An Ermine in Czernopol (3 page)

As a result, Czernopolites had a particular soft spot for stupidity, since they placed a certain value on anything exotic, which they viewed with a tender, heartfelt irony. The city's top fools never failed to elicit fresh enthusiasm, happy astonishment, wide eyes, gaping mouths, and gleeful shouts of amazement—like grotesque monsters in the retinue of some Oriental envoy, bearing fabulous presents from distant potentates to the ruler of the world. Except our fools were part of the public domain: they belonged to the general populace, and commanded the same affection as city mascots. They had nicknames, too, that had arisen with the leavening of satire, such as those of enormous bells—“Big Ben” or “Old Pummerin”—whose sound and legend are known to every child because they have grown up with the city and shared its fate. Or like an especially powerful cannon from a regiment of Landsknecht soldiers.

The last comparison is probably more apt, because Czernopol was animated by a similar spirit—not exactly soldierly, mind you, but more reminiscent of those earlier mercenaries, with all their train and baggage. Herr Tarangolian, who as Prefect of Tescovina was the province's highest official, as well as one of the keenest analysts of its capital city—presumably because he was its most fervent admirer—enjoyed discoursing extensively on the subject.

“The world we inhabit,” as he used to say, “is a world of such contradictions that it makes America look like a nation of materialistic bumbleheads. We, for our part, have been forced to become true cosmopolitans—and in the most extreme and dangerous manner, namely through our inexhaustible tolerance. But please don't call us nihilists. There is nothing we reject, absolutely nothing, and that's exactly the point. So if it's also true that there's nothing we accept—and I mean
nothing
—it's simply because we accept everything. We live amidst so many contradictions that we scarcely can find anything to hold against anybody. So what about order, you ask. I beg you, what city could possibly have more faith in order than our own? Czernopol is governed by a rigid bureaucracy, which, having inherited the most ossified system in the history of the world—in other words, the Austrian one that we supplanted—now sports its own brand of narrow nationalism, although under no circumstances is it willing to admit this. That it continues to be inefficient as well as ineffective is due only in small part to the long-established and well-honed system of bribery people are always fussing about. A far greater cause is the utter lack of resistance, the general compliance of the governed, which verges on the miraculous. This not only takes the sting out of every rule and regulation, but also dampens any impulse or momentum. In this matter Gandhi's followers could learn something from us—namely, irony. After all, even the most passive resistance is still resistance. But what can you do with a city that laughs at everything? What can you make of a world in which a rabbi capable of working wonders yields the sidewalk to some double-breasted dandy of a cavalry lieutenant, closing his eyes
so as not to be tempted by the beauty of the man's clothes.
Or where the citizens resort almost to violence in protesting the dismissal of a crooked public official,
because his deceit was too blatantly obvious to deserve punishment
! You probably consider this an Oriental practice, but let me assure you: it is completely European, Baroque to be exact, and not merely because it is so vividly explicit, but rather because of the unconditional belief in the necessity of
form
—and, consequently, in order of all kinds—along with the equally unconditional need to poke fun at same. Naturally this is bound to lead to catastrophe. But let's be fair: What else is left for us? In a world that has too many claims to validity, too many equivalences, too many relativities, a world that fashions life out of the grotesque and converts life into the grotesque—isn't such an appreciation of the comic, the droll, a physiological necessity, something analogous to the internal pressure in our bodies that allows us to withstand the weight of the atmosphere? Hah!

