Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

— Professor Dr. Lothar Feuer,

Senior teacher at the German Boys’ Lyceum in Czernopol

And a dreadful thing happened: the Jews of Czernopol, led by a couple of youthful pranksters, seized the issue of the Tescovina German Messenger in which Professor Feuer’s article had appeared; they bought up the entire run, paying collector’s prices to the German subscribers, and howled with laughter. They read Professor Feuer’s article to one another with tears in their eyes and breaking out into spasms of laughter. They spoke among themselves in a lightly Yiddishized “flickering-Waibling-Wälsung” German, and it became fashionable among young people to talk among themselves somewhat like this: “ Sieg-Heil , selfsame Sigi! Have you perchance perceived Luttinger’s lascivious Lily? No, forsooth? Some foul fate has flubbed our flirt? Elsewise she twines about me like the ivy twines about the ash, die sheyne shikse! Nu , so now I’ll have to wend my gleeful galosh-gait into the garden of the Volk . Are you pleased to plan to take your pleasure with another? Engage in a bit of racial defilement with a blonde, perchance?”

The reference to the “Baroque nightingale Agnes Günther” was a particularly delightful tidbit for connoisseurs.

All in all, the newspaper war enlivened the city. The patchkas in the circles around Năstase and Alexianu popularized the satirical verse about the balamuc that was soon put to music. Gyorgyovich Ianku played it for the habitués of the Trocadero, when the doors opened to let them in, with Ephraim Perko in the lead: the popular fiddler Gypsy first plucked the tune quietly on the strings of his fiddle, and little by little the entire orchestra joined in until they broke out in a thunderous march full of joie de vivre:

Just follow me to the nuthouse, please …

The flaneurs hummed it on their paths about town. The promenade pranced to its rhythm. Czernopol was in a champagne mood.

Only here and there were fisticuffs observed. Herr Alexianu knocked a Jewish lawyer to the ground because the man had inadvertently stepped on his feet in the confusing shuffle of the promenade. The leader of the Tescovina-German fraternity Germania struck a cadet of the officer’s school and was locked up for two days. And Solly Brill received a resounding slap when he greeted Dr. Salzmann in the corridor of the Institut d’Éducation with the words “Greetings, O brave cuckold.” He had not understood the meaning of the word and thought it sounded chivalrous, in the style of Professor Feuer.

During this time old Paşcanu died.

Herr Tarangolian never spoke otherwise about his death than as an important signal, a beacon.

“Explain such an end, if you can,” he said. “Gather up all the possible reasons, place the circumstances in a cogent chain of causality, and you still won’t be able to exclude an element of the demonic. No matter what people claimed to know after the fact, no matter what explanation they put forward — the failure of this venture or that, the catastrophe with Tildy, the attempted diamond swindle, how one thing led to another to exacerbate the mistrust that was already smoldering, and, finally, clear signals of a bad end — that’s all wisdom after the fact. No, no: we must look elsewhere for the true cause of Paşcanu’s ruin. Because ultimately the catastrophe did not affect him alone. Even if we can find sufficient cause in his own person — and that’s not hard to do — it still falls far short of explaining the misfortune into which he dragged others. Believe me, we all think too rationally. The death of Săndrel Paşcanu was a sign …”

And, indeed, other ominous things occurred in those days which had nothing directly to do with Paşcanu’s death. An ill star hung over Czernopol. We couldn’t help but think of articles we had read about the holy hermits of India whose presence protects a land from floods and crop failures, pestilence and rapacious beasts — plagues that soon return when the sainted person leaves. Today, as the story of Tildy has become the myth of our childhood, it seems to me as if we had known back then whose beneficent being it was that had been taken from the city of Czernopol.

The day they arrested Bubi Brill was a Saturday. On Sunday Czernopol was seething with rumors. On Monday morning old Paşcanu was called in for a hearing

Monday in Czernopol was market day. The peasant carts began trickling into town while it was still dark. In the pale dawn the markets filled up with seasonal vendors and booth operators setting up their stands; the large vegetable market at Theater Square, near the synagogue, a funfair at the Turkish Fountain, and a flea market behind the provincial government offices all swelled with teeming life. Soon the cardsharps had coaxed the first farmers to try their luck at three-card monte, which they played by manipulating three aces — two black and one red — with bewildering dexterity, by the festering light of sunflower-oil lanterns. After plucking the farmers of a few quick leos, they raced off at the first sign of a policeman. By the time the day arrived, the trading was in full swing. Housewives, followed by their servant girls in colorful peasant dress, haggled with farmwives over vegetables and fowl. Above the flea market, the pungent smell of untanned sheepskins lingered like a poisonous cloud. Ancient horn-phonographs squawked out the disembodied voices of Caruso and Lilli Lehmann. Spectacularly ragged figures stood beside old scraps of newspapers strewn with crooked nails and rusty screws, waiting to make a sale. At the fair by the Turkish Fountain, barrel organs droned away, swings arced back and forth, and the carousels went round and round. Older farmer couples and soldiers on leave with their brides had themselves photographed against a picturesque cutout of a well, their hands awkwardly clasped together, stiff as wax statues. Gendarmes with fixed bayonets patrolled the lanes between the stands, while pickpockets worked themselves into a sweat behind their backs.

While old man Paşcanu was being questioned on the third floor of the courthouse, and the state prosecutor — a young, ambitious gentleman freshly transferred from the provincial capital, eager to earn his spurs and anxious to worm out a confession with whatever display of lawyerly histrionics it might take — was taking pains not to allow his opponent to respond with anything that was clearly innocuous … while this was happening, something unusual occurred: a crowd began to gather on the street and kept growing bigger and bigger. The vast majority consisted of peasants, coachmen from the country, raftsmen, grain dealers, all of whom crowded outside the bombastically severe façade of the courthouse and looked up at the dusty windows in silence or muted conversation: the countryside had come to witness either the downfall or the triumphant vindication of its great son … No, not his vindication, not his resurrection in the glory of innocence — it was his downfall that they wanted to see. The rabble of Czernopol mixed among the country folk, spreading their coarse jests and uncouth jokes. Peasants hunched over from hard work, with shoulder-length matted hair, shriveled by the wind and tanned by the heat of the sun like an old goat ham, with skin as dry as worn-out Gypsy fiddles, listened in earnest amazement to the tales being spun about the heroic feats and dastardly deeds of the man who had at last come to be judged inside that building — the man whose name they didn’t even know, but whose magical powers had brought them there: a great man, a son of the mountains and forests, a son of the earth like themselves, born in the high bracken among the firs, a man whose countless adventures had brought him power and splendor and untold riches — whole lands had been in his possession — but whom the devil, with whom he had been in league, had discarded, and who was now on his way to the place of judgment. Would they hang him …? Hang him? Outside the city they were already building a platform, first to impale him and then to saw him into quarters and show his limbs to the populace: those arms and hands that had raked in the gold: Jewish thalers and widows’ bread money intended for feeding their hungry orphans … The rabble of Czernopol said all this and more — even as they cleaned out the peasant women of whatever they had in their meager belt pouches.