Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

It was the famous Titian. A completely inferior copy of the Reclining Venus. Some obscure painter had been commissioned to repaint the picture with the head of Princess Sturdza and the naked body of Ioana Ciornei. Paşcanu had had the red curtain installed so he could change his view according to his inclination, so that it sometimes covered the head and sometimes the body. The collected rubbish they found in his house didn’t even pay for the costs of his funeral. The two colossal horses would have fetched the highest price, despite their age, but they were found the next morning dead in their stalls, grotesquely bloated. People said that the scopit had poisoned them out of some ancient hatred.

We never found out how Săndrel Paşcanu’s funeral unfolded. And because no one ever looked for it, none of us knew anything about his grave.

The mausoleum of his two wives in the forest of Horecea fell peacefully into disrepair. When we visited it once years later we found it completely overrun by a rank growth of wild blackberries, pussy willow, and anemones. It was still bizarre, but quite romantic in its ruined state, made even more beautiful thanks to the decorative arts of a lush and rampant nature. The surrounding barbed wire had long been stolen to keep pigs penned in at some distant farmyard. Wild doves cooed in the tops of the old oaks that ringed the site. We had a picnic there and whiled away a moonlit night, telling ourselves the old stories.

ALTHOUGH the cooling of our friendship with Herr Tarangolian meant that the prefect stopped coming to our house altogether for a long time, and after that only visited rarely, we did continue to see him whenever he called on Madame Aritonovich during the remainder of our term at the Institut d’Éducation. He hardly missed a single one of our ballet rehearsals, the success of which seemed quite important to him. He would sit in the corner like an old habitué, diagonally opposite the large mirror, observing our warm-ups à la barre and au milieu with the eyes of a connoisseur, and watching the rehearsals of specific scenes, while chatting with Madame in between. Once we happened to be nearby when the name Tildy surfaced in one of these conversations.

“Tildy sent me a letter,” said the prefect. “But he isn’t challenging his excessively long internment or petitioning me to use my influence to shorten it. No, he’s writing on behalf of this insane locksmith, the ‘poet’ Piehowicz. He complains that they won’t leave the poor man in peace. Apparently they’re subjecting his poetic genius to a thorough grilling. That offends the major’s sense of justice. He’s beginning to get on my nerves, this knight of the overly upright posture. He wants to create order even in the insane asylum, after having created such a pretty mess for me here on the outside.”

We were shocked. We had never heard the prefect speak in such a tone of voice. We asked Blanche if she knew anything.

After our callous reaction to the poem, Blanche had avoided speaking to us about the goings-on in the asylum. Now she showed that she had generously forgiven us.

“Unfortunately it’s true,” she said, worried. “They’re torturing poor Piehowicz with these so-called cross-examinations, and what’s more, they’re keeping him away from Tildy. Because — I’m ashamed to tell you — people are so upset by the consequences of the publication of the poems that they’re beginning to suspect Herr Tildy. The whole business sounds crazier than anything you’d expect to hear coming out of an insane asylum, but they think that Herr Tildy is in cahoots with Dr. Kipper and my father — and that they are secretly leaking the poems to the press or that they leaked the poems to Tildy so he could publish them as transcriptions of Piehowicz. Herr Professor Feuer calls it an example of devious Jewish scheming, and although the article doesn’t say it outright, the implication is that Dr. Kipper and my father wanted to provoke a literary scandal that would damage the reputation of German literature, and enhance their own prestige among their peers. The same view is more or less openly stated by two new gentlemen who replaced two other physicians who were dismissed after Professor Feuer wrote an article denouncing the fact that five of the seven doctors at the asylum were Jewish. That created a lot of bad blood, and that’s why those two were replaced, because of the pressure from the nationalists. But there’s another reason for all the recent examinations, and one that runs counter to all the suspicions, voiced or otherwise. It turns out that he himself has put an end to the theory that he isn’t the true author of the poems and that he just brought them from his poets’ circle in the Foreign Legion — with a piece of prose that he could hardly have committed to memory back there. It’s a letter that he wrote to Tildy complaining that he no longer sees him. And this letter uses such linguistic power and is such a shattering poetic allegory of pain and despair that there seems to be little choice but to once again assume that he’s the author of the poems as well. If you’re interested I’ll bring you a copy tomorrow.”

The last sentence pained us, even though we knew Blanche in no way meant to annoy us. Because the words “if you’re interested,” along with the simple fact that she hadn’t thought it worth the trouble to inform us right away about such important events concerning Tildy, were certainly her way of getting even with us for the shameful way we accosted her with the pitifully shoddy poetic efforts of the author of “Springtime.” Blanche was too outspoken for that. Rather, it was an indication of the distance that had crept, unbidden, between us ever since we had been discovered in Dr. Salzmann’s class. I don’t think that Blanche had consciously removed herself, though a certain tactful reserve may have played a role. But with Solly, who hardly knew the meaning of the word “tact,” it was the same: ever since we were kept away from the Jewish religious instruction, an invisible wall had risen between us that would never have been there had we simply acted as declared Christians and never taken part in the course. We had contributed to the erection of this barrier ourselves, albeit unconsciously: we felt like renegades and traitors, and this secret sense of guilt affected our interactions with our friends. This had nothing to do with yielding to the attraction, or magic, if you will, of another religion — of being “partly in the clutches of Israel”—but was first and foremost a delicate matter of principle: loyalty toward our friends, a loyalty we were powerless to maintain. But in cases like that, powerlessness justifies everything but excuses nothing. Powerlessness is a condition without grace, tantamount to a state of indebtedness. Then again, it’s possible that the real source of the new distance came from breaking the bond of common experience in such an essential matter as religion.

It is a tribute to Madame Aritonovich’s pedagogical prowess that we were able to confide our worries to her. She responded with a coldness that we found inexplicable at the time, but whose wisdom we later learned to admire.

“Surely you don’t want to find out what your friends think about you?” she said. “A question like that is a sign of cowardice. We all want to know the truth about ourselves, because every judgment we hear pronounced out loud seems more bearable than what we suspect is being kept concealed from us. And with reason. So you can safely assume the worst.”

In this way we were left to our own courage to deal with the matter, which was dreadful at first but ultimately proved salutary. The fact that Madame had so unsparingly confirmed our guilt left us no way out, and we learned that when it comes to the soul there’s no excuse for powerlessness.