An Ermine in Czernopol (44 page)

Then, one morning, Tanya had a breakdown. She fainted for a very brief moment, and had already come to by the time anyone could help her. She smiled, a little embarrassed and confused, but it was a smile—and we hadn't seen her smile in weeks. Then she said quietly: “It's nothing, I'm fine, I can keep dancing.”

“Did you hurt yourself?” asked Madame Aritonovich. “Let me see you move your feet. Nothing hurts?”

“No,” said Tanya. “Please, may I continue right now? And from the beginning, if that's all right?”

Madame Aritonovich helped her to her feet, face-to-face, and looked her in the eye. “Fine, from the beginning, then.”

I've occasionally wondered whether Madame Aritonovich might have seen those first movements Tanya made by looking in the mirror, but that's impossible, because she was walking away from her, in the direction of Herr Tarangolian, who was sitting in his usual corner. In any case she had turned her back to Tanya and was heading toward the prefect with such a triumphantly relieved smile that I, a rather clumsy snowflake deployed close to that same corner, couldn't help being amazed. The prefect lifted his heavy eyes as she approached his chair, and said: “How did you do that, you sorceress?”

“It wasn't me,” said Madame Aritonovich. “Could I please have a light, Coco?” I saw how her hands were shaking. She lit her cigarette with the match he offered, and only then did she turn around to look at Tanya.

“This is one of the few truly miraculous events I have witnessed in my entire long life,” said the prefect. Madame Aritonovich did not respond. She was focused on Tanya's dancing.

“Ahh,” said the prefect, gasping with glee. “Fiokla—such a
port des bras
! But don't pretend—that
was
you, you're the one who brought it out of her.” He expressed his delight in an artificial excitement. “I admit, the child was always talented, we agreed on that from the very beginning, but this, this is brilliant.
Brava, brava!
” He applauded. “You see …” He played the awestruck admirer with such verve that he wound up being truly moved. “What balance, what elevation, what
ballon
!”

(
Ballon
refers to a special trick in dance, or better, the divinely given ability of a ballet dancer to appear to hold a position in the air, as if released from gravity. The effect is attained by the dancer's rapidity in assuming the desired position during a jump, which makes the flight seem more drawn out, relaxed, and full of élan.)

“She already had all of that,” said Madame Aritonovich. “What she had lost, and has now regained, is herself.”

“I admire you, Fiokla Ignatieva,” said Herr Tarangolian. He kissed her hand ardently.

When the scene was over, Madame Aritonovich said: “Well done, Tanya. And the rest of you were excellent. Ice cream for everyone. Who would like to volunteer to go get it?”

We broke out in cheers. Herr Tarangolian got up, went over to Tanya, took the red carnation out of its buttonhole and presented it to her with a very seriously intended, exaggeratedly gallant bow.

“
Nu
, finally something worth hearing: ice cream for everyone,” said Solly Brill. And then, to Tanya: “You could have come up a little sooner with the dance discipline and all that, you know.” He sighed. “Whimsical creatures, these women, by God!”

He had planted himself in the middle of the room and watched Herr Tarangolian, who had righted himself after bowing to Tanya and was gravely prancing back to Madame. “Herr Coco, you have a button open!”

The prefect looked down at himself, dismayed and embarrassed. “No, on your left gaiter,” said Solly. “Why? What did you think?”

That same afternoon Tanya was missing at home. They called for her but she didn't come. They went looking for her, increasingly agitated, but she was nowhere to be found. We were forced to ask at the neighbors, but she hadn't been seen there either. Uncle Sergei was sent into town to look for her at Madame Aritonovich's or at the institute. But she wasn't there, either. They were on the point of asking the prefect to contact the police when she came striding through the garden gate—accompanied by our father and Aunt Paulette.

Without paying any attention to our mother's worried expression, our father went straight to his room. That was the sign of a rising crisis, and everyone took pains not to say a single unnecessary word.

“Where were you?” asked our mother.

“She was with me,” said Aunt Paulette, in place of Tanya. “I took her to visit some friends.”

“Couldn't I have been told beforehand?”

“No,” said Aunt Paulette, without any further explanation, and likewise retreated.

Tanya kept quiet about her adventure. Everything remained very secretive and enigmatic.

But a few days later, over the after-dinner coffee—to which Herr Tarangolian no longer came—Aunt Paulette asked: “Will it be possible for me to borrow one of the children this afternoon?”

“I don't know exactly what you mean?” said our mother.

“I need a chaperone. I'd like to visit some friends.”

“And might we know what ‘friends' you have in mind?” asked Mama.

“Herr Adamowski. Don't worry: the children's moral health will not be placed in danger.”

“Wouldn't it be more appropriate if Elvira went with you?”

“I can't imagine she would much enjoy herself.”

“But you think that one of the children might?”

The conversation was clearly growing sharper by the second. Only Aunt Paulette stayed charmingly casual, her head leaned lazily against the back of the chair. “One of the children can drink chocolate and browse through some of the picture magazines. But if you think Elvira would be satisfied with that …”

“I have no intention,” said Aunt Elvira, poisonously.

And so I was chosen to accompany Aunt Paulette.

We passed through the Volksgarten the same way we went to school. Aunt Paulette hardly said a word to me, then stopped at a booth and bought me a bag of sticky candies, with the casual hint of contempt that was her way. But I preferred to go with her than with Aunt Elvira; she was eye-catchingly pretty with her dark-waved bobbed hair and wore her clothes with a natural elegance. She was tall and had beautiful legs, which she was already beginning to show back then—not past the knee, as later became common, but just enough to reveal the striking taper of her calves down to the ankle: when it came to fashion, Aunt Paulette was always ahead of the time, thanks to a certain intuition. Her flesh-toned silk stockings with the straight seam increased the appeal. I've always regretted that this seam, which connotes a slight disguise, has all but disappeared today. The overly thin hose-gauze looks like bare skin, causing the legs to appear naked. “Nakedness,” Uncle Sergei used to say, “has no charm. It is always the covering that awakens the erotic.”

Herr Adamowski lived on a side street off the Neuschulgasse, on the fourth floor of an ugly, dark apartment building. He had on a casual jacket of brown velvet with braid trim on the front. The homemade mixture of student-fraternity-jacket and Hussar uniform struck me as particularly revolting.

“Aha,” he said. “A young man as an escort, a true cavalier from top to toe—noble, elegant—my congratulations!” He bowed before me, sinking down on his clubfoot, and then righting himself by exchanging his swinging leg for his stamping leg. He had bared his saw-teeth and his monocle was flashing. “Take your coat off, dearest,” he said to Aunt Paulette, “and please step inside, the colloquium is all assembled.”

We stepped into a kind of library that also seemed to function as his living quarters. All the tables and even some chairs were littered with piles of books, magazines and newspapers. Three men rose as we entered; a woman in a brown silk dress stayed seated and took in our greeting with a nonchalant play of worldliness. Aunt Paulette introduced me with a mocking undertone as her chaperone. Everyone laughed.

“Please, have a seat wherever you like,” said Herr Adamowski, swaying from his long leg to his short one, and then straightening back up. “Of course the young gentleman will have some liqueur—a little glass of Cointreau won't harm anyone, am I right,
Herr Kavalier
? For who can reject a drop of respect!” The three men laughed loudly and tensely, all the while nodding to one another.

“Give him something to look at,” said Aunt Paulette. “Then he'll sit in a corner and not bother us anymore.”

“What bother, what bother!” exclaimed Herr Adamowski in feigned indignation, baring his teeth and flashing an embarrassing conspiratorial look at me through his monocle. “Who said anything about bother! We are delighted to have the young man's company. If you feel inclined to have another little glass, please, help yourself. I'll put the bottle here just in case.” The three men laughed. “You have all the books you could wish for at your disposal, although I'll ask you to skip the ones on this particular shelf.” The three men laughed. Herr Adamowski winked at me: “They're a little on the piquant side,
capito
? Only for collectors. But perhaps this one here: Greek vase paintings. It shows figures that are in their paradisiacal state as well, but they've been rendered harmless by their classical lines. Hellene goddesses and gods in contemporary portrait. And so on. Seek and ye shall find.”

Aunt Paulette had sat down in her usual lethargic posture and said nothing in response to these fatuous remarks. One of the men lit her cigarette with exaggerated eagerness, cupping his hands around the matchbox to create a hollow for the flame, as if it there were a violent storm inside and the match were in danger of expiring at any moment. Aunt Paulette had to dip her face into this hollow: the reddish-yellow tinge of the flame spilled onto her mouth so that she seemed to be drinking fire from his hands.

Herr Adamowski sat down as well and stared at each of the guests, one by one. When no one said anything, he stated with an eager, smirking grin: “So, our gathering is complete. And how is the general health of the assembly?” The men laughed once more, this time accompanied by the woman in the brown taffeta dress.

