Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

By the time Herr Adamowski left, we had run outside. Aunt Paulette accompanied him halfway to the gate. He waved to us and gave a meaningful, smirking nod, which we returned with the reserved politeness that Miss Rappaport had drilled into us and which Madame Aritonovich had enriched with subtle shadings vis-à-vis people of “higher, equal, or lower rank.” When Aunt Paulette came back, we were still standing in the same place. She walked right past us, but then all of a sudden turned around and smacked Tanya in the face as hard as she could.

It was so cruel and unexpected, so bizarre, that the resounding slap seemed like a trick of the senses by the time Aunt Paulette reached the stairs leading up to the house — like one of those eerily ephemeral hallucinatory events that are no sooner noticed than they are gone, such as when clouds open up and an angel drops out of the sky, or a sudden shifting of the planet, as though mountains were dancing: things we feared with a peculiar sense of excitement, and also craved, because they would have proven to us that the enchanted, heightened reality we so wanted to believe in, with the skeptical urgency brought on by our need to affirm our own identity, was real after all. But then we saw Tanya, shielding her face with her hands as if she had been blinded, still reeling under the brutal force of the blow, crumpled inward as if wounded. Not one of us had ever been hit before. We sensed that something critical had transpired, that this blow to the face had shattered something holy, something sacrosanct — a fragile mask of inviolate dignity, and now its splinters were being rubbed into our skin. I remember my pulse pounding in my throat while wishing to see a drop of blood trickle out from Tanya’s hands, as if such a sparkling, ruby-red mystery might effect a mystical reconciliation, and rid the taint of that colorless blow.

Tanya uttered something that was half whimper, half panting groan. She turned and raced off to hide in the furthest corner of the garden. And we followed her, also concealing our hate and choking thirst for vengeance in the leafy thicket of the bushes. We were ashamed for her and even more for ourselves, that we hadn’t been hit, too; we suffered because of her awful martyrdom. We stood around her in silence and waited with a terrible curiosity for her to take her hands from her face, and felt fear and seething rage when she finally did. She removed them slowly, holding them like the ruined shards of a bowl, and looked straight ahead with huge eyes, as if checking to make sure she still could see, her hands ready to spring back at any moment and cover her dead eyes. Then she let them drop, and we saw white welts from Aunt Paulette’s fingers between splotches of bright red.

Tanya didn’t look at us. None of us said a word. A desperate sense of helplessness overcame us — the seed of a sadness that would never go away: our childhood had been struck dead.

When we were finally rousted from our hideout, evening shadows were already bluing the garden. Her penance, designed to provide satisfaction, succeeded only in weakening our thirst for revenge while failing to put things right: Aunt Paulette was made to apologize to Tanya in front of us, and then to each one of us individually. Our mother forced her to do it.

I can still see my sister Tanya, accepting Aunt Paulette’s apology with a silent nod, and it’s painful to compare that image with that of the slender girl who scarcely a year before had taken the apple from the smirking Kunzelmann, every bit as immaculate as that beautiful green apple itself, with its smooth skin, and full of self-assured grace and the inviolable majesty of a child. I know that she died from that blow. She expired at the age of twenty from a passing cold that worsened into pneumonia. But I know that the seed to that early death had been planted inside her with that blow.

It had another, indirect, effect as well, that blow. When Blanche came to us a few days later, a little more shyly than before, and mentioned that her father had come into possession of a new poem by the insane locksmith, Tanya demanded to see it. She read it and gave it back to Blanche. “It’s very beautiful,” she said. “Would you please make me a copy? And of that other one as well, that you read to us first. It was very foolish of us not to see then how beautiful it is.”

“And now you see it?” asked Blanche with a poignantly illuminated smile — we hadn’t told her anything of what had happened.

“Yes,” said Tanya.

Blanche put her arm around her neck and kissed her.

The new poem was called: “One Drink of Love.”

Laβ uns in dem Silberglanz ,

mit des Blutes letzter Welle

so hinübermünden in den Strauch ,

wie ins Wurzelwerk der Quelle!

Laβ uns mit dem letztem Atemhauch ,

den die Birken grün umhüllen ,

unserer Herzen Krüge ganz ,

mit der tiefen Stille füllen!

Alles Irdische muβ wesenlos

ohne Trauer von uns fallen;

kindgeworden in des Waldes Schoβ

sind um uns nur Nachtigallen. [2]

Shortly afterward, the Viennese author Karl Kraus — the most significant German-language thinker and writer of his time — wrote: “Only at the highest peaks of German lyric poetry, where peace and quiet reign — only in a few verses by Claudius, Hölderlin, or Mörike, or today in lines by Trakl or Lasker-Schüler, does what a single heart and nature have to say to each other find such form, such sublime harmony of vision and sound. Lines such as unserer Herzen Krüge ganz, /mit der tiefen Stille füllen ; like this divine thought of nightingales surrounding us, kindgeworden in des Waldes Schoβ —make up for entire libraries full of verse. The real miracle is that this force of nature, this insanity, to which one easily entrusts the act of birthing the vision, has also affected or permitted this unbelievable congruity: one could write an entire essay on the symmetry in alternating short and long lines, and the psychic effect that proceeds from this, for example about the great pathos reserved for the additional two syllables of this final breath.”

And the miracle continued. Because it soon turned out that this poem, which was already a finished work of art with the closing verse about the nightingales, was even further elevated by the following magnificent addition:

. . . . . . . Nachtigallen.

die uns über Raum und Zeit

über uns hinaus zu den Gefilden

Gottes wiegen in die Ewigkeit

wo die Engel mit den milden

Mutterhänden unsren Liebesbund

heiligsprechen und in Harfenchören

und von Mund zu Mund

jubeln, daβ wir wieder Gott gehören. [3]

“Of course it’s hard to say,” Karl Kraus wrote in a postscript, “whether we ought to bemoan the loss of the full caesura following the line about the nightingales, or be thankful for the magnificent resurrection contained in this relative clause woven from these two verses that lead straight up to God. No matter what the results of the investigation into the authorship, and even if it turns out that admirers of spiritual values have found and memorized a poet who has gone unknown for centuries — it cannot produce a greater miracle than the work itself, and editors around the world will remain shamed by the fact that the asylum is, if not the source, then the refuge and sanctuary of this creation.”

The unresolved question of authorship had its own story: Czernopol was not a city to believe in miracles. After Blanche’s father and one of his colleagues — the junior house physician Dr. Kipper — forwarded the poems of the poor mentally ill person to a publicist named Sperber, who published them in the Tschernopoler Tageszeitung , people began to treat the case “scientifically.” The insane locksmith was then subjected to a cross-examination that yielded the following result: