Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Enticing and foreboding, conjuring the light and shadow of that fabled forest and the grotesque, fairy-tale-like slaying of a dragon, each and every one of these glimmering words had been made up, none of them was real, and we knew that — but the last thing we wanted to do was deny ourselves the reassurance of their pretend meanings by dismissing them as nonsense. That would have meant abandoning our secret hope that they might be part of some higher language, a special lingo for the initiated, for which there was no key, but which we expected to understand at some miraculous moment, as the apostles understand the language of all people at Pentecost. A language with an undeniable splendor all its own, with a relative absolute value like that of our play money, with no value but its own worth, which could be set as high as we wished.

So ingrained was our habit of trying to force meanings out of words we didn’t know that we often had to endure Miss Rappaport’s reproaches that we were too vain to admit our ignorance. But it was not a matter of childish vanity or childish pride — a pride, incidentally, that is more immediate and therefore purer than later in life — that kept us from admitting this. Nor was it our disappointing experience that the answers to our questions usually proved as unsatisfactory as what Fräulein Iliuţ told us about losing face. Certainly we were reluctant to give up the free rein to play afforded by these inexhaustible possibilities. But even this playful impulse expressed a more deeply rooted unrest. We resisted fixing things unambiguously, because we ourselves were anything but fixed and unambiguous. By the same token, we looked elsewhere for reassurance — to the definite, to the set and certain, fully expecting that things would reveal themselves to us of their own accord. Consequently there was something amiss about the passionate way we listened to a name such as Wälsung , fully in the thrall of adventure, convinced that our urgent desire would compress the sound of the word into some shape, making our wish come true, and that the peasant-knightly traits augured by its sour-apple smell would suddenly appear — whether in the form of gnomelike dwarves or a race of Æsir. The stealth, too, with which we carried on this foolhardy game of enticement and desire also had something wicked about it; we were ready and willing to be terrified, and this made us aware that our evil invocations were as sinful and dangerous as Doctor Faust’s, for we were summoning the spirit of language itself, and that brought us perilously close to falling into the hands of the devil.

But that wasn’t enough to make us want to stop. We did our best to avoid Miss Rappaport’s relentlessly sober explanations, and managed to cheat her out of the richness of the word Sälde. In this way its mystery, which kept the saying over the Feuers’ door in a state of enigmatic ambiguity, reconciled us with the disappointment this house had in store for us. Precisely because it was a house we would have preferred to encounter in a game of our own imagining, in which we wielded powers that could make our boldest wishes come true — to the point of reinventing ourselves — in other words, because it appeared to come from the realm of make-believe, where we felt much more securely rooted than in the actual world, its reality bothered us. Its roof and four walls ought not to have fit so well together. An unfinished construction, or one fallen into ruin, would have been a clear sign that the place came from and belonged to the land of fantasy. But as a home serving the same banal aims as any other, connected to the municipal electrical works and sewage system, it belonged in an embarrassing way to the real world, where it merely seemed odd and bizarre. Only the saying above the door, which we never fully explained, served to dispel this everyday quality like a magical incantation, returning it to our daydreams. And at the same time its dark conjuring, which corresponded to the irrational side of everything that was magic, including the nonsense of all our count-out rhymes and witches’ spells, offered us admittance to the secret essence of all things German — full of wonder, and always a little uncanny.

Sälde selbander— the words seemed to arise from the depths of the German linguistic wellspring, where the old sagas rested in a dusk twilight shimmering with a wine-colored light, like the sunken jewels of the Nibelung hoard — the sagas whose heroes, born of yearning, stood pale as birches in the den with the coiled dragon and the ranks of dwarves. Sadly, that is where most of them perished.

And as these words above the door seemed to be the true entrance to the Feuers’ house, portals to its promise of magic and marvels, they also opened onto a hole as dark and deep as a well shaft, leading to the place where German wondrousness proceeds from the depths of the German demonic genius.