I began leafing through a book, pretending that I was entirely absorbed in my reading. I was disappointed and alert at the same time. After everything I knew about Herr Adamowski, and the secretive circumstances surrounding both my visit and Tanya's earlier one, the last thing I expected was a group like this: boorish, gauche, and awkward despite the crude familiarity, where no one ventured to speak except the host, and everyone seemed to be waiting for some comment or observation that would relieve the tension. The three men sat there like lumps of wood: I found out that their names were Leutgeb, Fellner, and Kopetzki, but couldn't discover more about their background or occupation. The names alone sounded like a bunch of bandits. Fellner was still rather young, with a healthy, ordinary face and large hands, evidently very strong. He was the most awkward of them all; at every new outburst of nervous laughter he would squirm in his chair and look around and nod to the others, hiding his large hands between his knees, since he didn't know what else to do with them. Leutgeb was a middle-aged man, thickset, with a small mouth that displayed a hint of malice. Kopetzki seemed to suffer from a lung disease: he never stopped quietly coughing, though at the same time he smoked a pipe that gave off thick clouds of smoke. He had a finely shaped head, narrow and pale, with a dark Polish mustache. The woman in the brown taffeta answered to the name Theophila—evidently a nickname; her dress looked worn and its rhinestone embroidery gave a shabby appearance. On the rare occasions when anyone but Herr Adamowski said anything, they addressed their host as “Adam” or else by the less-than-elegant diminutive: “Adamchik.”

I have to confess that it was my Aunt Paulette who gave this group a peculiarly macabre note. Her presence was like a last spot of paint, a bit of contrasting color that paradoxically fit the whole picture and made the group seem a little eerie, or even dangerous, like a secret alliance, a conspiracy sworn to fulfill some covert mission. In later years I would encounter in spiritualist circles a similarly tense atmosphere charged with a furtive intimacy, together with the same vapid cheerfulness and habitual shallowness in the conversational tone of the séance leader before launching into the parts of the program that were meant to be creepy.

“You laugh, Ladies and Gentlemen,” said Herr Adamowski in his harsh-sounding German. “But these days one cannot be serious enough in inquiring after the health of every worthy gathering. You see, Gentlemen and Ladies, you are caught up in the course of the times, without realizing that this is more than just your personal progression—please consider the implications! All jests aside—the difference is a crucial one. For me the difference is quite clear, as a journalist with his finger constantly on the pulse of the times, I live with it every day, I experience this same discrepancy in all its tragic consequences, not only the direct effects that have already resulted, but ones yet to be seen, ones to be feared. It makes a tremendous difference if one chooses to view the times abandoning all claim to exclusive possession, in other words no longer as a phenomenon of personal episodes alone, but of collective experience. As a journalist I have a professional obligation to provide an accounting of the quality of the times, both for myself and for others. While doing this I have to bear two things in mind: first, that the quality of the times is shaped and molded by the sum of its details, a sum of purely personal experiences, which taken alone would be completely insignificant, and would lead to nothing but misleading exceptions divorced from the spirit of the times, but which in the aggregate, as I have said, help determine the general character of the epoch. And, second, that this specific general character in return has an effect on each individual fate, no matter how isolated, and shapes how each person passes their time, no matter how remote the activity. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is perhaps the most interesting interplay in all of nature, the one that leads us closest to metaphysics, and one that demonstrates the difficulty of the journalistic métier … Yes, you laugh, but please bear in mind what our thankless task consists in. The journalist, Ladies and Gentlemen, does not have as congenial a profession as people are wont to think.” The group laughed out loud. “He must, as my esteemed friend Professor Feuer would put it, act like the squirrel carrying discord up and down Yggdrasil, between the eagle in the canopy and the dragon in the roots. He must roust the privately minded man from living solely for himself, by ceaselessly calling his attention to outside his personal sphere—events that don't concern him at all, that don't apply to him in the least, as he sees it, but which in reality are of his utmost personal concern, whether it's a murder in the house next door or a change of regimes in Portugal, for instance, or an earthquake in Kamchatka. On the other hand, our conscience dictates that we journalists hold up this model of the private man to the so-called general public as an ideal form of being.” They laughed. “Yes, my friends, that's the way it is. Who among us would deny the singular truth of the saying
beatus ille homo qui sedet in suo domo
, and who does not yearn for this very same thing from the bottom of his heart? Nietzsche was proud of not owning a house, but you ought to read sometime what he said about Epicurus …”