Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

But now to the incident with Herr Adamowski. The sight of the ill-matched couple he formed with Professor Feuer—“a horse and a cow on the same shaft,” was how our coachman put it — always brought us to the garden fence when Strindberg’s doppelgänger and the hobbling journalist passed down the street around noontime. Moreover, by nodding and blinking and baring his teeth at us, Herr Adamowski had given us to understand that he well knew the cause of our curiosity. Then he would exaggerate his laborious gait, rolling his eyes and puffing out his cheeks when he rose up on his healthy leg, powerful yet still woefully short next to the tree-sized Professor Feuer, and shaking his head and letting it sink to his shoulders in distress when he then went back down on his short, crippled leg. He would look straight at us and laugh by baring his sawlike teeth and squinting through his flashing monocle. His grimaces were so sudden and darting, his expression so full of mystery and expectation, that we had the impression we were looking into a whirling wheel of fortune, from which the thick red winning number would jump out at any moment. He raised his rubber-tipped cane to his beret and lowered it again as if saluting with a sword. As with the Wilhelm Busch illustrations, we were at once fascinated and repulsed. Out of politeness we soon managed to return his greeting, which he acknowledged with a broad, obliging smile, which strangely reminded us of Widow Morar’s golden mouth. But we never greeted him out loud; we bowed or curtsied in silence, out of fear that he otherwise might say something to us.

For his part, Herr Adamowski didn’t seem bound by conventions that even the pushiest Jewish peddler immediately understood and respected — because no matter how bald and direct most dealings were in Czernopol, a traditional sensitivity regarding distance had survived, even if it expressed itself rather maliciously in most cases. But we still didn’t understand that very well; we had spent most of our young lives in the country, where the people showed an almost holy respect for those of higher station, which is the kind of distance that we, incapable of understanding irony, thought we were experiencing in the city. Herr Kunzelmann was the first one who had blatantly disregarded that. The second was Herr Adamowski.

That said, the editor did show an almost frightening ability to empathize with our thoughts and feelings. One day he suddenly stood in front of us, knocked with his cane against the garden fence that separated us, and asked: “Lances, right?” Only then did he show us the spinning fortune-wheel of expressions, which had momentarily frozen in a grimace of astonishing authenticity — the winning number had just jumped out.

“Long-lanced and blinking blade, playful the pike but hard to hurl,” echoed Professor Feuer by his side, raising his head with Odin’s slouch hat against the wind that wasn’t blowing. “Weak hands in wielding stiffen to stout, the fist shall be fearless and favored by Fortune.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice to have one?” asked Herr Adamowski with a new whirl of promise in his face, and then walked closer to the fence, alternating his swinging leg with the stamping one.

All we could do was nod, breathless with expectation.

“Come along, then!” He hobbled to the far end of the lance-leafed fence, where the raised base separated it from the neighboring garden. We had followed, still in the thrall of his insight, but also a little doubtful, irritated by his hard German, which reminded us too much of Schmunzelmann. But indeed one of the iron pickets had rusted away and was hanging by a single screw, leaning crookedly against its neighbor. Herr Adamowski easily pried it loose. He handed it through the sadly widened gap, nodded to us with bare teeth, then reached suddenly under my nose and held a candy out that he pretended to have magically conjured, which he then, equally unexpectedly, made disappear. But right away he took it out of his pocket and gave it to me. Then he saluted us again by raising his cane to his beret, and stamped off like a dinghy in a rough sea toward Professor Feuer, who had since moved slowly on.

