An Ermine in Czernopol (50 page)

Herr Tarangolian was clearly the instigator and moving force behind this dramatic effect, its director and lead actor in one and the same person, and when he launched into one of his entertaining philosophical monologues, his words also struck us as deceptively meaningful and spruced-up for effect. Not even our usual pleasure in hearing his euphonic voice—the Latin love of hearing oneself speak that we so enjoyed in him—could release us from the unease we felt that everything he was saying, everything he was alluding to and everything he was concealing—and thus the entire situation in which his speech proceeded—was only for appearance, alleged and pretended, and in a way that twisted reality to such a degree it could no longer be grasped. This uncanny feeling went to the root of our being, calling it into question, as if it were merely an assertion, a claim, as if our existence could be replaced by some other at any time—although without altering the inevitable course of events. In this way its essence acquired a deeply ironic character.

“Indeed,” said the prefect, “it is so difficult for me to part from Czernopol that I don't know whether I should be grateful to my friend Petrescu or hold it against him. Because it's to the general himself and no one else that I owe my upstairs plunge. In any case, I am bound to him—in the true meaning of the word—bound by fate, as rivals always are. But I have my own understanding of this rivalry, which couldn't consist in anything other than our love for Czernopol. I sincerely regret that such a capable man must atone for a mistake with a banishment that cannot possibly advance his outstanding qualities. For my part, I have complete understanding, even the highest respect, for his foolishness. His rash decision, which was unilateral and against my express orders, to unleash his troops during that wretched night—supposedly to restore the order that was never seriously endangered—the spontaneous and fateful stupid act of an otherwise intelligent man, I beg you, can only have one cause—jealousy. And not political jealousy. No, no! It was General Petrescu's jealous love for Czernopol that we have to blame for most of the forty deaths that night. And it fell to me to play his rival. Not that I would have given him any reason to begrudge my clear affection for this city. Oh no! For that, Czernopol is far too loose a mistress, who is so generous with her love that it would be petty to attempt to hoard it. A mistress somewhat like Madame Lyubanarov there, leaning so charmingly against your garden fence. Who—apart from a fool like Tildy—would forget himself so far as to be jealous of someone like that? But don't forget: we are in large part Latins and Orientals. Our jealousy is directed less at a particular
person
, the given favorite of a mood or of an hour, and more toward the
impulse
to love that which we love ourselves. As a result this blinding passion also sharpens our sight. We suffer whenever we sense that someone else understands how to love better than we do. We expect so much from our love that love tendered by someone else always seems better than our own. Well …” Herr Tarangolian smiled his most inscrutable smile. “I may flatter myself that in my love for Czernopol I conquered even a general. I simply knew the better way to love. My friend Petrescu wanted to be master over this city. He wanted it the way a soldier wants his mistress: wild but submissive, untrue but devoted, contemptuous but full of admiration for him. I, on the other hand, love her the way she is: moody, because she cannot find release, because she is unreliable, because she is helpless and crafty and treacherous, because she is fundamentally
chaste.
You don't believe that—you are smiling at my remarks. I won't be able to convince you. But love doesn't make one blind, as people say—on the contrary. It concentrates all our attention on one object that we see with greatly increased focus, because it is we who
discovered
it. Our love is an expression of our having perceived things in that object that no one else sees. Its monomaniacal character might make us blind to the rest of the world, for a while—but it only seems that way, because in fact we never do see more of the world than its surface, anyway. In love, however, we see
the essence
of the object of our affection. Because I believe that the only true love is the approving kind, the kind that lets something be the way it is. I have never wanted to change Czernopol in any of its qualities. The idea of order as perceived by the military mind strikes me as inapplicable, both in regard to women and to the world at large—and especially this world right here. To force it would require violently changing its nature—and that would be tantamount to destroying it. To create order in Czernopol would mean to kill Czernopol. It would mean strangling its spirit in the name of some imagined, abstract form. You may have your own thoughts about the spirit of Czernopol, but permit me to declare how much I revere it—that's right, revere it—because I see our infamous street-character as one of the primal forms of the great Eros, as the wellspring of all living spiritual fertility. I see it in what I call ‘the drunkenness of the sober': in a nagging, alert skepticism toward everything, and, above all, itself. Nowhere fully settled, nowhere secure outside of this skepticism—and therefore without any respect, fear, or awe, ready to get mixed up in anything and prepared for nothing—
that
is impressive … You might accuse me of loving chaos. That's not true. I merely believe that nature's idea of order is stronger than that of human beings. And I owe this insight not least to Czernopol. You consider its spirit corrosive. I do as well. Except that I consider it a kind of destruction that is more economical than our measures to guard against destruction. General Petrescu's praiseworthy attempt to spare the city a bloodbath, which would in fact have been satisfied with a few broken noses, cost forty lives. The spirit of Czernopol seized these forty deaths—you can call it corpse-robbing as far as I'm concerned—
and made a joke about it.
That sounds despicable, but may I remind you how much sorrow, what abundance of painful experience is required to produce a joke? Generations sink into their graves before the grotesque quality of a particular human situation that might have been the original cause of their torments, or even death, becomes clear enough to be expressed in humor. While the laughter it triggers cannot cause a single tear to become unshed, it does forgive all fault. For Czernopol it only took forty dead people to create a
symbolon
—an allegorical seal for the grotesque of a human, all-too-human situation. A story is making the rounds that on that night a giant policeman—in other words, a defender of order, sent in to protect the Jews against the anti-Semites—raised his rifle butt high and started lambasting away at a small Jewish man, who cried out ‘Stop! What's going on?
I'm
not a Nazi!' To which the policeman replied, ‘But
I
am!'”

