Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

“Please, have a seat wherever you like,” said Herr Adamowski, swaying from his long leg to his short one, and then straightening back up. “Of course the young gentleman will have some liqueur — a little glass of Cointreau won’t harm anyone, am I right, Herr Kavalier ? For who can reject a drop of respect!” The three men laughed loudly and tensely, all the while nodding to one another.

“Give him something to look at,” said Aunt Paulette. “Then he’ll sit in a corner and not bother us anymore.”

“What bother, what bother!” exclaimed Herr Adamowski in feigned indignation, baring his teeth and flashing an embarrassing conspiratorial look at me through his monocle. “Who said anything about bother! We are delighted to have the young man’s company. If you feel inclined to have another little glass, please, help yourself. I’ll put the bottle here just in case.” The three men laughed. “You have all the books you could wish for at your disposal, although I’ll ask you to skip the ones on this particular shelf.” The three men laughed. Herr Adamowski winked at me: “They’re a little on the piquant side, capito ? Only for collectors. But perhaps this one here: Greek vase paintings. It shows figures that are in their paradisiacal state as well, but they’ve been rendered harmless by their classical lines. Hellene goddesses and gods in contemporary portrait. And so on. Seek and ye shall find.”

Aunt Paulette had sat down in her usual lethargic posture and said nothing in response to these fatuous remarks. One of the men lit her cigarette with exaggerated eagerness, cupping his hands around the matchbox to create a hollow for the flame, as if it there were a violent storm inside and the match were in danger of expiring at any moment. Aunt Paulette had to dip her face into this hollow: the reddish-yellow tinge of the flame spilled onto her mouth so that she seemed to be drinking fire from his hands.

Herr Adamowski sat down as well and stared at each of the guests, one by one. When no one said anything, he stated with an eager, smirking grin: “So, our gathering is complete. And how is the general health of the assembly?” The men laughed once more, this time accompanied by the woman in the brown taffeta dress.

I began leafing through a book, pretending that I was entirely absorbed in my reading. I was disappointed and alert at the same time. After everything I knew about Herr Adamowski, and the secretive circumstances surrounding both my visit and Tanya’s earlier one, the last thing I expected was a group like this: boorish, gauche, and awkward despite the crude familiarity, where no one ventured to speak except the host, and everyone seemed to be waiting for some comment or observation that would relieve the tension. The three men sat there like lumps of wood: I found out that their names were Leutgeb, Fellner, and Kopetzki, but couldn’t discover more about their background or occupation. The names alone sounded like a bunch of bandits. Fellner was still rather young, with a healthy, ordinary face and large hands, evidently very strong. He was the most awkward of them all; at every new outburst of nervous laughter he would squirm in his chair and look around and nod to the others, hiding his large hands between his knees, since he didn’t know what else to do with them. Leutgeb was a middle-aged man, thickset, with a small mouth that displayed a hint of malice. Kopetzki seemed to suffer from a lung disease: he never stopped quietly coughing, though at the same time he smoked a pipe that gave off thick clouds of smoke. He had a finely shaped head, narrow and pale, with a dark Polish mustache. The woman in the brown taffeta answered to the name Theophila — evidently a nickname; her dress looked worn and its rhinestone embroidery gave a shabby appearance. On the rare occasions when anyone but Herr Adamowski said anything, they addressed their host as “Adam” or else by the less-than-elegant diminutive: “Adamchik.”

I have to confess that it was my Aunt Paulette who gave this group a peculiarly macabre note. Her presence was like a last spot of paint, a bit of contrasting color that paradoxically fit the whole picture and made the group seem a little eerie, or even dangerous, like a secret alliance, a conspiracy sworn to fulfill some covert mission. In later years I would encounter in spiritualist circles a similarly tense atmosphere charged with a furtive intimacy, together with the same vapid cheerfulness and habitual shallowness in the conversational tone of the séance leader before launching into the parts of the program that were meant to be creepy.

“You laugh, Ladies and Gentlemen,” said Herr Adamowski in his harsh-sounding German. “But these days one cannot be serious enough in inquiring after the health of every worthy gathering. You see, Gentlemen and Ladies, you are caught up in the course of the times, without realizing that this is more than just your personal progression — please consider the implications! All jests aside — the difference is a crucial one. For me the difference is quite clear, as a journalist with his finger constantly on the pulse of the times, I live with it every day, I experience this same discrepancy in all its tragic consequences, not only the direct effects that have already resulted, but ones yet to be seen, ones to be feared. It makes a tremendous difference if one chooses to view the times abandoning all claim to exclusive possession, in other words no longer as a phenomenon of personal episodes alone, but of collective experience. As a journalist I have a professional obligation to provide an accounting of the quality of the times, both for myself and for others. While doing this I have to bear two things in mind: first, that the quality of the times is shaped and molded by the sum of its details, a sum of purely personal experiences, which taken alone would be completely insignificant, and would lead to nothing but misleading exceptions divorced from the spirit of the times, but which in the aggregate, as I have said, help determine the general character of the epoch. And, second, that this specific general character in return has an effect on each individual fate, no matter how isolated, and shapes how each person passes their time, no matter how remote the activity. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is perhaps the most interesting interplay in all of nature, the one that leads us closest to metaphysics, and one that demonstrates the difficulty of the journalistic métier … Yes, you laugh, but please bear in mind what our thankless task consists in. The journalist, Ladies and Gentlemen, does not have as congenial a profession as people are wont to think.” The group laughed out loud. “He must, as my esteemed friend Professor Feuer would put it, act like the squirrel carrying discord up and down Yggdrasil, between the eagle in the canopy and the dragon in the roots. He must roust the privately minded man from living solely for himself, by ceaselessly calling his attention to outside his personal sphere — events that don’t concern him at all, that don’t apply to him in the least, as he sees it, but which in reality are of his utmost personal concern, whether it’s a murder in the house next door or a change of regimes in Portugal, for instance, or an earthquake in Kamchatka. On the other hand, our conscience dictates that we journalists hold up this model of the private man to the so-called general public as an ideal form of being.” They laughed. “Yes, my friends, that’s the way it is. Who among us would deny the singular truth of the saying beatus ille homo qui sedet in suo domo , and who does not yearn for this very same thing from the bottom of his heart? Nietzsche was proud of not owning a house, but you ought to read sometime what he said about Epicurus …”

The room groaned with laughter. The woman known as Theophila said: “That was fabulous, Adamchik, truly fabulous. Where does he come up with all of that?”