An Ermine in Czernopol (57 page)

Fortunately there were very few passengers: apart from the ticket-taker, who jumped off as soon as he realized what was happening, just a few drowsy railroad men, a woman with a basket of eggs, and the director of the Klokuczka Horticultural Academy, who having spent the previous day taking care of official business in Czernopol, was planning to catch an early train back home. Widow Morar's son, who was the first to notice the general danger, could have also been quick to abandon the car, but his sense of duty pinned him to the driver's seat like the captain of a ship—even though there was nothing he could do in the circumstances—a fact that was justly emphasized in the press. He maintained there was nothing for him to do except pray that the tram not jump its tracks as it went careening down the steep slope with an alarming acceleration, and that it not collide with anything so solid as to shatter the car to pieces—which was hardly the case for the group of three people that made up the only obstacle along its hell-bound path.

It was Tildy who first saw the wagon racing toward them. He and Mititika Povarchuk were on the sidewalk along the Bahnhofstrasse, so the only person in danger was Professor Lyubanarov, who was moving along the tracks. Tildy raced in to yank him back, but Lyubanarov was too drunk to react rationally. He felt Tildy grab hold of him, and presumably in a dim recollection of his recent eviction from the Établissement Mon Repos, he fell into a blind fury and hurled the much smaller man right in the direction of the oncoming streetcar. This caused the professor to lurch away from the tracks, so that he himself escaped being hit. But Tildy stumbled, and as he fell, the fender of the racing vehicle struck him right in the face.

Mititika Povarchuk covered him with her coat. The ermine collar covered the bloody mess that had once borne his “English” expression.

Herr Kunzelmann, who began his tireless activity early in the day, and was already making his rounds, came rattling up on the
taradaika
that was pulled by his brave mare Kobiela, and saw, as he put it, “a fine kettle of fish.” They loaded Tildy's corpse onto the cart and slowly drove it up to the Ringplatz, while Kunzelmann sat on his box, holding a sadly drooping whip. The girl walked behind. Professor Lyubanarov had long since tapped his way back to the groove and was taking his usual way home along “the line.”

It fit the insatiable appetite of the city of Czernopol for dramatic effects that Tildy's pitiful cortège on the Ringplatz collided with a pack of nocturnal revelers, led by Ephraim Perko, who had filled the Trocadero with his bubbly joie de vivre and was now on his way home, escorted by his friends and admirers.

“Tear out my heart!” he called, when he recognized the girl Mititika. “Now you are a widow?
Viens avec moi
, sweetheart, I'll pay a thousand leos for the hour. No need to play the
malakhamoves
.”

And when the girl walked on without hearing him, he pursued her with a stubbornness his friends and admirers found highly entertaining, and raised his offer: “Two thousand, Mititikele, twenty-five hundred—can you hear and see!—three thousand, Mititika! … Thirty-five hundred. Going once, going twice … four thousand for half an hour! It's time to pamper the
kurvehs.
Well, Mititika, five thousand!”

But the girl went on walking behind the little cart carrying Tildy's corpse, unmoved. “My respects,” said Herr Kunzelmann. “That's what I call character!”

There's still so much I ought to tell you: how Tamara Tildy separated from Herr Adamowski, who later to our painful embarrassment married our Aunt Paulette, and how Baronet Wolf von Merores confessed the love he had long borne for Tamara Tildy in secret and showered her with luxury and all the trappings of a respectfully shy, melancholic chivalry till the end of her days, when she died as his wife, destroyed by her addiction, on the Riviera, and how Frau Lyubanarov came to a gruesome end during a spring storm in the little woods of Horecea when a wall of the Paşcanu mausoleum collapsed on her and struck her dead—some claimed it was during a tryst, others maintained she was searching for her mother's jewels—and, finally, how Widow Morar of the golden mouth took in both of the half-orphaned Lyubanarov daughters after the professor wound up as a complete wreck in the municipal infirmary, and how in her macabre hands these girls blossomed into beauties who smiled their way through life as though through a garden. But that is another story.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1966 Gregor von Rezzori

Translation copyright © 2012 by Philip Boehm

Introduction copyright © 2012 Daniel Kehmann

All rights reserved.

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institute, funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Max Beckmann,
Beginning
; ©2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Rezzori, Gregor von.

 [Hermelin in Tschernopol. English]

 An ermine in Czernopol / by Gregor von Rezzori ; translated by Philip Boehm.

p. cm. — (New York review books classics)

 ISBN 978-1-59017-341-1 (alk. paper)

 I. Boehm, Philip. II. Title.

 PT2635.E98H413 2011

 833'.912—dc22

2011013386

ISBN 978-1-59017-341-1

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
www.nyrb.com
or write to:
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eISBN 978-1-59017-606-1
v1.0