Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

The coach with the faded violet silk repp curtains and the mice-infested upholstery rattled onto the bend of the narrow street at the Turkish Fountain and pulled to a stop at its crest. The coachman swung his rippling castrated corpulence off the high box and opened the gate with a massive key. Then he led the giant horses by the snaffle into the courtyard. The gate was immediately shut; a heavy bolt slid into place. Săndrel Paşcanu was alone in his home, with his mean castrated servant, his solitude, his senile pride, and his Titian.

WHENEVER in later years we thought back on our childhood, painfully recalling its richness and dignity, what we had retained from our youth struck us as an inheritance acquired by devious means. It had so little to do with what we had become that we at times felt tempted to consider it the “literary existence” Herr Tarangolian had dutifully warned us against. The images from those days seem as far-removed as the untold fairy tales and legends that filled it with such wonders. Just like these stories, our childhood may be told and may even come to life in the telling, although the unmistakable quality of its reality cannot be reproduced. And even if this reality is awakened inside us for a few moments, in all its layered complexity, and speaks to us so directly and urgently that it causes us to shudder, what we then hear doesn’t seem entirely our own, but rather the voice of the past itself, lamenting that which is lost, and which continues to dwindle into oblivion, with us and around us, with every passing hour.

“We are like the housing of an hourglass,” Herr Tarangolian used to say, when he felt obliged to admit that his memory was beginning to deteriorate with age. “Our consciousness is its narrow waist, unable to hold on to what passes through. Only the distant filling spaces cast back a vague reflection. To perceive something in a way it won’t be forgotten we have to become aware of its presence without looking at it. You have to look past something in order to see it in full.”

And indeed: at times we encounter something that happens to correspond to one of those essential images we carry inside us, like iridescent refraction in old glass, so that it lights up within us, for just a heartbeat, setting off a flash of magical splendor, which is as fleeting as an echo and fully out of our control. For we cannot simply conjure at will its momentary shine in all the fullness of being perceived — the unity of color, smell, sound, and touch that absorbs all these characteristics and transmutes them into a single essential core. We are left to the mercy of a moment that resembles the moment when it first crossed the periphery of our field of vision, when we were focused on something else entirely.

This powerlessness of our will to command our perception, the discrepancy between what we believe we experience and what we truly experience, makes it difficult for us to examine our past for any fractures that could reveal to us when and how we lost our supposed paradises. Memory occasionally descends upon us with the weight of authenticity, only to vanish into the shadows, inclining us to question the world in which we have lost ourselves, since we began fobbing off our ardent yearning with cheap secondhand goods. As if we ever had any other choice! And so later on we sometimes feel tempted to attribute the loss of our blissful, dream-bound childhood to certain events, which back then — as the story of Tildy I am relating here — affected us directly. We held Czernopol accountable for awakening us to the crude banality of the world, which from then on ceased to fill us with any longing. But there was more than just one error to that logic.

Certainly our yearning was inspired by our abundant inexperience, and it was this hunger for the world that sharpened our perception. But this negative abundance was paradoxically a burden, because its pressure complicated the experience itself. What we consider basic aspects of our character — aspects that appear to us like the ruins of a large, emotionally structured composition that was never completed due to the powerlessness and carelessness of its creator, and which is now completely lost but for a few barely discernible fragments — are clearly nothing more than the moments when our desire was at its strongest, and connected to images, sounds, smells that it was not aiming for, perceptions it had looked beyond , as it focused on a goal that was very far away. In other words, these were the moments of our most secret torment.

No childhood is beautiful, and none is happy, and ours was no exception. The distress a child feels as he attempts to recreate the world in his playing within a reality that is proportionate to his own, springs from the consuming awareness that he himself does not possess any reality whatsoever. Just as Professor Feuer’s house seemed to us the most beautiful of all, because it most resembled a play-world house, and just as we always regretted the fact that it was so real, and just as we wanted with all the power and weakness of unbridled desire to wield one of the spears of our garden fence as a play-world weapon and then were terribly disappointed, sobered, and hurt when Herr Adamowski unscrewed one and placed it in our hands, so we wanted everything to hover in some intermediate sphere of reality, balanced between expectation and readiness; in short, we wished it were all there in the same never-never land in which we ourselves lived. And that was a landscape of melancholy. What today seems to be the most reliable legacy of our childhood, and the only one truly intended for us — the sadness that was secretly mixed in with every one of our hopes — comes less from the disappointment of half and paltry fulfillment and more from the knowledge we had already acquired as to the invalidity of wishing at all.

And meanwhile the unfilled space inside us reflected the richness of images that the world contained. Because our desire focused so far into the distance, we looked past whatever was near, catching it by surprise in unguarded moments when it revealed its secret. Our childhood is the myth about ourselves, the saga from a time when we were yet an intermediate race, when we stole knowledge from the gods, insight into the essence of things. It is our magical dawn, a twilight filled with mystical happening. And every reencounter with it has the character of the numinous.

So if the memory of Czernopol includes experiences which we presumably ought to have been spared, that does not make it any less fortifying and purifying — or, in a word, any less holy , than whatever impressions we might have retained from some other perfectly harmonic world. On the contrary: the city’s reality, with all its dubious morals and drastic goings-on, was so mercilessly close that it provided a truly mythical background, so that the heroic characters of our early years stood out in all their ambiguity, impossible to forget. But what truly infuses our memory with a sense of primal experience is not so much these remarkably distinct figures and the impression they made on us, but rather the quality of the time when these events took place, and their ever-changing symbolic effect.

Old Paşcanu’s bizarre undertaking, which would lead to a grotesque and dreadful end, had a certain connection to the case of Tildy. Because hardly had the word gotten around that Tildy had been locked up in the asylum — which as usual in Czernopol took no more than a few hours — than a number of creditors approached Madame Tildy with claims that amounted to a fortune, and which had been guaranteed by nothing more than the modest, and now very questionable, pay drawn by the major. Madame Tildy dealt with the worried gentlemen exactly as one would expect from a born Paşcanu — in other words, at first she refused to receive them, but had Widow Morar, who was in those days constantly around, and who even later never left her side, show them out quite unceremoniously, while threatening to set the dogs on them if they didn’t kindly leave the premises at once. Widow Morar executed this task with closed eyes and with such a gleeful smile in her golden mouth that Messrs. Fokschaner, Lipschitz, Mer — dinger, and Falikmann fled the house as quickly as they could.