An Ermine in Czernopol (9 page)

I can remember tumultuous scenes that filled the house with terror, and us with excruciating fear—outbreaks of a temporary insanity that first infected individuals before affecting all and sundry—precipitated by nothing more than a muffled “Excuse me” quietly uttered by Miss Rappaport, her eyes crimson and swollen and blinded by tears. This had the effect of focusing everyone's attention on her for the fourth or fifth time during a dinner that had barely started, while she stuck her ostrich-like neck out even further than usual, her head swaying back and forth above her plate as if she had been struck blind and dumb by some enormous blow, and her buckteeth jutting out of her mouth with the expression of a dying horse, as if her skull were trying to peel itself out of its skin. As we waited for the eruption, keyed-up and anxious, Father hurled down his napkin, stood up, and left the table.

The ensuing silence was then saturated with a hostility that was not at all directed against Miss Rappaport, but rather set to spring like a trap, which anyone could trigger with the slightest clumsiness. And this tension grew into a painfully frustrated pleasure, when the compelling itch in our governess's nose proved deceptive, in other words when Miss Rappaport eventually stopped her imbecilic head movement, opened her eyes as though surprised, blindly gaped around her in amazement, and finally let out all her pent-up air in one gigantic, convulsive sigh from deep within. Then she pulled her lips back over her teeth as best she could, and as her blotting-paper red eyes reabsorbed the well of tears brimming behind her thick glasses, she resumed spooning up her soup with model manners.

A single misplaced intonation or inept movement of the hand could unleash a distressing insanity that would spread all the way to the servants' quarters, and this was most threatening and alarming when it went on behind closed doors, on the threshold of some catastrophic decision, as happens with people of unbridled temperament, who force themselves into conventional forms only to find their pent-up aggressive instinct festering into a blind rage. And even if we soon saw through the grown-ups' theatrics—and we saw through them completely, recognizing that within those conventions they were resorting to artificially exaggerated emotions in order to stimulate their capacity for experience, which had been diminished or numbed by life—we realized that their histrionics were merely a way of mourning for what was irretrievably lost, although we ourselves were not so insensitive as to consider their pathos completely false and unreal. A sentence such as “
So the only thing left for me is the pistol!
” (punctuated by a carefully timed slamming of a door) never caused us a moment's doubt as to whether the shot might be meant for Miss Rappaport and could free us from the cause of all discord, and the fear, with which we listened to the enormous silence that suddenly loomed in the house, mixed with a vague but painful sense of envy of Widow Morar's sons, whom no one had kept away from the keyhole to witness the consummation of the catastrophe. Because even back then we sensed that nothing we might ever encounter, no matter how horrible, would frighten us more than what Herr Tarangolian called
the horror of the literary existence
—the void that engulfs us when we have too little actual experience. “Bear in mind, my young friends,” the prefect once told us, “that most people only know life from hearsay.”

In fact we wound up not leaving the city at all that year, so that everything could have stayed the way it had been. But it's a well-known adage for the fickle-minded that the more you strive to avoid making decisions, the more likely you are to wind up with a weak alternative that—no matter how nonsensical—will become firmly entrenched, simply to release you from all other decision-making. And so a pretext was concocted, namely that our characters had had enough Anglo-Saxon development, and it was time that we acquire some solid learning to add to our knowledge that cats are able to fiddle and cows can vault the moon.

This goal was indeed achieved, although in a way that may not have been to everybody's liking. And so, over the course of the summer, Miss Rappaport was given notice and Herr Alexianu was hired to replace her.

Regrettably, a tactless error tainted our relationship with Herr Alexianu from the very start. Somehow the idea had caught on in our household that private tutors typically had sweaty feet, and as a result a fresh pair of socks was set out daily for Herr Alexianu, who had moved in with a fiberboard suitcase full of books, two shirts, a gymnastics device, and a sheaf of love letters. He was obviously able to interpret this indelicate gesture and took his revenge on us by ignoring us completely outside the predetermined hours of instruction, when he treated us with iron strictness—as if we didn't quite exist for him socially. This led to our having an abundance of free time we hadn't expected, and weren't accustomed to, and consequently to our discovering many details of the story at hand.