I will never forget the feeling of disappointment and disillusionment that overcame us as we stood there holding the iron bar, which was no coveted spear but merely a ruin from the destroyed perfection of our fence, the fence that had preserved our home and garden like a temple grove, and from which now a piece had broken off, like the tooth from Wilhelm Busch’s boy with the peashooter. For the very first time — I can still feel it today — we were filled with the fear that people might think we had unscrewed the piece ourselves, though we were never accused of doing anything that wasn’t clearly our own doing. So great was our dread that we didn’t dare tell anyone but Uncle Sergei, who commanded our unreserved affection. He listened to our story, and then consoled us, saying, “Iss no problem, my little hearts, don’t think more about it. The Germans do very many strange things; we say in Russian they invented the ape. They also invented the railroad —alors, qu’est-ce qu’on en veut! ”

The next day the picket was screwed firmly back in place. But as though our faith in the invulnerability of our house had been shaken by the possibility that even one of the lances that watched over us might fail, even if for just a moment, a secret pride began to wither inside us. We avoided approaching that remote corner of the garden fence, where the new screws stood out against their brothers. Their cheap gleam seemed to us a flaw.

I am telling about these occurrences in such detail because all the people involved still have a certain role to play in our story, and also to give a picture of the world in which it took place, especially the world to which they wanted to consign Tildy by declaring him to be a German. Their contempt in so doing was unfortunately all too obvious, although every other ethnicity might have been viewed with equal disdain, if it were to be judged by its representatives in Czernopol. In some ways the others even outdid the Germans, but they had the advantage that their reputations were not so highly developed as that of the children of Teut, and were therefore less likely to be belittled. Not that I am presuming to dismiss our German neighbors with examples of an oddball, a pseudo-genius and a surly cur. But we would later find out that in Professor Feuer, Herr Adamowski, and Schmunzelmann we had encountered three varieties of German mischief that we would continue to meet, either separately or, very often, all together. In any case, at the time we took them to be representatives of their species since we didn’t know any others. We confided our anguish to Uncle Sergei and asked him how we could reconcile the repulsiveness of the Czernopol Germans with Tildy.

Uncle Sergei smiled and shook his head. “Tildy,” he said, “is cavalier . He is gentleman. The homeland of aristocracy, of people with honor and manners, is very broad, it surpasses all nations and languages. But is very thinly populated, extremely thinly. And today this land suffers some epidemic disease, so its people are dying out …” He sighed from the bottom of his heart, but all the while beaming and smiling as if he were telling the most amusing anecdote. “ Enfin , don’t scratch your head over what one person says about another, only scratch if you have worry. Or if you have louse.”

We took comfort in this oracular speech, because we loved Uncle Sergei and felt secure in confiding in him. Above all, we were convinced by what he was saying about the homeland of the noblemen throughout the world; no one seemed a more competent expert on that subject than he. If someone had asked us whom we considered the perfect cavalier — after Tildy — we would not have hesitated a second in naming Uncle Sergei, although his position in our household was not the best. We couldn’t see what was so bad in what our aunts called “the bad habits of our dear cousin,” especially because he had the kindest and most attentive manners, far more convincing in their unforced grace than the calculated and often seemingly artificial bonhomie of Herr Tarangolian. Nor was anyone prepared to explain to us what exactly these “bad habits” were. We knew he had a tendency to talk about gruesome things as if it gave him some joy to describe them, but we figured that he did that for fun, as play-acting, the way we felt that he exaggerated his Russian accent or his horribly off-key singing, for the amusement of himself as well as others. For a while we were troubled by a small incident with a servant girl, an otherwise easygoing creature, who once came running through the house, completely beside herself, declaring that she couldn’t stay another hour under the same roof with “a man like that,” and although we naturally had no idea what might have happened, we knew it had something to do with the dark goings-on that occasionally happened in the servants’ quarters and with repellent regularity at Frau Lyubanarov’s in the dvornik ’s hut, and which comprised one of the great secrets the grown-ups guarded from us so jealously. No matter what the case, our Aunt Elvira always seemed to consider men to be the initiators of such incidents, and spoke about “ une crise juponière ” as though of a sporadic bout of insanity, much as Widow Morar had described the effects of amanita poisoning. We asked Miss Rappaport to translate the expression and received an almost brusque reply, delivered from a haughty arch of protruding teeth, as severe as a window of a Gothic cathedral: “Why, skirt fever, of course!”