An Ermine in Czernopol (39 page)

She gave a dark and throaty laugh. They stood there and looked at each other, face-to-face.

And suddenly the golden rain tree beside her parted, and a figure burst out and headed straight for Frau Lyubanarov.

It was the Widow Morar. As she later told us, she was on her way to us, and had arrived at the open gate just as the two had begun their conversation.

Like a fury she went after Frau Lyubanarov, screaming: “She's lying, the tramp, she doesn't know a thing—she doesn't know anything and pretends to know everything in order to coax it out and then broadcast it to all her studs and stallions, so that the filth will lust after her. You don't know a thing, you cesspit, who'll open your legs for any Gypsy's slime. In the mud, you say, you who are nothing but mud yourself. If it's mud you want, then I'll give it to you! Mud to mud!”

She clawed at the gurgling runoff and scraped up a handful of earth and gravel and leaf mold and hurled it at Frau Lyubanarov's head. We heard it rattle and slap against the
dvornik
's hut. Frau Lyubanarov had shielded her face with her hand, but a stream of dirty water came flowing out of her hair onto her forehead. Before her opponent could reach into the gutter a second time, she shot forward and threw herself on the other woman. In the process she knocked Herr Adamowski's arm off the wall he had been leaning against and sent him tumbling. The two women grabbed each other by the hair, tangling themselves into a knot; they clawed each other to shreds and bit each other with a venomous rage, such as we had never seen before and thank goodness never would see again. Howling, shrieking, and screeching like cats, the two women rolled over each other on the ground until the coachman, who had heard the noise, came running up and tried to separate them the way you would separate fighting dogs, with a bucket of water. But that didn't help; they only became more and more entangled. Shaggy locks of hair clogged their mouths, bloody welts marked their faces, and their eyes rolled back into their heads out of pain and rage. All the household servants came running outside; the women's fingers had to be pried apart, their feet had to be held so that they wouldn't keep striking blindly at the other, and they were lifted or dragged away, Frau Lyubanarov returning to the
dvornik
's hut, Widow Morar into the street. Their screaming and howling brought the entire neighborhood out of their houses.

Our mother and Aunt Elvira, who had also come outside, chased us back into the house. For the first time in our life Mama lost her composure in front of us; she shooed us in and threatened us with terrible punishments, even spankings, all because we had been involuntary witnesses of the horrible scene. We were locked in our rooms, had to eat supper late, and by ourselves, and were immediately sent to bed. The storm at home raged for days, bringing with it the dreaded arguments between our parents, behind closed doors that were suddenly opened and slammed shut. Our aunts looked at us as if we were to blame for everything that had happened. Uncle Sergei deliberately stayed out of the house as much as possible. Only Herr Tarangolian, who once again stopped by for some black coffee, treated us with the same affectionate and attentive politeness as always, and invited us, as compensation for the outing that had been canceled on that ill-starred day, to a long ride in his carriage, which was a great treat for us, especially as it was crowned by a lavish visit to the Kucharczyk Café and Confectionary.

We were the only ones who knew of the conversation between the two furies that had set off the fight, and we kept that to ourselves.

The second incident I have to report before I go on to events that also affected other people was so cruel it made the first one pale by comparison. It was not quite as violent, to be sure, but the pain was greater for having been inflicted on us in a blindly unfeeling and incomprehensible act of stupidity.

Clearly the preceding episode took its toll on us, though it would take a far greater shock before an actual illness manifested itself. Meanwhile it was only thanks to our school that we were able to withstand the psychological burden as well as the physical stress: there our friendship with Blanche Schlesinger and the irrepressible vitality of Solly Brill allowed us to escape the chaos at home completely for part of the day, and we felt liberated and very happy.

Madame Aritonovich decided that the school should put on a ballet performance for parents and guests; in later years the gratitude we always felt for her made us think that she came up with the idea just for us, and above all for Tanya, who danced with enthusiasm and talent. Nor can this supposition be entirely mistaken. Madame Aritonovich was too close to the prefect and Uncle Sergei not to know every detail of what went on in our house. She probably knew more than we did at the time, for instance about the heated arguments with Aunt Paulette, who stood accused, justifiably, of having opened the house up to Herr Adamowski. At the same time, no one had any idea of the content of Adamowski's conversation with Frau Lyubanarov, which was the actual cause of the fight between her and Widow Morar. But Herr Adamowski was mixed up in it somehow, and that was bad enough, according to the entirely proper view that even an innocent bystander at such occurrences bears some responsibility. In other words: “That kind of thing just shouldn't happen to you, regardless of whether you were involved or not.” Naturally Herr Adamowski never came to our house again; instead, Aunt Paulette began to visit him.