The main reason for this was that Herr Alexianu often spent his free time—when he was nonetheless confined to the premises—chatting with the household seamstress, Fräulein Iliuţ, in her little back room, where we also liked to go. Fräulein Iliuţ was a hunchback and beyond doubt the kindest and most likable character from our childhood.

The room where she sewed was always filled with a strong womanly scent, which was not the least bit unpleasant and was just as much a part of her as her legs, which seemed long in relation to her drastically shortened trunk, and her angelic head that was wedged between her shoulders. She had pretty, curly blond hair, and beautiful, remarkably lucid, eyes, and the fine-boned, somewhat emaciated face of hunchbacks—occasionally given to grimacing—as well as the delicate, spidery hands of the deformed. Apart from the hump between her shoulders everything about her was delicate, tender, and beguiling: her skin as well as her voice, her quick and quiet bustling, and the way her sadness dissipated into sunlit kindness. I clearly remember her gait, which was upright despite her humpback and in some unassuming way more determined than that of most people who had grown up straight. She was uncommonly dexterous and was a downright genius at piecing together something new from patches and remnants—just as she herself seemed fashioned from all sorts of remnants and remains of creation. She could bend her fingers—particularly her thumbs—amazingly far back at the last joint, and to our delight she would perform the “Great Mandarin of the Diamond Button,” using a Chinese hand puppet she quilted together at amazing speed, which we logically interpreted, without anyone ever having mentioned it, as a parody of the prefect, our fatherly friend Herr Tarangolian.

Without taking the slightest notice of our presence, Herr Alexianu opined that this suppleness of the finger joints pointed to a generous character.

Fräulein Iliuţ gave a quiet, somewhat melancholic laugh between her piled-up shoulders, in the painfully transparent aura of those used to abstinence and self-denial.

“Don't say a word,” Herr Alexianu objected resolutely. “I know what you're going to answer. But that doesn't contradict what I'm getting at. Because you can be the most generous person precisely because you are the poorest. My friend Năstase, who, if he only wanted to, could be our country's greatest writer—perhaps not as a poet, but as a novelist, or an essayist, because his insights are astounding—my friend Năstase says that the only fully convincing proof of love that he knows is cash. ‘I've held many women in my arms,' he says—and he's not showing off, his triumphs in this field are common knowledge. Năstase believes that the assertion
I love you forever
is true in the throes of happiness, when the present moment merges with eternity, when time is rescinded. Are you following me? Philosophically speaking, this is extraordinarily interesting. Happiness is the equivalent of time that has been extinguished. It is in the present moment, fleeting and timeless like eternity. Practically speaking, happiness and eternity are one and the same. So for Năstase the assertion that
I love you forever
is completely true, precisely for that moment of highest happiness, when our earthly self is dissolved in the act of love, which makes this related to death, according to Năstase. But where time comes into play, so does matter. Without matter time is unthinkable, just as matter is unthinkable outside of time. Thus the only guarantee for love inside of time is through matter. Money, according to Năstase, symbolizes both matter as well as the immaterial value of happiness. Hence true proof of love is money.”

Fräulein Iliuţ nodded with kind understanding, as her delicate spider hands busied themselves with sewing.

“His assertion is unassailable, except from the standpoint of a most banal, popular concept of morality,” Herr Alexianu declared, countering an objection that no one had raised. “Năstase is by no means amoral, quite the contrary. He stands against every bogus and hypocritical convention. And not from the flippant position of a libertine, but rather out of a profound new morality. For instance, when he decides not to pay a bill from his tailor and tears it up with the words “what doesn't kill me makes me stronger,” he is making an ironic—I'm tempted to say pedagogical—statement,
pour épater les bourgeois.
What has outlived its time must be destroyed if you are going to create something new. We are in the process of founding a newspaper, a political-literary journal. But politics for us has nothing to do with what usually passes for politics. We understand the word in its original and broadest sense, as in
polis
—the city. Our goal is to found cities. Not in a literal sense, mind you—just a metaphorical one. Because human thought is metaphoric. The image is the root of everything spiritual, of life itself. And this can be proved mathematically. All beginning is additive, Năstase says, and human beings mere masters of calculation. We are dealing with fundamentals. We have absolutely no intention of revising the world as it is. We don't believe in the value of reform. We are starting an entirely new world. We are establishing new foundations. The world consists of how we see the world, according to Năstase. Where existing forms are outdated, new ones need to be created … And it's obvious,” added Herr Alexianu with a scornful frostiness that caught our attention, “that the reason for our program has nothing to do with class struggle. I don't need to demonstrate that we are completely unbiased in this regard. Those kinds of things take care of themselves. I have the proof.”

