Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

We had no reservations when it came to treating Solly, who was a head shorter than we were and almost two years younger, as a superior being. His verdict on Blanche was, incidentally, absolutely matter-of-fact: “A whimsical creature, the Schlesinger girl”—and here he was right—“but intellectually anemic. Not worth talking about.”

So we contented ourselves with greeting her from afar, with a short nod and a quick glance, both conveyed in embarrassment, leaving us even more embarrassed because we knew that she was still observing us with her big eyes. And then the day came when she spoke to us.

It was during Fräulein Zehrer’s German class, which usually passed sluggishly, unless it was fraught with the kind of tension that made us refractory and unleashed all the bad habits children are capable of when pressed into a stupid and unenlightened educational mold, although it should be noted that Fräulein Zehrer was hardly the fossilized schoolmarm people are inclined to blame for the shortcomings and taxing boredom of school. She was healthy and red-cheeked, relatively young, blond, even bright. But her unconcealed disapproval of Madame Aritonovich’s pedagogical views and methods — which were never presented as a program but simply derived from her unique personality — made her contrary, and thereby inept. She taught in protest, and her protest was as much against Madame Aritonovich as it was against ourselves. Alone among the teachers employed at the Institut d’Éducation — mostly mousy old spinsters or kind, grubby old men — she had trained for her profession and had fallen victim to various modern ideas. Her ideal was most likely a German Waldschulheim —a boarding school in the woods with lots of sun, enormous windows, where the walls were adorned with the students’ artwork and where the children sat outside in a meadow, singing chorales in a circle — the idyll, in a word, of a kindergarten teacher. The very building that housed the Institut d’Éducation, a dilapidated private home where the only equipment was the barre in the ballet room, must have been repugnant to her. Her revenge took the form of teaching us with a matter-of-factness and thoroughness that suffocated us with boredom. My guess is that Madame Aritonovich probably realized all this, but kept her — or possibly even hired her — for pedagogical reasons, namely to provide contrast, following the only principle she ever did put into words: Children should not be spared anything.

We were practicing what was called the “spoken essay.” My assignment consisted of retelling the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. I did my best, and when I came to the place where the prince reaches the castle surrounded by thorns, I said: “… and the prince saw before him a sleeping castle, covered with layers and layers of briars …”

“ What was sleeping?” Fräulein Zehrer interrupted. “The castle?” She turned to the class: “Did you hear that? Have any of you ever seen a castle sleep?”

The class howled with laughter, with Fräulein Zehrer laughing along at full volume. “The people in the castle were sleeping, you dum — mkopf— Sleeping Beauty in the attic chamber, the king on his throne, and next to him the queen, her pages on the steps and the guards on the balconies and over the gate, even the cook, who was in the process of giving his apprentice a slap on the face, and the court dog on his chain and the cat at the hearth — but not the castle!”

I stood there close to tears, overcome with shame. What hurt me the most was the betrayal of my friends: Solly Brill next to me had thrown his arms over the table and laid down his head, which was red from so much laughing. And although I knew that he wasn’t laughing so much at my mistake — which I couldn’t consider a mistake — as much as expressing his relief from the deadly-dull torment, which would have made me every bit as cruel if someone else had been in my place, I did feel the stabbing pain of having been utterly and despicably abandoned.

“Now take your seat and think about whether a building can sleep,” said Fräulein Zehrer. “But don’t go dozing off on me, you sleepyhead!”

Solly Brill grabbed his protruding ears as if his head were about to fall off. “A sleeping castle! Who ever heard of that! You have words for that, all right! Go to sleep, sleepyhead!”

I was as if blinded.

But when the class was over, Blanche Schlesinger came up to me. “What you said didn’t make me laugh at all,” she said. “I thought it was exactly right, and very poetic, a beautiful shortcut that said all that was needed.”

My sister Tanya joined us. “You have a very nice dress,” said Blanche, briefly turning a little red, as if the compliment seemed a little empty. “And very pretty hair,” she added, as a kind of compensation, “and pretty eyes. I’d like to be friends with both of you. Do you want to trade some books?”

We brought her Dickens’s A Christmas Carol , which she already knew, but was happy to have because of Rackham’s beautiful illustrations, and she in turn gave us a very strange book, God’s Conic Sections by someone named Sir Galahad, who Blanche said was actually a woman. We didn’t understand a word of it, but when we came across it years later it seemed like a revelation, and it took us another ten years to get over it.

Because we realized the imbalance of this literary exchange, we next brought her Agnes Günther’s The Saint and Her Fool , which our Aunt Elvira had found very moving, and which we begged her for, supposedly so we could take it to Fräulein Zehrer. We felt that Blanche was the spitting image of the “little soul” in the book — a misunderstanding that later proved to be quite cruel. That must have led her to judge us for what we were. Her next gift to us was Kipling’s Jungle Book.

But that wasn’t all. She gave us Mörike, in homeopathic doses, then Thackeray’s Pendennis , which to this day remains one of our favorites, and, finally, a volume of selected poems by Goethe, and after that Longus’s Daphnis and Chloë , in all naïveté and undoubtedly only because of its beauty. We loved her more and more with every book.

I don’t know what was more exciting for us back then: the events concerning Tildy, his wife and her father, old Paşcanu, who were often the subject of conversation first at home and ultimately throughout the entire city — or our friendship with Blanche Schlesinger and the other world that she opened for us, the marvelous wonder-world of literature, this real place of refuge for those who have need to flee.

“Come visit us sometime,” we asked her. “We have a big garden.”

She smiled sadly. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Then we’ll come visit you, and you can show us all your books and your father’s as well.”

“That won’t work, either,” she said quietly.

We were inclined to consider her very elegant, because she was kept so isolated. So there she was at last, our bewitched princess, who remained beautiful and noble even though a terrible curse had deprived her of her crown and her rule over her subjects. I loved her, and I loved her name, which I expanded into the name of Parsifal’s love: Blanchefleur.

Later, after our friendship had been sundered in the most horrible way and she and her father had left Czernopol, she sent one last book: Disraeli’s Tancred. As a dedication she had inscribed a few lines from Verlaine:

Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela ,

Et que je suis plus pauvre que personne ,

Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela ,

Mais ce que j’ai, mon Dieu, je vous le donne.

In the meantime, while we were so absorbed in our immediate concerns, things were happening that would have a far greater impact on us. Czernopol was weaving the background for our myth.