In any event, the prospect of the school ballet recital excited us, along with all of our classmates. We began rehearsing the snowflake scene from Tchaikovsky's
Nutcracker.
Tanya danced the part of the Snow Queen, while a handsome and talented boy from a higher grade played the Snow King; Blanche, to our delight—and this seems to confirm our suspicion that the plan was devised with us in mind—was given the part of Clara, while the rest of us, as part of the
corps de ballet
, were to be plain snowflakes, albeit exceedingly eager ones. Solly was cast as a comical snowball with his own special choreography. Turning to her inexhaustible supply of assorted odd, highly original, and skillful acquaintances, Madame Aritonovich assembled a small orchestra. Other instruction was reduced to the bare essentials. Costumes were sewn; Tanya was given a genuine tutu. We were in heaven.

Our parents continued to insist that we never go to or from school unaccompanied. Until then, our coachman had always driven us in the morning, and Aunt Paulette had usually met us after school and walked back home with us through the Volksgarten. That had been very fun on occasion. But ever since she had hit our sister, Tanya, Aunt Elvira picked us up. Aunt Elvira was in her forties, and to us she seemed ancient and unbending. In addition, she had been “left on the shelf,” that is, she hadn't found a husband, which also may have soured her. She was the oldest of four sisters—after her came, at significant intervals, our mother, our late Aunt Aida, and Aunt Paulette—and so she commanded a certain degree of authority in the family. We always considered her a terrible party-pooper. For like many unlucky women who have missed their natural vocation as mothers with families of their own, and who though not entirely without work lack much that is truly theirs, being forced to live with relatives, she clung to the illusion that our family was nothing more than an extension of her parent's home, and kept a jealous eye out to make sure that everything was done in the same way and according to the same views as had been practiced there. This led to frequent conflicts with our father—so-called crises—that split the house into factions. At first glance, such divisions do much harm to family life, but frequently they are the only thing that makes us aware that there is such a thing as “family life” in the first place.

I have already mentioned that we didn't concern ourselves with the religion of our new friends—nor in fact that of most of our classmates—though it's hard to say whether this was intentional or an unconscious decision. But I would be straying far indeed from the truth if I were to claim we didn't know what kind of instruction we were receiving every week from a certain Dr. Aaron Salzmann. We had never discussed or planned our participation; we simply took it for granted that we would take part in that course, just like the majority of our classmates, and above all like our close friends Blanche Schlesinger and Solly Brill. There were so few Catholics in the Institut d'Éducation that the school did not offer special instruction for them. We had been told at the outset that one afternoon in the week we were expected to visit the priest of the Herz-Jesu Church, Deacon Mieczysław Chmielewski, who had a hard time ridding us of the Anglican notions we had acquired thanks to Miss Rappaport. Similarly, the larger group of Lutherans, the occasional Eastern Orthodox or Greek Catholic, the Armenians, and Calvinist students went to their churches for instruction every Wednesday afternoon, and kept away from Dr. Salzmann's class, which was the last one of the day at the institute. So it didn't really attract any attention if we took part in that course; besides, no one at home paid much attention to our schedule.

Only Solly Brill expressed his surprise the first time he saw us in Dr. Salzmann's class. “What's this?” he said. “I thought you were little
goyim
. You're not even circumcised. Well, so much the better. We'll sit through
cheyder
all together.”

Blanche, however, appeared to see through our friendly deception. She said: “My father often talks to me about Christ and the holy symbolism of his crucifixion. I'd become a Christian myself if it weren't for the fact that as soon as you do that you get attacked from all sides. My father also thinks that people can feel Jewish and Christian at the same time.”

Thanks to the short time we spent in Dr. Salzmann's class, we never thought otherwise ourselves. Because what we heard there and learned was a beautiful reverence for God and an equally beautiful tolerance, wise and smiling—in any case far more ethical than the relentless zeal of Deacon “Mietek” Chmielewski, who tried to convince us that we, as Austrians—in other words almost Germans, by which he meant Protestants—had little or no chance of ever truly being good Catholics, and that a good Catholic had the duty of being an even better Pole.