An air of eeriness surrounded the Feuers’ house once we learned he had placed guns in his garden and set them to fire automatically, in order to scare off the countless Jewish peddlers whose favorite domain was the villa district, and who were in fact a genuine nuisance. Whenever Miss Rappaport led us past their garden and we saw Professor Feuer’s swarm of reddish-blond children playing with absolutely no inhibitions among the dangerously positioned, and in our minds all-too-effective, shooting devices, we felt a timid admiration for them. Our governess hated these children, who ranged in years from bloated students of theology sporting the first dueling scars on their cheeks and heavily braided maidens unable to suppress their embarrassment at their all too generous and early-developed bosoms, down to a horde of boys and girls our ages and even younger, and there would undoubtedly have been an infant in the spidery pram that now served as a cart for shrub-fruit, if Frau Feuer hadn’t died a few years earlier “in fulfillment of her maternal duties,” as noted in the obituary.

Their clumsy formality, and above all the sheepish way they exchanged awkward glances in an attempt to arrive at some secret understanding, made the Feuer children unsympathetic. Even so, for a while we felt tempted to make friends with them, because our only playmates, the Lyubanarov daughters from the dvornik ’s hut, had been sent to relatives in a vicarage in the country. But our tentative approaches were nipped in the bud by Miss Rappaport. Without ever coming into contact with them, our governess had determined that the young Feuers were insolent and uncouth, although whenever our paths crossed, the older girls never failed to curtsy, blushing as they did, while poking their younger brothers in the ribs to remind them to remove the caps from their blond heads. But a single ridiculous incident, which Miss Rappaport could not get over, confirmed her prejudice. We once ran into the entire horde of Feuers as they were chasing a field mouse through their garden and across the street. The mouse had slipped into a hole along the embankment of the ditch on the other side of the street. While the majority ran back home to fetch a spade to dig it out, one of the little girls bent over the hole and tried to coax the creature out by tenderly saying “Meow!” As far as Miss Rappaport was concerned, this innocent mistake was proof of unbounded stupidity, as well as an ingrained cruelty. From then on we were forbidden to have anything to do with the inhabitants of the miraculous house.

Every day at noon we saw Professor Feuer walking down our street after finishing his classes at the boys’ lyceum. He was always in the company of another man, whose name, as we learned, was Adamowski — the chief editor of the Tescovina German Messenger , the third German-language newspaper in Czernopol, and the only one not edited by Jews. One of Herr Adamowski’s legs was shorter, with a clubfoot, which was shod in a cork boot that was bulky but nonetheless insufficiently padded. While Professor Feuer strode ahead with his back straight as an arrow, draped in loden and wearing his slouch hat low over his handsome forehead, the much shorter Herr Adamowski tottered alongside, struggling to keep up. His dress, which was oddly thrown together, had a certain shabby elegance: along with a heavy plaid ulster with two rows of bumpy leather buttons — the kind of coat that in those days was seen only at very sportive events — he wore a very modest silk scarf, a so-called collar-saver, boldly tossed around his neck, as if he were dressed in top hat and tails, stepping from the grand opera into the pale gaslight of the Parisian night, heading straight for the Moulin Rouge. A monocle enhanced this image of the bon vivant, as well as a beret on top of his faded and straggly hair, which he combed back. The strain of firmly maintaining his monocle between eyebrow and cheekbone had frozen his otherwise labile face into a teeth-baring grimace that also formed the backdrop for a whole array of rapidly changing expressions which flitted like shadows over the fixed scenery of his face. He wore his beret slanting over his right ear, angled so that it pointed to the source of his affliction, and as he walked he would swing his short leg forward, like a pendulum, his progress punctuated by the dull thud of the cork sole. His grimacing face reflected the broken lines of this movement, which, despite all the swaying, was quite rhythmic, as he tottered alongside the erect Professor Feuer, speaking to him through bared teeth, rising at his side and then humbly descending. A bamboo cane served as a support. He always carried a bulging briefcase that was buckled and fastened with complicated locks.