“Hah!” said Herr Tarangolian, giving his delicate, heavily ringed, hand, with the nails filed into yellow, almond-shaped claws, a casually elegant flip—like a magician who, having performed his amazing trick, would now like to demonstrate that such speed and dexterity, while not exactly witchcraft, clearly approach limits where rational laws do not apply. “Hah! I tell you, we are modern—modern to the point of having no history. Because the sequence of pogroms, in which we will ultimately let our various tensions play out—or perhaps I should say when we will kill them off—is unlikely to produce any history. Or, rather, it will not produce any
more
history. We have too much history already—inside us, behind us. This city is officially less than three hundred years old and yet you can find anything and everything under its roofs, whatever each new mass migration deposited on our shores, from the Aeolian invasions in Pella to the Brusilov Offensive. My guess is that about one-third of our population is illiterate, and the other two-thirds are clearly unlettered and ignorant: in fact only one in ten thousand could qualify as educated. That said, we do have coursing through our veins a spiritual inheritance that runs from Euclid to Einstein, from Thales to Sigmund Freud. I know of no other city that is more alert, more aware. Here you can find a dozen of the most disparate nationalities and at least half a dozen bitterly feuding faiths—all living in the cynical harmony that is built on mutual aversion and common business dealings. Nowhere are the fanatics more tolerant, and nowhere are tolerant people more dangerous, than here in Czernopol. Nowhere is there less sense of shame and nowhere are people less naïve. I tell you, we are modern to the point of living in the future. Because if you live in a world so full of disdain and contempt, armed with nothing but your own scorned existence, then you are bound to develop a certain insouciance where your only loyalty is to yourself. A present moment that denies both past and future, but is completely committed to the here and now. This is far more than what you might call
amor fati
. Just look around and you'll see that our city, this permanent settlement of nomads—to coin an oxymoron—has less in common with the pioneer spirit than with what might be called ‘the recklessness of saints.'”

A
S I TELL
you the following story, you'll have to permit me to mention myself now and then, because its hero and central character is inextricably bound to our—that is to say, my and my siblings'—childhood. By the same token, it would be impossible to sift out the people who told me about these contexts and connections, and my storytelling would suffer if you were to insist I keep myself entirely out of the tale like a good narrator. Besides, please bear in mind that no one with anything to say ever said anything about anybody but himself.

As I have mentioned, we spent a portion of our childhood in Czernopol. Actually we spent the greater part of every year in the country, though not in the wholesome way in which people tend to imagine this way of life. We wound up there entirely by chance: at one point someone from our family came into a bit of land—the measurements weren't very exact; it was simply part of the landscape whose expanse was generally accepted as beyond estimation—and we didn't consider the property particularly worthy of mention. Nor was agriculture a family passion, whereby character and essence might take root and in turn find reinforcement, a pursuit that lends staunchness of character and an enviable steadiness of spirit. We were happy to leave farming to the people we considered had been called to that way of life, namely the farmers, and if some of our family did tarry in the country nevertheless, it was for reasons, or should I say excuses: because the fathers were so keen on hunting, for example, or because the fresh air and good milk were healthy for the children, or else, as was unfortunately the case with us, because shoddy household management and constant debts didn't permit anything better. As it was, we tried not to extend these stays too long, and eagerly returned to the city at the first opportunity.

Nevertheless, this was the same countryside that looked to Czernopol as its capital, and a few things in my story might be clearer if I offer you a brief description.

“The Province of Tescovina, which is comprised of Tertiary Hill country rich in loess, has no natural eastern defenses and lies exposed to the Podolian Steppe, so that for thousands of years the land was subject to the invasions of barbarian nomads.” That was the sentence we had to commit to memory as one of our first lessons in local history and geography under Herr Alexianu, who worked for a while as our private tutor—one part of our very checkered and highly unsystematic education. The purpose was to acquaint us with the idea that running through our veins was the blood of Dacians, Romans, Gepids, Avars, Pechenegs, Cumans, Slavs, Magyars, Turks, Greeks, Poles, and Russians: “a strong mix of ethnicities” was how the book described Tescovina. In the fourteenth century some landed gentry, whose names struck our ears like the curses we were always hearing—Bogdan Siktirbey, for example—founded small states, known as “voivodates,” which soon came under Turkish rule. In 1775 the Sublime Porte ceded our homeland to Austria, which first annexed Tescovina to Galicia, and later declared it an independent Crown Land. Herr Alexianu spoke about this historical episode with the greatest reluctance.

And yet that chapter had irrevocably shaped the face of the country—at least for the time we lived there. The late-summer sunsets still reflected the glory of the sunken Austro-Hungarian Empire. Broad, tranquil country roads still cut through the vast expanses, bulwarks of official sobriety restraining a landscape drunk with melancholy, “roads from the time of marching and express post,” straight as an arrow, drenched with sweat and powdered with dust “like ribbons of military twill” … roads lined with mighty poplars, where falcons perched in treetops flickering in the wind—the gasps of a gigantic breath that refused to be checked by a few silly barriers recently sprung up along the border … roads quietly bending in the distance, toward faraway places yearned for by the plaintive, minor tones of the shepherds' pipes.

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.