually proved as unsatisfactory as what Fräulein Iliuţ told us about losing face. Certainly we were reluctant to give up the free rein to play afforded by these inexhaustible possibilities. But even this playful impulse expressed a more deeply rooted unrest. We resisted fixing things unambiguously, because we ourselves were anything but fixed and unambiguous. By the same token, we looked elsewhere for reassurance—to the definite, to the set and certain, fully expecting that things would reveal themselves to us of their own accord. Consequently there was something amiss about the passionate way we listened to a name such as
Wälsung
, fully in the thrall of adventure, convinced that our urgent desire would compress the sound of the word into some shape, making our wish come true, and that the peasant-knightly traits augured by its sour-apple smell would suddenly appear—whether in the form of gnomelike dwarves or a race of Æsir. The stealth, too, with which we carried on this foolhardy game of enticement and desire also had something wicked about it; we were ready and willing to be terrified, and this made us aware that our evil invocations were as sinful and dangerous as Doctor Faust's, for we were summoning the spirit of language itself, and that brought us perilously close to falling into the hands of the devil.

But that wasn't enough to make us want to stop. We did our best to avoid Miss Rappaport's relentlessly sober explanations, and managed to cheat her out of the richness of the word
Sälde.
In this way its mystery, which kept the saying over the Feuers' door in a state of enigmatic ambiguity, reconciled us with the disappointment this house had in store for us. Precisely because it was a house we would have preferred to encounter in a game of our own imagining, in which we wielded powers that could make our boldest wishes come true—to the point of reinventing ourselves—in other words, because it appeared to come from the realm of make-believe, where we felt much more securely rooted than in the actual world, its reality bothered us. Its roof and four walls ought not to have fit so well together. An unfinished construction, or one fallen into ruin, would have been a clear sign that the place came from and belonged to the land of fantasy. But as a home serving the same banal aims as any other, connected to the municipal electrical works and sewage system, it belonged in an embarrassing way to the real world, where it merely seemed odd and bizarre. Only the saying above the door, which we never fully explained, served to dispel this everyday quality like a magical incantation, returning it to our daydreams. And at the same time its dark conjuring, which corresponded to the irrational side of everything that was magic, including the nonsense of all our count-out rhymes and witches' spells, offered us admittance to the secret essence of all things German—full of wonder, and always a little uncanny.

Sälde selbander—
the words seemed to arise from the depths of the German linguistic wellspring, where the old sagas rested in a dusk twilight shimmering with a wine-colored light, like the sunken jewels of the Nibelung hoard—the sagas whose heroes, born of yearning, stood pale as birches in the den with the coiled dragon and the ranks of dwarves. Sadly, that is where most of them perished.

And as these words above the door seemed to be the true entrance to the Feuers' house, portals to its promise of magic and marvels, they also opened onto a hole as dark and deep as a well shaft, leading to the place where German wondrousness proceeds from the depths of the German demonic genius.

An air of eeriness surrounded the Feuers' house once we learned he had placed guns in his garden and set them to fire automatically, in order to scare off the countless Jewish peddlers whose favorite domain was the villa district, and who were in fact a genuine nuisance. Whenever Miss Rappaport led us past their garden and we saw Professor Feuer's swarm of reddish-blond children playing with absolutely no inhibitions among the dangerously positioned, and in our minds all-too-effective, shooting devices, we felt a timid admiration for them. Our governess hated these children, who ranged in years from bloated students of theology sporting the first dueling scars on their cheeks and heavily braided maidens unable to suppress their embarrassment at their all too generous and early-developed bosoms, down to a horde of boys and girls our ages and even younger, and there would undoubtedly have been an infant in the spidery pram that now served as a cart for shrub-fruit, if Frau Feuer hadn't died a few years earlier “in fulfillment of her maternal duties,” as noted in the obituary.