Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

“And what about him?” we asked. “Is it true that he is happy?”

“If she feels it then it must be true,” said Widow Morar, smiling with her gold mouth. And he was. We later found out that it was true.

“You are surprised, even indignant, because they didn’t release Tildy long ago,” said Herr Tarangolian. “Permit me to say that for the moment it’s best for him to stay where he is. You can be assured he is being treated with the utmost consideration, with great courtesy and tact. The head of the institution, Dr. Kobylanski, is an unusually reliable man. And he has found in Dr. Schlesinger someone who can attend to Tildy with great sensitivity …”

“Yes, but none of that excuses the fact that a gross injustice has been committed, that it was all completely unwarranted!” exclaimed our Aunt Elvira. “You can’t just pack a man off to the asylum because he makes you feel uncomfortable.”

“My dear friend, if you had to decide his case, would you send him home right now?” asked the prefect, with an ironic look.

“You don’t expect us to believe that they’re keeping him there out of kindness, do you?” asked Aunt Paulette, the youngest.

“I don’t expect you to believe anything. I only said that he is being treated with consideration and tact.”

“So he has no idea what’s happening outside the walls of his confinement?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“But that’s even more horrible, if that’s possible! Isn’t anybody thinking about his poor wife?” Aunt Elvira was outraged.

“On the contrary, everyone is thinking about his wife.” Herr Tarangolian seemed to enjoy the general silence that followed his words.

“Permit me,” he said after a while. “Could he be of any help to her?”

“That’s not the question. But at least he ought to be given a chance to try.”

“Unfortunately that’s impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible.”

Herr Tarangolian shrugged his shoulders and busied himself with his cigar.

“Won’t Major Tildy demand accountability when he’s dismissed?” asked our mother. “A man of his character will consider this the worst thing that could be done to him, obstructing the performance of his duty.”

“Demand accountability from whom?” asked Herr Tarangolian.

This time the silence proved a little embarrassing, full of hidden shoals — there was too much being unsaid. Our temperamental Aunt Paulette couldn’t bear it any longer.

“I hate you, my dear old friend! Admit that you have your hand in it. And not for Tildy’s sake. You’re no angel. But because he’s in your way somehow, because he doesn’t fit into one of your intrigues. The notion that he’s being spared out of consideration while he’s actually being kept locked up in a nuthouse as long as possible is a perfidious hypocritical pretext. Admit it — you are a devil.”

“I don’t feel close enough to the beyond to say which category suits me best,” said Herr Tarangolian. “The only thing I know for sure is that you, my dear young friend, look as much like an angel as a human being possibly can — although perhaps one of Lucifer’s entourage …”

“A fallen angel, in other words,” said Aunt Paulette drily. The comment unleashed a palpable wave of embarrassment.

Herr Tarangolian acted as if he hadn’t heard her. “ Ach , my child,” he said. “Be annoyed, be indignant, wax righteous with anger, champion all that is noble and good, or else the opposite — at your age everything is beautiful.”

“Do you know much about the institution?” asked Uncle Sergei, interested. “What I mean is: Do they not have methods? Straitjackets for raving madmen and such like? Or perhaps they are using certain therapies such as electrical shocks?”

“You can rest assured none of that will be applied to Major Tildy,” the prefect said with enigmatic irony.

“Naturally!” exclaimed Uncle Sergei in all his disarming naiveté. “I am asking only out of curiosity, medicinally speaking, you know.”

“Naturally,” said Herr Tarangolian.

“I have the picture you requested of Aida’s grave,” our mother said. “The gravestone is up now. My relatives wrote that it turned out very nice.”

“You are kindness in person,” Herr Tarangolian mumbled, moved, as he kissed her hand …

Aunt Paulette reclined her bobbed hair against the seat back and stared up at the ceiling with arched eyebrows.

“You have very beautiful throat,” said Uncle Sergei.

“Are you tempted to sink your teeth into it?”

“Paulette!” said our mother. “If I might ask, would you help the children with their schoolwork this afternoon — or better yet, why don’t you go up right now, you’ll have the whole afternoon to yourselves.” She turned back to Herr Tarangolian: “It’s really a terrible shame that Miss Rappaport couldn’t come back …”

Aunt Paulette got up. “A terrible shame,” she said. “And no one has more cause to regret it than I do.”

She shooed us upstairs. “Incidentally, even when the dear departed Rappaport was with us the brood was always sent out only when it was too late.”

“An excellent educational method,” said Herr Tarangolian. “Children can never be corrupted early enough. On that matter I agree entirely with my friend Fiokla Aritonovich.”

“Paulette, please!” said Mama.

Aunt Paulette opened the door and let us out with an ironic bow. She didn’t exactly hate us, but she made no secret of her indifference toward us, and of the fact that recently we had become downright burdensome. It was also clear that it was only reluctantly that she undertook the task of helping us with our homework and otherwise standing in for the absent Miss Rappaport. But perhaps she was simply venting her general displeasure at us. She was twenty-five years old, very pretty, full of joie de vivre, and unspeakably bored in our household, which was anything but companionable. Apart from Herr Tarangolian and the occasional relative from the countryside, no one came to visit us, and it didn’t occur to anyone to pursue some social connections or visit friends in town. Although the household was large and busy — we were still a large family, including the help, and we did include them, a whole tribe — nothing could hide the fact that the empty space around us was expanding to the point where we felt entirely alone and utterly isolated.

We had yet to endure the painful experience of seeing such an entity as seemingly natural as our own family dissolve and disintegrate. In later years we told ourselves that we had parted from nothing more than a beautiful delusion, that the nestlike warmth we remembered from our intact home had never truly resided between its walls but was more the product of the warming rays of our childish bodies, our liveliness and open-mindedness, and that what we experienced was therefore the only natural outcome — namely, that we grew colder, along with the world around us. But no matter how reasonably we bore that in mind, it failed to assuage our homesickness — any more than a secret suspicion we shared that none of us would ever be capable of erecting anything as solid, sheltering, and warm as our childhood home.

Or should we already have had some feeling, some premonition, of what it was that made Madame Tildy so cold?

Meanwhile, Uncle Sergei seemed to show more understanding than might be expected from the implacably cheerful and charming countenance of an unreformed rogue. The accidental silence lasted for several minutes and at one point suddenly became palpably oppressive, without anyone being able to say why. Then Uncle Sergei blew a few rings from his cigarette in faux contemplation, puckering his lips in a kind of artful parody and sending the smoke off into the past, while quoting: “He who doesn’t build a house today will never build; and he who is alone will so remain …” He reached his hand out to Aunt Paulette, who was resting her head against the back of the chair and staring at the ceiling, and said with exaggerated sentimentality: “Give me your hand, ma chère cousine , in order to warm me.”