Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

“But can you go on living without a face?”

“No. Then you have to die.”

“So how come it’s only then that you become human?”

“When you wipe what you have drawn on the windowpane, then the glass is clear.”

Incidentally, the next day we were informed that Herr Alexianu had been dismissed, and that we would have a few weeks’ vacation before being admitted into Madame Aritonovich’s institute.

THE IDEA that Tildy would be considered a German struck us as so outlandish that we fretted over it for a long time — since in our childish gullibility we took everything at face value, accepting every hint of a possibility as cold hard fact — and led us to observe anything or anyone German more closely. Not without some hostile bias, it seemed at first, ultimately, though, it helped us discover positive qualities that would make it easier for us to accept the illogicalities if they ultimately proved true.

The fact that the Germans had been our comrades-in-arms during the war that had recently run its course and which very much still captivated our imagination, as well as the shared sense of defeat that weighed on our souls — not because we had to bear any consequences but because all our fervent wishing had proven powerless, and so the magical core of our faith in ourselves had been shaken — this had engendered a familial feeling for all things German, though it was not strong enough to drown out a closer kinship to our former opponents. Our family contained Italians and Russians whom we loved as Cousin Luigi or Uncle Sergei, although that didn’t stop us from viewing the cockerel-feathered Bersaglieri and bearded Cossacks we knew from the photos of the war as our enemies, but neither did it bring us closer to the men in feldgrau who had fought shoulder to shoulder with our own, men who always struck us as slightly wooden, and who never missed an occasion to proclaim how our military prowess paled before theirs. Naturally we inherited our mother’s Francophilia, which was shared by her sisters and seconded by Herr Tarangolian’s own passionate admiration for the French, for their art, the beauty and richness of their language, their fashion and their cuisine, and which had hardened into one of the preconceived judgments that youth, with its penchant for absolutes, is so quick to grasp, and which despite all later reservations continue to influence our life: the prejudice, for instance, that whoever didn’t speak French and wasn’t familiar with the French way of life was seen as provincial and uneducated and therefore of little account. The transfiguration in the expression of the men whenever the talk turned to Paris was in no way inferior to the depth of feeling summoned by our aunts when they spoke of Reims and Chartres, or Florence and Siena, and this led us to suspect that these cities would one day become our own places of pilgrimage, similar to the one our Polish cook took every year to the Black Madonna of Cze̜stochowa.

On top of that, Miss Rappaport never hesitated to give vent to her genuine British distaste for the hapless German kaiser, which was only seen as a further attempt to pass as more English than she was, and triggered astonishingly well-informed discourses on the significant role that Jews played in the establishment of the Bismarck Reich. But such silly remarks — which we saw through, and which even Miss Rappaport met with an obtuseness that, while hardly attesting to her intellectual powers, spoke more for her strength of character than for the groundlessness of the insinuation that she was a Jew — could not cancel the reservations we had in our feelings toward things German.

Nor did this apply to the Germans alone; our encounters with all sorts of nations came first and foremost through their soldiers. In fact, whenever we heard about nations it was in relation to wars. As we understood it, the Israelites first became a nation with the Exodus from Egypt and the destruction of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea. We first learned of the Hellenes in front of the walls of Troy. Our own nation long ago gave up its mythic origins in favor of some bloodbath. So for us the word “nation” never failed to summon images of an army with its own colors, its own weapons and dress — which amounts to a uniform — that distinguished it from some opposing nation which had set out to attack it — or which it had prepared to defend against.

We knew, as I have mentioned, that our own Uncle Sergei was a Russian. But for us the “Russian Nation” consisted of swarms of regiments of good-natured, misled peasant boys in long coats and stiff flat caps, armed with dangerous, triple-edged bayonets, throwing themselves against our brave ranks in such numbers that they drove our men back — despite heroic resistance — far beyond the borders of our homeland. And only in their wake, as if it constituted part of their train and baggage, could we discern the toyland world of the Russian landscape, with its colorful figures: gruff-happy troika coachmen with ruddy beards dangling over steaming tea, long-haired Orthodox priests, and apple-cheeked women in prim skirts and high-heeled morocco-leather boots — all against a backdrop of small carved wooden houses and blunted onion-domed churches with delicate three-barred crosses.

And after we expelled the martial images from our imagination — which in the innermost depth of our subconscious we never managed to do entirely — when we finally replaced the uniforms with folk costumes and added a few more essential traits — invariably as much a caricature as a display of character — what we wound up with were more or less well-founded generalizations. Considering the fact that, even today, our inner illustrated atlas of the world shows every Chinaman with a queue and every American with a bottle of medicine cum spot remover in his pocket and a set of false teeth in his mouth — the prejudices and biases we had back then as children may be forgiven.

We knew the Germans from the wartime illustrated journals, clopping along in marching columns, each man the same height and maintaining the same posture as the next, like so many lead soldiers, each with the same stereotypical stiff and empty seriousness — although not quite as erect and slender as their toy counterparts. Even the gauntest among them had something earthbound and heavy, something clumpish and bulbous, especially when they were weighted down with veritable mountains of war materiel like the little old mothers in the German fairy tales, doubled over under the heavy bundles of brushwood they had packed on their crooked shoulders, a symbol of how oppressed they were by need. And, indeed, our allies seemed burdened by a particular kind of poverty, an oppressive lack, the result of an ongoing and all-exhausting deprivation that was hard to square with the pictures of their homeland, with its productive landscape so rich in mountains, forests, cities, meadows, and ponds. This lent them a pathetic quality — the pathos of a righteous claim that forever remained unfulfilled — a negative dimension, like the reflection of the cathedrals in their celebrated rivers, where the mirrored towers rise high above the old-fashioned world of gabled houses. And just as the flaunted immensity of those great churches, the points and piers, the sharp teeth and deep notches, all seemed rooted in their rippled reflection, so, too, the defensive stance of our brothers-in-arms, so beset with misery, seemed to shoot up from an upside-down image of themselves, a restless delusion welling from a melancholy deep within.

I no longer remember which one of us had the idea that they should all be called Schmalhans Küchenmeister— Little Hans Kitchenmaster, aka Short Rations. The name seemed to lie somewhere between the world of fairy tales and the world of insects, ideally suited to express their anonymous, or really absent, character — which scared us. Because the tiny patches of face we could make out didn’t seem to belong to them; they appeared borrowed and appended to the uniform, just the way the primitive heads with curly locks stamped out of colorful paper were pasted onto the cotton-wool angels at the German Christmas fairs. If you tried to look at them as human beings it only heightened the impression of estrangement and forlornness. They had evolved from being human into another, perhaps higher, form, into a pupate stage which would undergo a final, glorious metamorphosis, emerging in victory or in death. Simple being had been replaced by purpose, and consequently all character was determined by purposeful things: uniform and equipment. What appeared as ornament and decoration was also in the service of this mission — all those collar insignia and chevrons, epaulets and medals. Even the oak leaves that proliferated from the muzzles of their rifles and on their helmets as they marched off may have been placed there for functional reasons, such as camouflage or to provide a last bit of grazing.