Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

He had had a mausoleum built for his wife — a certain Princess Sturdza, the mother of Madame Tildy — in a small forest at Horecea, just out of town, modeled after the Taj Mahal. People said she lay there covered with jewels. But he also buried his mistress, a strikingly beautiful peasant girl with the common name Ioana Ciornei, right next to his wife. It was on her account that Princess Sturdza had died, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. People spread all kinds of rumors about the true purpose of the devotions he used to say at night, in the presence of both coffins, while his extraordinarily mean coachman, a castrato of elephantine build, kept close watch on the building. In Romanian, “ taci mahala ” means “keep quiet, outskirts” and people found hidden meanings in the overlap of pronunciation.

“Does she see her father often?” we asked.

“Never. She hates him.” Widow Morar closed her eyes and gave a gleeful smile. “She despises him. She calls him her mother’s murderer.”

“Does she cry much because of him?”

“Never. She never cries. She is the kindest, happiest, wittiest creature, chirps like a little bird. Only now and then she …”

“ What now and then?”

“Now and then she locks herself inside. She reads in her books. Her rooms are full of books — books not even scholars can understand. No one understands them but her. She knows every author and every scholar, whatever language they may have written in. She can recite what they wrote word for word. They make her melancholic, and you can knock on her door and rattle the handle but she won’t answer. The orderly keeps having to break down the door to make sure she’s still alive, and then they find her lying on the floor, unconscious, or else she wanders out and speaks in tongues, words of deep meaning, just like the monks at the monastery where pilgrims visit, when they’re in a religious rapture. When she’s in that state she tells people their true names. To me she always says: I love you, for you are marked. And isn’t it true that I was marked by suffering on the day my blessed husband rolled on the ground like an animal attacked by wasps and tried to drink his death from a rifle? We saw it all through the keyhole, my sons and I, we bruised our heads trying to see, all the while wailing and screaming … ”

“And her husband — Major Tildy?”

“Oh, he is a true cavalier,” said Widow Morar and opened her eyes wide, transfigured. “He stands before her like an angel dressed in armor and keeps silent. Even when she drums away at him with her fists, he stands there without moving and says nothing. Not until the devil inside her has been bested and she crumples onto the floor and whines. Then he orders what has to be done, in his calm and clear voice. And never a word afterward, never a complaint from his lips. Nothing happened. He speaks to her the way you would speak to a princess, to the Sturdza that she is. He approaches her like the imperial sword-bearer approaches the emperor, he opens doors for her and always lets her through first, he straightens the chair she sits in, and when she speaks to him, he stands at attention as if before his general, even when she’s being playful and joking with him — because she really is like a little bird. He bends over to pick up her book or handkerchief, when she willfully tosses it away, picks up the pearls from her necklace that she has torn because the mood struck her — he bears it all without a word, like a soldier, all you can hear is her little twittering voice and her laughter, not a sound from him, even his spurs jingle quietly — they have thick carpets — until she shuts her ears and locks herself back inside her room.”

We listen in rapt attention. For a long time, whenever we were left to ourselves, we played out the image she had depicted: the princess and her knight, the angel dressed in armor, the imperial sword-bearer . I was completely at the mercy of my sister, Tanya, and I hated the fact that she always insisted on playing the major.

What we learned about him on the side came from a different source. I say on the side because neither did our curiosity drive us to learn more about him than we knew, nor was it likely that our image of him could be more complete than it already was, in its unalterably memorable details. But once, when Herr Tarangolian managed to win us over with one of his jokes and unlocked our most secret thoughts, we asked him if he knew Tildy. The prefect answered right away, courteously and willingly, that he was well acquainted with the major and knew him to be a very excellent soldier and a gentleman of the first water, a worthy role model with admirable traits, above all an outstanding horseman; but then he turned to Uncle Sergei, a distant relative who lived in our house as a Russian emigrant, and switched languages, evidently forgetting that we could also understand, and called Tildy a strange saint. From the conversation that followed this casual remark, we were able to make out the following:

Tildy had been an officer in the Austrian service. Almost nothing was known of his background. He was not from Czernopol, and the Hungarian name suggested other roots than Tescovina. The landed gentry did not recognize him. Apparently he came from one of those noble but thoroughly impoverished families whose only achievement consisted in sacrificing themselves in the service of a banner, and as a result had acquired a certain aloof self-contentedness and a smoldering pride. We could see his ancestors arrayed before us, in miniatures and lockets: haughty, smug women with pious airs, with occasional traces of a former youthful beauty tempered rock-hard by a strict and stringent life, and swarthy men with the puckered look of the brave, whose only passion is to demonstrate their courage, some surprisingly coarse, with round skulls, massive faces, and martial mustaches, others of more noble cut that comes from the knowledge that early in life they will carry out their assignment to die a model death. One of these may have been Tildy’s father.

And he himself: a childhood in unquestioning obedience; women of almost painfully solemn bearing as the object of the highest respect; perhaps a secret understanding with his mother that was never expressed, a shyly restrained tenderness; and an adolescence in iron discipline, total commitment to duty. But all within a world of splendid style that brooked no skimping: amid the grand waving of the pure flags, across the fresh expanses of the horsemen’s dawn, overrun by a festive swarm of brightly colored uniforms topped by a blaze of glistening helmets.

And then came the war.

He was said to have served in an excellent regiment, albeit one which had been subjected to the harshest censure. Evidently, during the war-of-position in Galicia, after the last great cavalry battles had been fought and the war had become a troglodyte affair, an attack couldn’t be carried out because one sector’s officers were conducting a race behind the lines with gentlemen from the opposing regiment of Russian guards. The men were sent to the Isonzo Front. Tildy must have been still young at the time.

Whether his homeland, like ours, was occupied after the collapse of the empire, and ceded to a new state, was not clear, because no one knew for certain where he came from. In any case, the fact that a former officer of the Dual Monarchy was so quick to accept service in a different army was not seen in the best light. Despite all the presumed reasons that spoke for him — and on close inspection none spoke against him — he could not shake the odium of the renegade.

In Czernopol that would have normally counted as a sign of quick-witted flexibility and competent life skills, and commanded a certain respect rated far more highly than honor: “You know, we don’t put much stock in such fiction,” was how Herr Tarangolian put it. Strangely, that didn’t apply to Tildy, however. There was something in his bearing that everyone — everyone without exception — found provocative.