Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

Herr Tarangolian completed this sketch by saying: “Fiokla Aritonovich is undoubtedly a personality. I have been her friend for years. And”—he said in English—“ she is a lady. You will not regret your decision.”

Because after the debacle with Herr Alexianu, the question of our further education had become critical. When they implored Miss Rappaport to come back she declined, saying that unfortunately she was about to accompany three charming children of an officer of the British Colonial Army to India. Apart from a postcard with a picture of the Taj Mahal, which we knew well enough anyway from the little forest at Horecea, we never heard another word from her, and because Uncle Sergei assured us that she could not possibly have been devoured by a “tyiger” because tigers despise Jewish flesh, and also even the fiercest beast would be afraid of her, we had to assume that she was grateful to have half the planet between us, and were probably correct.

Madame Aritonovich had begun her institute as a ballet school, which was then expanded to include instruction in French. The institute’s popularity increased dramatically, and as a result it had very recently added all the subjects necessary to prepare students for the gymnasium and had — undoubtedly thanks to the prefect — been duly licensed.

When further inquiries yielded positive results, our mother and her older sister Elvira went to meet Madame Aritonovich in person. They both returned with the unreserved impression that Madame was “quite formidable .”

“ Voilà ce que j’ai dit! ”said Uncle Sergei, triumphantly.

“Perhaps a little too much personality,” Aunt Elvira dared to object.

“ But she is a lady! ” said Uncle Sergei, in English. “Don’t you agree?”

“Of course, of course …”

“ She is a lady. So what else do you want?”

With that our matriculation into the Institut d’Éducation, as it was called, was a done deal. We would have it to thank for a wealth of experiences that were both unusual and, without doubt, also educational.

I don’t want to omit how much we were looking forward to the new school, and especially to our future schoolmates. We expected they would also become our playmates, that they would visit us and that we could visit them, and that we would finally be freed from the isolation we had experienced up to now. Our eagerness was immediately dampened, however, when we were told that we would never be allowed to go to school unaccompanied, but would always have to be taken to the institute and picked up later in the day. This supervision ultimately led to discoveries that caused our parents great dismay — though for no reason at all — and that sadly put a stop to our close relationship with our new friends.

Today it seems obvious that we loved Madame Aritonovich from the very first moment, and we maintained our attachment and tender admiration for years, all the way up to our final departure from Czernopol, while she in turn rewarded us with her friendly affection. This is somewhat odd, considering that we must have found the general milieu of the school, and above all Madame Aritonovich’s own appearance, puzzling, even frightening.

Madame Aritonovich was very thin, almost disturbingly emaciated, and she was the first woman we ever saw in pants. The day we met her she was wearing a kind of Chinese garment — a three-quarter-length black silk jacket with wide sleeves lined with cherry-red fabric, and broad white silk pants, with high-heeled slippers. She was ghostly pale. Her thick hair was parted severely down the middle and tied in a knot at the back of her neck, so that it lay like a narrow cap of shiny black lacquer on her slender head. She was smoking a cigarette through a thin jade holder the length of her arm.

“You are a charming little flock of chickadees,” she said, with a voice that was alarmingly full and deep. “You, there — come here!” She pulled my sister Tanya over, ran the tip of her fingers along my sister’s dangling arms, then took her hands and raised her arms up to her shoulders. “Stand on your tiptoes!” she commanded.

Tanya obeyed. Madame Aritonovich took Tanya’s right hand in her left and held it tightly by her fingers at a graceful angle over my sister’s head, then spun her in a quick turn, quite firmly but also amazingly tenderly. Thus supported, Tanya performed a pirouette as if entirely on her own, one that was full of grace.

“Well, that certainly looks promising!” said Madame Aritonovich past her cigarette holder to Herr Tarangolian — the prefect had offered to introduce us. “What natural poise, don’t you agree, Coco ?” She released Tanya with another artful swing, as skillful and gentle as before.

“She reminds me of myself at that age, although I was perhaps somewhat less naïve. In any case, five or six years later my father said to me: Si tu continueras comme ça, tu finiras dans un bordel. To which I replied: En tout cas ce sera un bordel de premier ordre. ”

Herr Tarangolian tossed his head back and laughed, his pearly teeth flashing beneath his dyed mustache. “That’s delicious, Fiokla, delicious! And your father?”

“All he said was: J’en doute. But this one here could really become something, don’t you think, Coco ?”

She turned to us: “Did you understand what I said?”

We had understood everything except for the word bordel. But her voice was so natural and had such a winning authority, that we would have gladly confessed if we had understood it. However, we had very little interest in that, distracted as we were by the discovery that one could call the prefect, whose first name was Constantin, Coco. We found this absolutely delightful, because the nickname made us think of a large, intelligent, and multicolored parrot, and in this way we gained a new and very informative image that illuminated the character of the prefect, and for a long time we only referred to him as Coco.

Incidentally, Madame Aritonovich didn’t leave any time for an answer. She said: “As I told your mother and her rather sour companion — what do you think, Coco, it was probably her sister, no? — anyway, as I explained to the two ladies, the most important thing a good school can teach is a small dose of cynicism. Do you know what that is?”

We said we didn’t, and were very eager to learn more.

“That’s the word used to differentiate smart people and dumb ones. Please take note of that, because we’ll never speak about it again. Perhaps people will tell you something completely different later on. And when they do you should think of me. Or else think of the story about Queen Victoria and Prince Edward. She caught him cheating at cards. “Do you know what happens to little boys who cheat at games?” she asked, in English. To which he replied: “Yes — they win.”

She turned to a young person who had witnessed this exchange with undisguised disapprobation — one of the teachers, as it later turned out.

“Be so kind as to show these little titmice the classrooms, Fräulein Zehrer. And don’t let them know that from now on they are my favorite students.”

As we later discovered, this was something she said in front of all her new students. But Fräulein Zehrer, who was our German teacher, made it very believable by treating us especially badly from then on.

And I remember as if it were today that we suddenly saw how beautiful Madame Aritonovich was — in an entirely different way than the somewhat shallow white-golden good looks that had been our only model for beauty up to then. She was so thin that the delicate bone structure of her skull seemed to be covered with nothing but skin — or perhaps just a layer of powder. Her face was a death mask; only her eyes were full of the splendor of life. Her mouth was large and very mobile, with thin lips. When she closed it, there was something strained or even exhausted in its expression, which immediately vanished as soon as she smiled or began to speak, and both things happened the moment she looked at you. Her neck — the same neck that caused Uncle Sergei to wish he were an executioner, really did stretch in an almost alarming fashion from her shoulders, longer than Miss Rappaport’s, and incomparably more attractive. We realized that the spirit of a woman could be seen in her neck. Even later, after Madame Aritonovich had aged abruptly and hid her neck under rows of thick fake pearls—“my tortoise neck” was how she put it — it was still full of grace and poise, and ennobled by the shimmering pale-blue lines of two veins that emerged below her cheeks and ran to her collarbone — the runes of the sangre azul , which had given the light-skinned Goths the name “Blue-bloods.”