With the exception of Uncle Sergei, no one laughed, but Herr Tarangolian didn't seem to have been looking to elicit merriment at all.

“I can't think of anything more characteristic for Czernopol,” he said. “This joke, filtered through forty dead people, seems like an ideogram of our city—a single image containing all the elements of its spiritual structure. It calls to mind the strange alternative posed by Tildy, by which I mean his
either/or
—whether the solution is about justice or about a joke. Nowhere is the deadly comic quality of the grossly unjust made so clear as here, but only as a joke, in the moral function of wit, in its lightning-flash illumination of the one true and incontrovertibly genuine reality in the paradox. What does it mean, then: destruction, decomposition, decay? I recall finding a leaf that had decayed down to the veil-like veins of its ribs. And in that state of decomposition it had become uncommonly beautiful, a natural work of art, reduced to its most essential, highly ordered and compacted into an idea. But again, it was only a paradox of itself, in the uselessness of those same ribs that no longer held anything together, the joke of a leaf, so to speak—rather in the way a skeleton is a macabre joke of a human being. And still it seemed to me that the greatest possible justice had been done to the leaf, by the manner of its destruction into this basic sketch …”

Herr Tarangolian studied the intact ash-cone of his cigar, lowered it carefully to the ashtray, and tapped it off.

“Please forgive my boundless chatter,” he said. “I'm letting my emotions get the better of me.
Partir, c'est mourir un peu, n'est-ce pas?
Because you are always parting from yourself … Perhaps everything I think and say is wrong. Perhaps”—he arched one of his magician's eyebrows—“my thinking is intentionally wrong and my speech a deliberate lie—in order to deceive myself. I am leaving this city and have to hold myself accountable for the state in which I leave it. Perhaps”—he smiled broadly, so that his all-too-perfect teeth appeared under his blackened mustache—“perhaps I am removing myself from all accountability by claiming that our human idea of order doesn't exist at all except in our minds, in our thinking, in the artificial sketch—in other words, not in nature but only in art. That leaves it to whim whether we act in one way or another, depending on how serious we are. Because what I truly believe is that we are not capable of comprehending the world, but merely of interpreting it—and, to be sure, the simpler our interpretation, the better. The more resolutely our interpretations vanish into one point, whether it carries the name of God or is merely some symbol for relative nothingness—the more stable the earth is under our feet. It is the privilege of the dumbest as well as the wisest to have firm ground beneath their feet. Both live in the blessed state of simplification. And it makes no difference whether they inhabit the center of this world—which we are told is a sphere—or the outermost surface. After all, this sphere may also be conceived negatively—not imagined, but conceived—so that the periphery may just as well be considered the middle, and the center its surface …”

