Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

I SHOULD have acquainted you earlier with the person I just mentioned. She was the wife of an unhappy man, a certain Dr. Lyubanarov, formerly a lecturer in classical languages at the University of Sofia, who was hopelessly addicted to drink. So as not to wind up on the street along with his wife and children — two girls our age who were our playmates — he had taken on the job of gatekeeper at our house, a position that was quite dispensable and consequently did not require much effort, and which originated solely from the fact that we happened to have a gate with a guardhouse, the one we called the dvornik ’s hut. No one thought seriously of assigning Dr. Lyubanarov any real duties; to do so would have meant courting serious disappointment, because he generally slept for most of the day, and made his way to the drinking holes near the train station in the evening, to return home just before dawn, dead drunk, a staggering colossus spewing Greek and Latin quotations along with spittle and the last of whatever rot-gut he was drinking. We once ran into him on his way home like that. His expression was one of heartbreaking inner turmoil.

Later, someone told us the story of how he turned to the bottle. He came from the humblest origins, received a scholarship for talented students, and graduated with distinction. Full of enthusiasm, he began to teach. His sole passions were his love for his people, the eternally oppressed Gorals, and for classical antiquity. He was dirt poor. His one yearning was to see just once with his own eyes the glory of the temples and palaces, the figures of gods and men from that bright dawn of Europe. With a group of students he saved for years until a trip across Italy finally materialized, taking him as far as Naples. They visited Rome, they saw Herculaneum and Pompeii and Paestum. And there, after a scorching-hot day taking in the endlessly astonishing harmony of the column shafts and their crowning pediments, Professor Lyubanarov got drunk for the first time.

This didn’t require much: his life had been practically ascetic up to that moment. And, besides, he was intoxicated already: by the beauty, the sunshine, his own happiness … perhaps also by Pompeii, this city of death so horribly alive, by the ghosts of the former houses full of color and life, and the human castings — because it’s not the people themselves we see there, frozen in the most convincing poses of death, but rather baked and sintered masses of calcium and silica that gradually seeped into the decaying forms, as the liquid metal for a bronze statue replaces the wax melting out of the mold — so perfect, that the jaws still have teeth and the fingers of young women still wear their rings.

And the people of Naples: Roman faces in the rags of our Americanized civilization; a girl in the lobby of the train station calling out in an inimitably melodious voice: Claudio! … the rickety two-wheeled vegetable carts, which the drivers would leap onto at full speed, laughing and shouting jokes over their shoulder as they steered through the commotion with mystifying skill; the horrible metal hackamore bits that insure the delicate horses are kept rearing up furiously like the steeds of a quadriga …

They had pulled him out of the tavern where they had stopped. In the courtyard he vomited onto a half caved-in wall. Stars shone overhead, and the fragrance of mold and burning, of spices and swamp, urine and oil and wine and smoke and wind and sea, enveloped him, the desolate jumble of tavern voices and the tender humming of a wistful song and the rush and rustle of the great tranquility under the glassily transparent sky. And here, in front of a remnant of wall soaked with ammonia, between the latrine and the pigsty, he discovered antiquity. And from then on he drank desperately, in a fury of self-destruction.

We never learned what brought him to Czernopol, or how and when he met his wife. She was more beautiful than I can describe, with a peasant-like freshness in shape and stature and in her coloring, in her pitch-black curly locks and in the resplendence of her skin, colored like honey and pulsing with warmth from the sun and her own blood, and which called to mind the magnificence of a young pastoral deity. She had exceedingly clear, almond-shaped eyes — the goatlike eyes of goddesses — and a pale mouth that peaked up at the corners into a secretive smile, like an archaic head of Hermes. Her hair rested on her short forehead like a permanent wreath, with curls that dangled around her temples, then were pulled back coquettishly to reveal her delicate ears, and finally cascaded across the nape of her neck like the gentle grasp of a man’s hand. And all of this rose out of a majestic pair of shoulders the color of ripe golden corn, out of the splendor of two vivacious breasts, the absolute embodiment of motherliness, and which she displayed with the most beautiful frankness whenever the opportunity arose.

Because she was anything but unapproachable. The callers she regularly received at home at dusk, as soon as Dr. Lyubanarov had shut the garden gate behind him, and who did not leave until just before he returned, namely at dawn, provided inexhaustible nourishment to the scandalous annals of our household. The fact that no male could resist her charms was something I sensed from my own example, despite my being a child. And as a result, the other women were unanimous in their hatred of her.

We weren’t to learn until later that she was Tamara Tildy’s half sister — the daughter of Ioana Ciornei and old Paşcanu.

Another character who will play a role in my story was a young man named Năstase. We only knew him fleetingly, by sight. Our tutor, however, Herr Alexianu, happened to be one of his close confidants.

Herr Alexianu was hired when our parents could no longer bear Miss Rappaport’s sinus affliction — a kind of hay fever that always appeared in spring and afflicted her throughout the warmer months.

We were preparing to move for one more summer to the country, where we all ate together, unlike in town, where we children ate our meals with our governess. And our father’s irritation, his annoyed throat-clearing, the angry looks he gave our mother, seeking help and at the same time full of reproach, and the general nerve-racking silence whenever Miss Rappaport, with the heart-rending defiance of the desperate, would surrender to one of her excessive fits of sneezing and snorting — all of that only amplified the existing tension between the adults in a perfectly unnecessary way.

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.