Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

Evening descended over all of that, bringing freedom and release, like the shade of a soothing hand. As its light dispersed, reality dispersed as well, gently felled: what was rude softened, what was close moved away, what was immediate became mediated and indirect. The dimension that that first star acquired for the world was that of heaven — the insight into our own extreme forlornness. The violet blue of the shadows transformed the anxiety of the lonely into another type of solitude. Those who had never escaped themselves now fell back, and by withdrawing they gained the world in its boundlessness. As the earth gradually turned from the sun, they discovered the other side of the planet, and found a place for themselves in its visibly increasing detachment. A sense of yearning permeated their glances and gestures, followed by a kind of tenderness — the tenderness that can only come from the anguish over what can never be reached or realized, and which therefore tastes so much like sorrow. It burst out in songs sung in a minor key, sought refuge in wondrous stories, shrank into amorous whispering. It made people restless, driving them on a search with no particular object or definite goal — and so the evening promenade was more than idle strolling, it was a ritual, in which the restiveness of the lost souls abated, when the raucous mood of a barnyard wedding mixed with the Maytime Devotion of the Blessed Mother.

Night in Czernopol was also beautiful, although the moonlight found no cathedrals or palaces it could infuse with reverie and transform into the charnel architecture of exquisite dreams, and only gave a shabby gleam as it hit the stepped tin roofs that rose from the area around the train station and up the steep escarpment by the Volodiak. At the top of the hill its merciless beams fell on the ugly tenements, cutting their banal silhouette out of the horizon, and exposing the battlements of the Metropolitan’s Residence as the fakes they were. Then it lifted the bulbous dome of the synagogue from out of the jumble of gabled and flat-topped boxes, and, a few streets further on, the toy stone towers of the Catholic Herz-Jesu Church and St. Para — chiva, which towered over the synagogue in stark pathos. The moonlight dripped down the firewalls at the Ringplatz without having any poetic effect on their plainness; it collected in a milky puddle on the filthy paved esplanade in front of the Rathaus; it cast the finely etched shadow of the basilica of St. Miron across the mangy, enclosed square of grass; and finally faded away behind the complex of provincial government buildings and the flat temple of the officers’ casino, darkening into the olive tone of tarnished silver in the Volksgarten as it mingled with the foliage that was swaying in the night wind.

And yet it was as if the vast surrounding countryside had taken a blot of shame compassionately into its lap. The black forests of the Volodiak hills seemed to surge closer, having sent narrow spits and isolated islands into the wasteland of stone, tin, and mortar, each tree fanning out into the night as though by some great accord, a chalice of living darkness rich in mystery. The ring of fields closed more tightly around the town, drowning its bare ugliness in their richness, and the same wind that combed the silver ears of grain far away, carried off the gutter-like stench from the Jewish courtyards, mixing the biting odors of dishwater, rotten fish, and rancid sunflower oil, of garlic, mare’s urine, and cat feces with the aroma of earth, hay, and fir resin. Puddles that by day were as brown and foamy as beer glistened like ponds, like pieces of heaven accepted into the earth, and the enormous stillness of the star-studded night lay over Czernopol — punctuated by crickets, shrouded by the sound of frogs, as soothing as a mother’s lullaby, unbroken except for the occasional clatter of hooves of a droshky hack driven to exhaustion, or by the distant, forlorn howl of moonstruck dogs, baying in dismal futility.

At times like that mothers would occasionally turn to their unruly children, if they refused to go to sleep, and frighten them into silence by raising their fingers to their lips and saying: “Shhh! You hear those hooves rattling? That’s old Paşcanu — and he’ll come and get you if you don’t stop crying.”

Because at night was when Tamara Tildy’s father used to set out in his old-fashioned, heavy coach, pulled by two colossal horses, to visit the mausoleum of his two wives in the little woods of Horecea.

Only little is known about the early history of the city of Czernopol. A half-day’s march north, on one of the Volodiak hills, lay the ruins of an old watchtower, known as the “Zitzena Castle.” According to local folklore, the name came from when the Turks destroyed the fortress. A child had been stolen and placed in the forest: it was hungry and cried for its mother’s breast: “ Zitze! Zitze! ” In her desperate search the mother is said to have heard her child, and as she pressed forward, offering the source of nourishment, she kept calling out “ Na! Na! ”—which in Tescovina means, more or less, “Here you go, have at it!”—but she never found her little darling.

The legend proves little except the unreliability of folklore as a source for historical research. And as interesting as it may be to know which voivode had the watchtower erected, whether the Poles, the Hungarians, or the Turks themselves — what is certain is that the city of Czernopol was no more than a few hundred years old, and probably entered European consciousness far sooner owing to its fondness for anecdotes than on account of any historical significance.

The Tescovina Germans enjoyed taking group hikes to the ruins of Zitzena for their solstice celebrations and similar folkloric occasions. The Turnvater Jahn Athletic Club, the German Men’s Chorus, and the German Women’s Chorus would set out with their flags and beer wagons, merrily singing their way through the Ruthenian suburb at Kalitschankabach, despite the fact they always encountered a few heroes of the Romanian Mircea Doboş sports association or the Junimea fraternity who saw fit to spoil their innocent joy, and which usually led to lusty fistfights. The representative of the German minority, a certain Professor Dr. Hodelein, whose name with its unfortunate overtones the nationalistic circle around Professor Feuer jokingly romanized as “Testiculescu” because of his alacrity in accommodating the new sovereigns, would then have occasion to appear before Herr Tarangolian and submit a formal complaint.

These fights usually occurred near a pub, known to be the place where Săndrel Paşcanu first appeared among men. Widow Morar told the story best: how the pub maid had gone to the well and come back screaming, because evidently a bear or, even worse, a forest spirit known as a djuglan was bending over the wooden bucket to drink from it; how a few brave men had gone out, and how they, too, came back running into the house, afraid, because the giant had turned around as they approached, and he had been without a face— a black head without mouth or eyes, only a white beak jutting out. Then the presumed djuglan had raised its hands, parting its long black hair, which had fallen over his face while drinking, shoving the two halves aside like curtains, revealing a mouth after all, and a pair of glowing black, but actually gentle, eyes, and what they had thought was a beak was really his nose. They invited him to eat, and he stayed. He was young and strong as a bear and useful around the pub. But one day he up and left, to join the soldiers fighting the Turks, in the last of those wars, when the Ottomans were beaten and lost the fortress at Plevna and wound up leaving the country, or perhaps he had joined the robbers; in any case, when he returned he was a rich man and had married a princess.