Herr Tarangolian took his leave, and remained in Czernopol for years, without ever revoking the legend of his imminent recall—and without renewing his former friendship with our parents' household. From then on we saw him only rarely; he no longer mixed among the people like Harun al-Rashid disguised as an idle bon vivant. In time his appearance acquired a legendary quality: we would gape in wonder at our close friend from a long-vanished past whenever we happened to catch sight of him, driving by in his elegant black barouche, with the gleaming brass-crowned lanterns and the cinnabar whirlwind of spokes, the batman seated gruffly and martially beside the coachman on his box. And when once or twice he did appear on some extraordinary occasion in his full presence, it truly was as if he came riding in from some distant place, paying the honor of a special visit that seemed to demand appreciation. From then on he was removed from his old sphere into a new and higher one, and over the years he acquired an unusually high—and, for Czernopol, essentially unique —prestige. After that we never referred to him anymore as our friend, Herr Tarangolian, or even disrespectfully as “Coco,” but reverently, as
the prefect.
But later on, shortly before he left the city to become a government minister, he had become such a popular figure and public institution—a figure so steeped in legend it was impossible to imagine Czernopol without him—that the gently ironic nickname had become common currency. Even the newspapers took the liberty of referring to him as “
Our Coco
” in the headline of an article on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday.

“Perhaps we should all let ourselves be ‘recalled,'” said Madame Aritonovich once—incidentally the only person he visited with any regularity, albeit at greater and greater intervals. “Because sooner or later the hour comes when our lives want to step into a new phase, completely of their own accord, and all previous connections are rendered null and void. Why not give fate a little help? One day all the old meadows are mown and we have to look for new ones—the same nomads we always were, incapable of cultivating our field.”

And as before, on the winter days when the prefect would come to visit and we would peep through the feathery patterns of the frosted windows as he climbed back onto his sled, eerily swathed in blankets and furs, and drove off into the white-and-gray snowy landscape—so now, with his parting from our lives, we felt the emptiness racing in, as though we had been abandoned to the merciless elements, to an all-powerful nature where humans, and with them all measure and order, had moved on, never to return.

W
ITH ITS
profligate smile of spun light, which was both captivating and a little suspicious, like Uncle Sergei's sentimental charm, autumn scattered its deceptive riches, dusting the profane tin roofs with its cheap gold leaf, and sprinkling its chromium-yellow, blue, and ochre-brown hues on the streets like confetti from a carnival, a parade of paradoxes—a motionless riot of color, a silent din, as dramatic as an
attitude en pointe
, and just as the ballet position becomes transformed by the cryptlike emptiness behind the sets, this autumn display acquired an unreal dimension, under the glass dome of the blue, silken skies where the crows were gathering.

Frau Lyubanarov stood at the garden gate day in and day out, filled by her own sweet idling, her sumptuous presence like a piece of fruit ripening away in some secret understanding with the late sun. We saw a man wearing a large gray hat enter our yard and pass her by; his posture was ramrod-straight, and he exuded a pallid, grim determination that seemed manic. Ruthlessly he passed through the force field of her honey-smile and emerged unscathed, then approached the house with decisive steps. The ingrained tautness of his bearing reminded us of the artificial vigor in the gait of our hunchbacked seamstress, Fräulein Iliuţ; the steady output of energy had become second nature by dint of cultivation and habit, just as her misshapen body had mobilized its reserves and developed unexpected powers, even a certain degree of grace. The tortured correctness of his clothing seemed provincial. His summer suit was tastefully understated in its cut and pattern, but its ironed surfaces and creases were so immaculate and pristine it looked like it had been hanging in the closet for a very long time. His smooth brown leather gloves were carefully buttoned at the wrists, and his broad-brimmed felt hat sat upright on his head with a defiant ponderous formality that showed through despite all intention to appear casual. A brooding earnestness and a knee-jerk pride—compensation for the visible discomfort with his own person—lent him an air of macabre absurdity. I caught myself thinking that it was the hangman in civilian clothes, en route to a quaint and wholesome little spa where he intended to spend his vacation—incognito, of course. Full of curiosity, we strained to see below the brim of the travel hat that had been arranged on his head with an angry attention to detail: it shaded his eyes and was underscored by the parallel lines of a vigorously trimmed mustache. Our gaze perceived nothing except for the impression of something alien, so far removed in time as to be anachronistic, or from another world entirely. And only after he had passed did we realize, more as a result of a slow, inner dawning than a clear and precise recognition—
that it was Tildy.