An Ermine in Czernopol (25 page)

This powerlessness of our will to command our perception, the discrepancy between what we believe we experience and what we truly experience, makes it difficult for us to examine our past for any fractures that could reveal to us when and how we lost our supposed paradises. Memory occasionally descends upon us with the weight of authenticity, only to vanish into the shadows, inclining us to question the world in which we have lost ourselves, since we began fobbing off our ardent yearning with cheap secondhand goods. As if we ever had any other choice! And so later on we sometimes feel tempted to attribute the loss of our blissful, dream-bound childhood to certain events, which back then—as the story of Tildy I am relating here—affected us directly. We held Czernopol accountable for awakening us to the crude banality of the world, which from then on ceased to fill us with any longing. But there was more than just one error to that logic.

Certainly our yearning was inspired by our abundant inexperience, and it was this hunger for the world that sharpened our perception. But this negative abundance was paradoxically a burden, because its pressure complicated the experience itself. What we consider basic aspects of our character—aspects that appear to us like the ruins of a large, emotionally structured composition that was never completed due to the powerlessness and carelessness of its creator, and which is now completely lost but for a few barely discernible fragments—are clearly nothing more than the moments when our desire was at its strongest, and connected to images, sounds, smells that it was not aiming for, perceptions it had
looked beyond
, as it focused on a goal that was very far away. In other words, these were the moments of our most secret torment.

No childhood is beautiful, and none is happy, and ours was no exception. The distress a child feels as he attempts to recreate the world in his playing within a reality that is proportionate to his own, springs from the consuming awareness that he himself does not possess any reality whatsoever. Just as Professor Feuer's house seemed to us the most beautiful of all, because it most resembled a play
-
world house, and just as we always regretted the fact that it was so real, and just as we wanted with all the power and weakness of unbridled desire to wield one of the spears of our garden fence as a play-world weapon and then were terribly disappointed, sobered, and hurt when Herr Adamowski unscrewed one and placed it in our hands, so we wanted everything to hover in some intermediate sphere of reality, balanced between expectation and readiness; in short, we wished it were all there in the same never-never land in which we ourselves lived. And that was a landscape of melancholy. What today seems to be the most reliable legacy of our childhood, and the only one truly intended for us—the sadness that was secretly mixed in with every one of our hopes—comes less from the disappointment of half and paltry fulfillment and more from the knowledge we had already acquired as to the invalidity of wishing at all.

And meanwhile the unfilled space inside us reflected the richness of images that the world contained. Because our desire focused so far into the distance, we looked past whatever was near, catching it by surprise in unguarded moments when it revealed its secret. Our childhood is the myth about ourselves, the saga from a time when we were yet an intermediate race, when we stole knowledge from the gods, insight into the essence of things. It is our magical dawn, a twilight filled with mystical happening. And every reencounter with it has the character of the numinous.

So if the memory of Czernopol includes experiences which we presumably ought to have been spared, that does not make it any less fortifying and purifying—or, in a word, any less
holy
, than whatever impressions we might have retained from some other perfectly harmonic world. On the contrary: the city's reality, with all its dubious morals and drastic goings-on, was so mercilessly close that it provided a truly mythical background, so that the heroic characters of our early years stood out in all their ambiguity, impossible to forget. But what truly infuses our memory with a sense of primal experience is not so much these remarkably distinct figures and the impression they made on us, but rather the quality of the time when these events took place, and their ever-changing symbolic effect.

Old Paşcanu's bizarre undertaking, which would lead to a grotesque and dreadful end, had a certain connection to the case of Tildy. Because hardly had the word gotten around that Tildy had been locked up in the asylum—which as usual in Czernopol took no more than a few hours—than a number of creditors approached Madame Tildy with claims that amounted to a fortune, and which had been guaranteed by nothing more than the modest, and now very questionable, pay drawn by the major. Madame Tildy dealt with the worried gentlemen exactly as one would expect from a born Paşcanu—in other words, at first she refused to receive them, but had Widow Morar, who was in those days constantly around, and who even later never left her side, show them out quite unceremoniously, while threatening to set the dogs on them if they didn't kindly leave the premises at once. Widow Morar executed this task with closed eyes and with such a gleeful smile in her golden mouth that Messrs. Fokschaner, Lipschitz, Mer–dinger, and Falikmann fled the house as quickly as they could.

