Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

“But also an example!” Fräulein Iliuţ objected with a severity that seemed to be more rooted in convention than conviction.

Herr Alexianu held up his hand in a Roman gesture of dismissal. “First and foremost it is an image. An image that each can and should interpret as he will. Or would you be ready to let yourself be crucified out of love? Would you be prepared to do that?”

Fräulein Iliuţ did not answer. But it was clear that she was suf — fering.

“Understand what I am saying!” exclaimed Herr Alexianu. He was so worked up he had turned red; his sentences, which up to now he had been drumming into Fräulein Iliuţ with clipped precision, now became hasty and frayed, tattered like flags in the hail of fire during an assault; we watched as the swarming squads of his thoughts dissolved and regrouped, in order to take a height that had been set as their objective, at great sacrifice, while Fräulein Iliuţ’s face also displayed a delicate, modest blush of red. “Understand what I am saying! I confess the idea sounds outrageous. But it contains the secret of salvation. To make yourself loved — to produce love, without falling into the passion, the guilt of love yourself — the loftiest form of being human — an extraordinary degree of dignity … We can even see a forerunner of this viewpoint in Plato — except that’s insignificant, it doesn’t matter where the idea comes from, and yet it holds the secret of Christ. It’s absurd to imagine the Son of God as a sentimental loving person. He was extremely lucid. His powers of perception are so refined that he has nothing to do with the emotional drivel of the rabble. He rejected every outburst of emotion, just as he turned away his suffering mother. What he acknowledged was the love of Mary Magdalene. For she loved much —in her case that was completely unambiguous: she let herself be loved; she created love. That is the essential moral religion. To love — to love from within one’s self, in order to experience the momentary happiness of being extinguished in eternity — that is the apotheosis of selfishness. To love, without asking for love requited, without hoping for love requited, according to Năstase, requires the lonely strength of the man in the wilderness. In actuality it means scorning and neglecting one’s fellow man. Goethe’s “ And if I love you, what’s that to you! ” is utterly solipsistic. He was a self-confessed heathen. Christianity is the religion of the ideal society. As a continuation of Judaism — a tribal religion — it is the only faith that counts on its God loving back. Consider the role hope plays in Christian teachings. Their aim is for God to take us up into himself lovingly — in other words: to make us beloved in his sight, to make him love us. But that, too, should be understood metaphorically. Tenets of faith are the metaphors for the most earthly form of existence.”

Fräulein Iliuţ looked up at him, and her tormented expression dissolved in a reflection of pure admiration. We could see that she loved him.

But Herr Alexianu stared rigidly ahead, without looking at her.

“Năstase is striving for this highest level,” he said. “But his reasons for doing so are more biological than ideological. This task was assigned to him by nature. Arranging your life according to ideas is a German approach. Our own mentality, which was molded by antiquity, prefers to derive philosophy from life. Năstase is naturally predisposed to create love, despite — or perhaps precisely because of — the fact that he himself is incapable of loving. But he is anything but coldhearted. He acknowledges love as a necessary force, for the exaltation it creates, the animation it brings to our souls, and for its role as a binding force in civilization. But he advises us to be extremely careful and cautious in its use. Just think: if love for your neighbor became truly common, it would mean the end of love as something exceptional, as a special form of affection. This can already be seen in civilized society, in the secular form of the theocratic state. In other words: Christianity is robbing itself of its core, the core of its true ethical initiative. Năstase aims to avert this danger by a rigorous scientific analysis of the subject matter.”

Herr Alexianu went silent with a sullen expression. Whether he noticed how confused his speech had become, or whether he sensed some vague regret, that his ardor had somehow been displaced, perhaps because he made a careless mistake in once again referring to his great master Năstase at the most crucial moment — in any case, what he went on to say sounded bland in contrast to his earlier zeal. He had put away the shears and buried his hands in his jacket pockets. He looked off absently as he spoke, and he held his elbows pressed tightly to his side as if he were suddenly freezing.

“He really is a genius.” By saying “he” instead of “Năstase” he was conveying a certain distance: the self-identification had been broken. It seemed to indicate a diminishment, a falling-off, and this made us sad, just as Herr Alexianu’s voice seemed tinged with sadness. “He is the son of rich parents and became independent early on, because his parents died. He was able to live life to the fullest when others were still timid. He knows people’s secrets. For example, he distinguishes between two types of women, and claims to be able to identify each at first glance: the ones for whom, in the moment of greatest happiness, the man they are holding becomes only a male — in other words the ones who betray him, just when he is at the peak of his masculinity, with all other men of this world, and the others, who always mean this particular man they are holding and receiving and no one else, and who thus create the image of the male of the species in a mosaic-like fashion. He calls them the scientists, in contrast to the first group, the philosophically inclined women. But this is a deeper thought as well: the loving individual always loses sight of the loved one as individual and only seeks that which is generic, only submits to the general ideal, just as we submit to the most general of all ideals — death …”

For a while no one spoke.

“He talks about all this, and similar such things, in front of women without the slightest embarrassment,” said Herr Alexianu, and looked at Fräulein Iliuţ as if he had been frightened by his first original thought of the afternoon. “And they love him. They all love him.” He took up the shears. “But as far as he himself is concerned, he refrains from any kind of reciprocity in love. And he does this consciously and intentionally. He calls it his form of monastic asceticism. It is part of his purity, his chastity, not to love. He despises the idea of si vis amari, ama. He says, and correctly, that it is the expression of a half-intellectual, an amateur poet courting the favor of the masses. No, not to love in order to create love, but to conjure love, to arouse love without getting mired in sentimentality — that is the noblesse of a new caste of Brahmins, and Năstase is one of them.”

Fräulein Iliuţ’s cheeks had turned a deeper shade of red. She now looked doggedly at her sewing, and we sensed what she, too, must have understood from Herr Alexianu’s peculiar lecture — and presumably from that alone: his secret penchant for cruelty, which drove him to seek chastisement. And although we loved her, and were filled with nothing but loathing for our tutor — the same deep-seated loathing we felt when he insisted on showing up our admittedly inadequate gymnastic attempts by dispassionately performing some acrobatic feat, ignoring the fact that he would stretch his tendons to the point of tearing or scrape his hands to the verge of bleeding — even though we were fully aware that he was behaving in a base and perfidious manner, that he was using a person who was utterly defenseless to still his desire, we were completely enthralled and took care not to diminish the spectacle by any slackening of our own undisguised curiosity. Because even if we were wrong in thinking that Herr Alexianu’s words were directed against us, we weren’t altogether mistaken, since our presence had undoubtedly provoked him to make a display of himself. Among the various experiences we had that summer — and not all were particularly happy ones — we learned that the best way of getting someone to reveal his true colors is to provoke him into showing his concealed disdain.