He was conspicuously silent for a few seconds. Of course we hadn't understood a word he was saying, but we had no doubt that his last words and his silence were directed at us. We could clearly feel the effort it cost him not to look in our direction, and Fräulein Iliuţ seemed to sense it as well, because she, too, had glanced up to him instinctively, and her beautiful eyes reflected the exertion present in his own.

What he was saying was disconcerting to us in many ways—primarily because we couldn't make any overriding sense out of all the strange words and unfamiliar concepts, and whenever we thought we understood what he was getting at, we soon discovered that we were on the wrong track. Now, however, when there was no doubt that he was alluding to us, Herr Alexianu's statements were excruciating. Because we then assumed that everything else was directed toward us, and so the strain on our concentration was exacerbated by the embarrassment of our inability to understand—that bitter combination that so irritates us as children, and grinds down our beautiful curiosity.

Just as we suffered, for example, because we couldn't understand how the streetcar's bow collector could pass through the branching of the electrical wires without getting caught—we had seen it with our own eyes during our walks!—because our imagination wasn't developed enough to convince us that it didn't run above the overhead wires but rather glided along their undersides, held up by a flexible spring pressure, so we were also bothered by Herr Alexianu's inconsiderate monologues, which we couldn't understand, and which left us feeling that behind the visible and tangible phenomena of the world were hidden secrets to which we had no key, and perhaps never would. Today I'm positive that this scornful cheating of our curiosity was exactly what Herr Alexianu was after, a malicious revenge, because for children curiosity is both hunger and nourishment for life all in one, and to pique it like that and then refuse to satisfy it is tantamount to committing a psychological crime.

But Herr Alexianu seemed to actually savor his tempered-steel disdain. He went on expounding rigorously, but now with greater confidence, more commandingly:

“When I say
forms
, I mean the spiritual patterns and designs that make up the basis of how we think and perceive, of everything we undertake. But what is passed down to us no longer fits the modern human being. Năstase, however, perceives things in a truly modern way. His thesis is that modern man is far more cerebrally determined than his predecessors. Take careful note of this, because it is enormously significant. It describes in a nutshell how our existence is becoming progressively more abstract. Bear in mind the fact that man no longer has free control over his own instincts, which automatically enabled him to do whatever was necessary to maintain his existence in accord with the demands of nature. Instead he has become dependent on experience that has been handed down—in other words, on education. Until now we have relied on religions to deliver the basic substance of our life feeling. As institutions of convention, constructs that housed the oldest traditions, they were able to impart a certain body of knowledge, which, while perhaps no longer pure, did address a wealth of psychological states that human beings must experience for their well-being on earth. In other words, we are talking about plain and simple mental hygiene. Our ongoing alienation from nature, from a life filled with natural—i.e., violent—situations, causes certain mental functions to wither away. And the entire organism suffers along with the mind. The entire organism. To take a specific example: the way you sit at your work, day in, day out, means that your lungs are never sufficiently oxygenated. Consequently your psyche, too, can only atrophy due to insufficient exercise. Even if you walked upright it wouldn't help much. You need to work your lungs to the limits of their capacity, precisely what this organ experiences in the wild—during a dangerous hunt, fleeing and pursuing. You need to run, to jump, to box. You also need to be able to hold your breath, three minutes at least, though if you train correctly you can hold it for much longer. Only then—and this requires a daily regimen of gymnastics—would your body reach the natural condition it would have if you had to hunt down all your sustenance.”