We could never find out if Tildy himself had in fact incurred such high and risky liabilities, or whether Tamara Tildy had run the debts up behind his back—though in his name, possibly enabled by the fact that she could be considered the only legitimate heir to old Paşcanu. Even so, every child knew what the enormous sums were used for—sums well above the demands of even the most luxurious lifestyle. Nor did the press fail to take up the matter, and the leading daily,
Vocea
(The Voice), went so far as to publish a lead article under the headline “Czernopol: A Center of International Drug Trade?” which made numerous unsubtle allusions to the case of Major Tildy, though without the slightest reference to the presumed suppliers of the unfortunate lady, nor any explanation of how our city deserved such an appellation.

The possibility that a third party might be responsible for inflating the case into a public affair, and for entirely different purposes, could not be overlooked. At first only Herr Tarangolian had picked up the scent with his Levantine nose. His heavy eyes, which floated in the oily yellow veil of the liver-diseased, rolled more indolently than usual behind his thick eyelids—in his case, always a sign of extreme alertness and dangerousness. His sentences were more polished, his gestures more exaggeratedly polite: whoever knew the prefect couldn't help notice that something was going on, and that he was in his element. He spoke of General Petrescu with an almost tender irony, an affectionate attentiveness, rather like a fencing master who gently raps his opponent's blade to assess his skill, or offers a halfhearted feint suggestive of this thrust or that cut—until finally he performs a true attack entirely unexpectedly and with alarming power and efficacy.

“Don't say anything against vanity,” he explained, fanning cigar smoke under his nostrils with obvious pleasure. “It is a manly trait, a romantic one, the coquettish sister of pride, whose menacing histrionics it transforms into a flowery garland of dainty grace. And it especially becomes the military man! Because is there anything more elegant than a martial bearing when it verges on coquetry? Isn't that exactly what lends his elegance its deadly earnestness? And doesn't the wish to excel in the bloodbath of a battle show a beautiful love of extravagance, a willingness to squander everything just for the glances and sighs of the young women who line the streets to greet the returning victors? There are occasions when the very traits that people point to as examples of how old-fashioned our nation is, how far behind the times, make me happy and grateful to be its child, and to live among my siblings. Isn't it delightful to watch our generals cultivating the passions and gestures of Napoleonic officers? Take, for instance, my friend Petrescu's ambitions. The political game he is pursuing so arduously is really nothing more than an expression of his warrior-like restlessness, the impatience of a knight worried that he might disgrace himself through idleness, who engages in the business of the state because he has no war in which to prove his rank among men. The
will to power
—so full of sound and fury, but we are most inclined to accept it when we realize that it's really all about the ladies on promenade in Czernopol whispering their admiration … Incidentally I will predict that the article in
Vocea
is only the first of what will become a whole series of similar pieces. And I will be paying them all the more attention as they represent the journeyman's labor, so to speak, of a young man who is not unknown to you. I'm talking about the children's former tutor, Herr Alexianu.
Vocea
has acquired his promising journalistic gifts, and he is finding it a much more suitable and fruitful place for his polemical talents than if he had followed Năstase's malicious cajoling and founded his own paper, which would no doubt have been the wittiest rag around, but for a limited readership—yes, alas, a very limited readership …”

In any event, when Tildy's case became public it acquired a certain piquancy, which the local gossips made all the more delectable. As for the major himself, no one doubted that had he been free to act on his own he would have categorically protected his wife and assumed all of her liabilities. Unfortunately, however, he was in strict isolation for the foreseeable future. Aside from that, it was unlikely he could cover any debt at all, since he was now utterly destitute. And so it would have amounted to nothing more than a beautiful gesture, which would hardly have created much of a sensation, since the character of
the last knight
—or “the dumb German”—was already widely known. As things stood, the scandal was unavoidable. Suits, demands, and seizures rained down on Tamara Tildy. The bailiff had to arrange a forced entry. The small names among the creditors gave the affair its “human interest” as Herr Tarangolian remarked sarcastically. “The case is so embarrassing,” he said, “that there is nothing to do with it except turn it into a tale of the grotesque.”