From Dr. Salzmann we heard about the only people—apart from the Hellenes—whom we felt had a legitimate claim to national seniority, a nation made holy both by the greatness of its religion as well as by a thousand years of martyrdom, that had produced the men we had learned to revere as our own patriarchs, and whose cruel persecutions throughout generations were no less than those suffered by the martyrs of our Church, and continued to the most recent times. We were shaken to hear about the atrocities committed during the uprising led by Khmelnytsky, whose name sounded so much like that of our deacon.

In portraying those events, or the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition, Dr. Salzmann's intent was not to show how bestially the Christians had acted in their religious zeal. He mitigated their guilt as well as he could, with wisely resigned pronouncements about human nature, and by constantly demonstrating that stupidity or foolishness were more to blame than actual ill will—for instance when he told us that the reason Russian soldiers so much enjoyed enacting pogroms was because they had great fun slitting the feather beds with their bayonets. The fact that people who had been frightened out of their wits happened to have crawled under those same feather beds was, so to speak, a misunderstanding—“bad luck,” as Miss Rappaport might say, who also responded to such situations with cool objectivity.

In talking about the agonizing history of the Jews, Dr. Salzmann was not simply dishing out the murky broth of nationalistic feeling by citing the hardships of the fathers; his goal was to emphasize the steadfastness of belief that had been handed down through the generations. Untold hordes of old and young, men, mothers, children had been tortured to death upholding the precept of
Kiddush Hashem
—in the praise of the one whose name cannot be taken in vain, according to the commandment that for us also was the first—and would continue to be martyred for their belief. They died confessing their faith with words that we, who also believed in a single God—the God of the same tribe from which our Savior came—happily repeated with conviction the
Shema Yisrael
: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one!”

But most of all we loved this class on account of the teacher. Dr. Aaron Salzmann had a captivating way of treating each of us as creatures that were at once human and all-too-human, whose understanding of the world, from the least things to the greatest, was limited solely by our lack of practice in clear and logical thought—in other words, in merely thinking. He accepted neither ignorance nor stupidity, which he considered mere excuses. Whenever he encountered a lack of understanding, he never lost his patience, but closed his eyes, arched his eyebrows, and repeated the question or sentence that had not been immediately understood in his soft, rich tenor, adding a sigh of ponderous contentment—for as long as it took until he finally came out with the explanation or answer himself, because it was part of his internal vision. His standing expression was: “I'm thinking out loud.”

He was very fat—his stomach stuck out so far it seemed to push him backwards; his face had a glossy, reddish tinge with the olive undertone of his race, and he had sparkling black eyes and a thick, assertive mustache. His bearing was warlike. Embedded in the cushions of fat around his cheeks we could still make out the features of his youth: the face of a young David, bold, clear, and beautiful. His mouth was defiant, soft and sensuous, with finely molded scarlet lips. A profusion of oily ringlets formed a wreath around his neck inside his collar, which was always a little grimy.

He came into the classroom and said: “What am I doing? I am thinking out loud. I will speak about religious matters. So I step before God. Who am I to step before
Him
whom we do not name, out of respect for the first commandment—who am I to step before
Him
with my head bare, combed or not, just as I am? Am I subject to the order to cover my head? For the Orthodox it is imperative, and for the liberal, half-imperative—one doesn't have to, but one should. I'm thinking out loud. Maybe the liberal isn't wrong when he says that God sees his reverence even though he isn't wearing a hat. Because
He
sees everything that is over a hat and everything that is underneath. But next to me is maybe an Orthodox man who finds my uncovered state offensive to his religious feelings. In order not to offend his religious feelings, I therefore put on a yarmulke.” He pulled out a round black silk yarmulke from his pocket and put it on. “There was once a man in Russia who saw an officer approaching with soldiers. The man thought to himself in fear: ‘Now they are going to beat me. Because if I let them pass with my head covered they will yell at me:
Why didn't you remove your hat to greet us?
—and they will beat me. But if I take off my hat, they will yell at me:
Who are you to be greeting us by removing your hat?
—and they will beat me. Probably they will beat me to death. And if I die, I don't wish to come before
His
countenance, whom we don't name, with an uncovered head. So I keep my hat on my head.' In this way the man died for
Kiddush Hashem
… The Orthodox wants to be certain at all times and ready for all things, and so he wears both, a yarmulke as well as a hat.”