Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

At this point Herr Tarangolian interrupted his report and said that it would be impossible for him to repeat the general’s joke. We children were sent out under some pretext or another.

But we soon found out what the general had said. Of course it cost my sister Tanya a golden heart with a Madonna medallion, which she used to bribe Uncle Sergei. But we had long gotten used to slipping him little pieces of jewelry, which we would then claim to have lost, and at times, too, the contents of our piggy banks, so that he could play his cards, and in this case we would have been ready to give up much more to hear the words that sealed our hussar’s fate.

And so we heard them. And we also heard what followed.

The general said: “It would be a very strange place indeed to keep your honor hidden, Major Tildy— between the legs of your sister-in-law. ”

At that, Tildy jumped up, grabbed his shako and gloves, clicked his heels together and left the room without a word.

One hour later his challenge was delivered to General Petrescu.

That same afternoon Tildy was arrested and placed under observation at the municipal asylum for the insane.

OF ALL the birds that dwell above cities, pigeons are the serious patricians. They are linked to the Baroque, which opened and softened the craggy, narrow world of gables to provide a clifflike homeland, full of accommodating hollow nesting places and hideouts, as well as platforms, ramps, and stages where they can collect, cuddle, and strut with pigeonly self-importance. Because unlike the shy and furtive tree dwellers of the parks and gardens, who whoosh back and forth to create an abstract tapestry, as if weaving the bare wintry branches into the green leaves; unlike the tireless gulls of the ports, who glide up and down in waves that mimic the surface of the restless sea, pigeons are steady and gregarious, they like a show of fussiness, and move sprightly and coquettishly, their bodies quivering like a cluster of lilacs, their nimble feet pattering, and their small heads always bent in a tender curve.

Swallows and falcons belong to Gothic towers, creatures of a different sphere, of reverie, natives of heaven for whom diving through the boundless sky is pure ardor translated into movement. Jackdaws are the denizens of abandoned buildings, crumbling walls, and barren, defoliated treetops — oddball artists of flight, playful bohemians of the air — while the starlings form a quarrelsome proletariat that goes whirring off the rooftop gutters to scrap over a bit of straw lying in the dust. Pigeons alone display a cultured, bourgeois behavior, showing grace and circumspection in a firmly ordered world, politely stepping aside for you on the squares, where they have descended in swarms, trickling over each other, nodding their heads, cooing as they bow deeply to one another; and the slightly coarse clapping of their wings carries them to the stony saints gesticulating on the cornices, breathing gentle life into their isolation.

The pigeons above Czernopol were wild and fast: they flitted high overhead as if sweeping past inhospitable territory, in arrow-straight paths, from the range of hills along the Volodiak to the scattered oak groves of the great steppe across the river. Only a few would from time to time drop to perch in the crowns of old beeches and poplars that lined the main roads out of town, just for a brief rest. You seldom saw them by day, except when they cut across the pale, early-morning sky, or just before evening, when the heavens turned the color of their plumage, without smoke, and a first star appeared, magically, as if announced by their flight.

We always treated that first star as a mystery, a deeply mystical occurrence. We could never pin down the moment it actually emerged, in a sky that was the same sky that had passed through the day, but had taken a giant step back, so that it was now deeper by a whole heaven’s breadth, and open to newer depths beyond. This star that appeared without warning twinkled with the magic of something placed in the world complete and fully formed; it was simply there, and required no becoming. And even if we told ourselves that we could discern these new reaches only because our eyes had acquired a fixed point with which to gauge the distance, the actual appearance of that star would forever remain a mystery of creation. Beyond all scientific explanations, we realized that all new creation necessarily enlarges and enriches our own world by bringing new dimensions.

For Czernopol it was the mark of a daily deliverance: a release from itself. The city awoke from its ruthless, overpowering reality, which was as glaring as the day, and which nothing could cancel except the dying day itself. The earlier waking state, so close to reality, now seemed like a daze that slowly faded, layer after layer, with every veil that evening lowered onto the streets.

Because the reality of Czernopol was the street — those wide roads that are life’s thoroughfares, roads that stretch across the boundless countryside and do not end with the death of the wayfarer. It was thanks to these roads that the city had come into existence, having arisen at one of their intersections as a stowing place for those without a homeland, a collection point for those without a home — pulsing with restlessness, spurred by a consuming desire for a vague beyond, for something further, pervaded with the yeasty ferment of discontent. At the same time it was naked and unadorned in its need, burdened with hardship, with the compassionless severity of those who know life, for whom everything is fleeting, every trouble a mere phantom, and all sympathy is rendered invalid by the knowledge that all pain will pass.

Unlike in other cities, then, where life proceeds agreeably on the streets by day, and only shows its cruel and desperate side at night, and even then keeps it confined to secret niches and lairs that become visible when its veins are emptied, like rats’ nests in drained sewers — unlike in these other cities, the day in Czernopol bore witness to all kinds of reality. Crass, unembellished life, the midday glare, and the street itself were one and the same in Czernopol: they were inseparable. Everything, from birth to death, took place in the open as if in the palm of a hand. Thus, by day the streets of Czernopol were the site of sheer meanness, brutal selfishness, shameless depravity. People laughed, cried, loved, robbed, and thrashed each other at the markets, coupled behind fences, died in the gutter. Purse-snatchers stole the last few coins off poor beggars; murderers fled from their pursuers; obscenities spouted from the lips of young girls.

And people loved the day and its brash reality. In Czernopol nothing remained unsaid. Nothing was concealed; nothing allowed itself to be concealed. No pretense was admitted, no keeping-up of appearances, no glossing over, no pretext was valid, no deception went undetected. Everything was left mercilessly to its own devices; nothing relied on anything else, and nothing had acquired a healthy distance. All the devices that help us imagine the dark spaces we inhabit as richer than they are — deception, delusion, embellishment — were banned from the glaring light of day. Foolishness was nothing but foolishness, intoxication was only drunkenness, despair was a door that led nowhere.

Nevertheless, the faces of the people in Czernopol were by no means banal. Their alertness was magnified to an expression of highest intelligence; it came beaming out of them as a dry, bright zeal — in their fervent, unerring gaze, in their delight of exposing things and reducing them to their proper measure — in other words, in their passion for wit, and it was this passion that gave free rein to all the others. The penchant for bluntness found its full, uninhibited expression. People laughed when a coachman took his whip to a blind man who happened to step in the way of his droshky; they laughed about a Jew who was howling because he’d been cheated out of a few coins; they laughed about a passing drunk bellowing obscene songs, while next to him a dog that had been hit by a vehicle kept spinning around his lame rear end, slobbering with pain and biting himself blindly in the flank. The children of the street laughed with the raw, tinny laugh of meanness; their agile, thieving eyes always on the lookout for new cause, and nothing escaped them, no misunderstanding and no confusion, neither torment nor terror, vice nor crime — nothing that was painful, and certainly nothing grotesque, because that was always close at hand for everyone.