None of it caused old Paşcanu the slightest discomfort. On the contrary, malicious as he was, he actually gloated to see his daughter, who he was convinced hated him, and his son-in-law, who he was convinced despised him, in such a situation—and it would have given him great satisfaction to see them come begging at his doorstep. But, strangely—and Herr Tarangolian had certain suspicions concerning this as well—at about the same time the news was spreading that there was something almost deceitful about the way that Tildy—or his wife—had fallen into financial ruin, rumors started making the rounds that Săndrel Paşcanu's own finances were far from rosy. People went so far as to doubt his fabled wealth, declaring that the business with the jewels he collected for his dead wives was a fairy tale, and that even his Titian was a fake. And what followed proved these sudden doubters right. The death of Săndrel Paşcanu set off an economic catastrophe that affected the entire city. The whole lumber business—which was of incomparably greater significance for Tescovina and its capital than the drug trade—was hit very hard, and that had grave repercussions for other trades. And not only that: certain transactions involving state funds were uncovered that were more than merely dirty, and a whole gallery of public figures was exposed in the most embarrassing way. And so the terrible events that would one night turn Czernopol into a witches' cauldron, when the basest instincts ran amok, were preceded by other incidents that were disconcerting on any number of levels.

But it would be wrong to suppose that old Paşcanu was simply trying to save what he could with his childish scheme. We later overheard a conversation between our parents and Herr Tarangolian in which the prefect had his own insightful explanation ready and waiting. But Uncle Sergei would have none of it.

“You no understand what is proud man's act of desperation,” he said. “Forgive me, my esteemed friend, but in this case your psychology is not enough.”

“Don't call my knowledge of people and characters ‘psychology,'” answered Herr Tarangolian. “That would do offense to my modesty.” He closed his heavy eyelids for a moment, as if he wanted to suppress a smile. “I knew the old man very well. It's quite true that he was dumb enough to be proud—in his way. But not so dumb that he didn't know exactly what chances his maneuver really had of succeeding. Even if the swindle had gone through, the winnings would have covered just a fraction of his debt—what am I saying!—not even enough worth mentioning … No, no, it was something else entirely …”

Herr Tarangolian woke up from the idly relaxed and reflexive pose of the bon vivant. His perfect teeth flashed beneath his twitching mustache; his temperament gave wings to his hands, and they began to speak with him, forming and kneading his thoughts, sketching pictures in the air, sculpting his speech into strikingly animated forms. Animated himself, he leaned forward as he spoke, delighted by the liveliness that had taken hold of him.

“How could you possibly understand old Paşcanu! Forgive me, but to do that you have to be a child of this nation. Pride, you say. Yes—but what kind of pride? Even you, a Russian, my dear Sergei Nikiforich, overlook the mythic element. He was a force of nature, this old swindler, a true son of our Romanian soil—personal pride has no part in this. He was always half wild, I tell you: they had to pin him down to get him to wear shoes, they had to chain him, like a wild horse being shod for the first time … Have you ever wondered what his secret was, how he managed to keep it all so well hidden for so many years, the fact that he was totally bankrupt? There had to have been at least a dozen people who knew of his circumstances, and not all of them were so entangled in his shady dealings that they thought it prudent to keep their mouths shut. No, the force of his personality outweighed any such prudence. Today we know he was never as rich as everyone thought. But he had the aura of a man of unlimited wealth. You see: he knew that this aura was suddenly in danger. Not that he wouldn't have been able to slither past the catastrophe in the years still granted him. Anyone who's managed to pull it off for as long as he had can manage a little while longer. But that's not what he was after. What he was concerned about, if you will, was
saving face.
More exactly, in saving the aura that had surrounded him his entire life. Because he, too, was in danger of disgracing himself through
idleness
, like my chivalrous friend Petrescu, or like Tildy, if you follow me. It was again time for one of his strokes of genius, some fantastic, and if possible clever, coup that would have dazzled and amused everyone as much as possible. His dealings were always astonishing, witty, and sly, full of a con man's grotesque humor. He would bluntly grasp a possibility that others overlooked either due to lack of spirit or lack of brains. As a result people were inclined to immediately forgive the more disturbing aspects. As a son of this nation he knew in his blood how to best impress his brothers. Force alone is not enough. You need wit, you need satire. That is the only thing our people truly value—and their respect is absolute—because of its symbolic character, because wit is both a symbol and reflection of life. Of course …”