Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

Aunt Paulette didn’t move. Uncle Sergei raised his eyebrows very high and then sang, as mellifluously as a tender Pierrot, and bone-chillingly off-key, “ Là ci darem la mano ,” then sighed and got up. We knew he was going to play cards. Our mother stood up with him and left the room under some pretext. We knew that she would slip him a little money outside.

It may have been a mood like that which led Aunt Paulette to go and visit Tamara Tildy. She hadn’t told anyone her intention, and we didn’t learn of the visit until a few days later, and then quite by coincidence.

The conversation proceeded the same as most of the conversations that took place in our house did, and exactly the way, strangely enough, we would recall later on: assembled in the so-called salon , drinking black coffee after dinner, a group of people sitting motionless, silent, and fossilized. The only thing that occasionally enlivened this group was the presence of Herr Tarangolian, but after Aunt Aida’s death his visits grew less and less frequent, and finally, after a difference in opinion that had become all too clear, they ceased almost entirely. We were always inclined to think that this increasing stiffness in the lifeless room didn’t start until after Miss Rappaport had left us — which is proof of how much we are prey to optical illusions whenever we look back at the past.

The conversation was trivial and disjointed. Sentences such as “Will you have some more coffee, Sergei?” and “Thank you so much, Cousin Elvira!” floated randomly on the surface of a sluggish silence. Aunt Paulette, her head resting on the back of her chair as usual — which earned the undisguised disapproval of her older sisters — interjected: “Do tell me if you should ever win anything at cards, Sergei. I’d like to borrow some money from you.”

“You know, my angel, I never win. Alas.”

“It might happen yet. If you cheat as cleverly as you do when you play rummy with me …”

“Why do you need money, moye serdtse ? A woman who has your beauty has everything.”

Aunt Paulette said nothing.

“I understand,” said Uncle Sergei after a while. “She is not doing well? She is always hungry?”

“Yes, she is hungry.”

“Oh-là-là,” said Uncle Sergei. “But this hunger is very hard to still. Very expensive. The games I play are for kopecks.”

“You sometimes see a doctor, by the name of Zablonski or some such?”

“You are speaking of Madame Tildy?” our mother said, not without a certain edge. “Have you seen her?”

“Yes, I went to visit her,” said Aunt Paulette with unabashed nonchalance.

“To visit her?”

“Yes, the day before yesterday. There was already someone else there as well. A certain Herr Adamowski, an editor from what I understood. He was performing magic tricks.”

“He was doing what?”

“Magic tricks. He pulled a sugar-egg out of his nose, and other unappetizing and boring things. Card tricks, too. You should avoid him, Sergei, if you run into him in one of her circles. He’s better at it than you. You can recognize him by the fact he has a clubfoot. And a monocle. Both are hard to miss. Incidentally, Tamara Tildy seemed to be thoroughly amused by the man. She was practically bubbly, witty and charming. And the old Morar woman was lurking like a spider. When you look at her she closes her eyes and smiles. Her gold teeth are so bright you have the impression the sun is rising.”

“She waits on her, from what I hear,” our mother said.

“I think they sleep in one bed, if you can call what I saw a bed.”

“It’s horrible,” our mother said. “By the way, children, you haven’t been outside all day. Go play in the garden until Aunt Paulette calls you in to do your homework.”

If someone had told us back then that Aunt Paulette would wind up marrying Herr Adamowski, and then only after she’d been his mistress for a long time and under circumstances very embarrassing for all of us, we would have considered it the product of an unsound mind. We once spoke about it with Madame Aritonovich.

“What’s so hard for you to understand,” she said, “about your aunt falling for this man? Tamara Tildy fell for him as well.”

“And?”

Madame Aritonovich smiled. “Didn’t you ever notice how fascinated Paulette was by Tamara Tildy, from the very beginning, the same way you were fascinated by Tildy?” Except she was fascinated the way one woman is by another, through constant secret comparison, relentlessly lying in wait for the moment when she might emerge triumphant. She was younger and more beautiful, and that made her envy all the more bitter — that gives it an edge right away … You understand what I mean, Tanya, don’t you?”

Tanya didn’t answer.

“Of course,” the rest of us said. “And we could have understood it if she had taken Tildy away from her when he came back. But not this clubfoot, this salon-buffoon.”

“Tildy!” said Madame Aritonovich, almost disdainfully. She looked at Tanya. “You know what I mean, yes?”

Tanya still said nothing.

“Wait until you are twenty-five,” said Madame Aritonovich. “Live with relatives when you are young, beautiful, and at the peak of vitality but unable to move freely. Your expectations from life have been curtailed. Meet a man you find repulsive in every way — physically, mentally — but who has conquered the woman who makes you uneasy, because you sense that you have something in common, if nothing more, or nothing less, than a seed of the same despair. What will you do? You take revenge for this despair that she has beaten you to. You will want to hit her where it hurts the most, on account of your own despair … I don’t expect you to approve, I only expect you to understand … Ah, but sadly you weren’t in my school long enough, you little titmice, back then.”

The platitude that “You never can tell” could be aptly applied to the short time we spent in Madame Aritonovich’s Institut d’Éducation, and we could count ourselves lucky that we didn’t know back then how soon we would leave it. Because we were happy there, apart from a few very mundane childish worries — minor aches that later struck us as ridiculously trivial, though at the time they seemed as bitter as any sorrow yet to come.

One of those early pains, which I alone experienced, was responsible for our friendship with Blanche Schlesinger.

For a few weeks we had tried in vain to get to know her. But she was as retiring and shy toward us as she was toward all the others, and, moreover, we felt awkward and embarrassed by our attempts to approach her, and especially by our poorly feigned casualness. This was a technique we had picked up from Solly Brill, and to us it seemed a wonderful way to overcome embarrassment. But while such spontaneity was second nature to him, we were never to fully master it, not even later on. Nor did it work in the least bit with little Blanche. When her large, knowing eyes met our own, when we saw her sad smile that seemed to say “Don’t try to disguise anything, don’t put on an act, tell me what you want from me and I’ll do it if I can, if it isn’t too loud or garish,” we were stopped in our tracks, succumbing instantly to a sensitivity against everything garish, loud, or direct. For we had seen, often enough, how just one excessively familiar word or overly intimate gesture could cut to the quick, wounding a person where he was at his most vulnerable, at the core of his personality. And having to watch Blanche’s eyes grow a shade darker, or her smile turn more sadder, while knowing that whenever things remained unsaid that should have been stated hardly helped us overcome our shyness — well, it only made things worse.

I feel a little embarrassed when I say “little Blanche,” for although she was probably younger than we were, we never had the feeling that we had to patronize her, or that we even could. She was superior to us in every respect. Just like Solly Brill, and for the same reason: she was thousands of years ahead of us — the superiority of an older race.