Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

If someone climbs with difficulty

So high up into a tree,

And thinks that he might just be a bird:

He is absurd.

— and left us with the task of reproducing the smooth original from the embarrassingly ruined rhythm.

Just before four o’clock, Fräulein Riffke Brill showed up on our street, in a coach festooned with blue-and-white banners and the Star of David, together with her fiancé, young Seligmann, to pick up the young ladies of the Grünspan family, who lived not far from us. Bubi Brill was unfortunately still in custody, and the president of the Lawn Tennis Club, Baronet von Merores, remained true to his racket sport.

But Ephraim Perko had loaded a fiacre with half a dozen exquisitely beautiful, long-legged blondes, and was lounging in the cushioned carriage, beaming, his arms wrapped around their blossoming voluptuousness, his short legs crossed and resting on the jump seat, his jacket open and his homburg tilting back onto his neck.

A little later we heard the first roars of the crowd greeting the players as they ran onto the field; the din came bursting over the canopies of the trees in the Volksgarten like a dark cloud of passion.

Despite their animosity toward Madame Aritonovich’s Institut d’Éducation, our mother and even Aunt Elvira had agreed to watch the ballet, for our sake. The performance was to begin at seven o’clock, but Madame had told us to be in the institute no later than five, to give us enough time to put on costumes and makeup. Uncle Sergei had promised to come later, and to persuade Aunt Paulette to join him. Our father had left town to go hunting with Uncle Hubert.

We loaded the costumes into the carriage and set off. In the main boulevard of the Volksgarten, which was open to traffic, we ran into various packs of people on foot — mostly adolescents. They whistled as shrilly as they could to spook the carriage horses. One voice outshouted the others: “Yossel, what’s the score!” “Four to three for us!” was the answer. “Fight’s broken out. Better not waste any time getting there.”

The noise from the playing field had become constant, tumultuous, disquieting. Outside the officers’ casino a platoon of gendarmes was being sworn in. A man with a badly bleeding head passed by, kicking and screaming and struggling against the two companions who were escorting him. Someone called out: “I can’t believe that the gentlemen in the casino won’t let a person use their phone even in a case like this. I’m going to report this. A scandal, that’s what it is!”

We turned off the main street and stopped in front of the Institute. Solly Brill pounced on us, very excited: “Haveyouheardanything? Anynews? What’s the score at halftime? A stroke you can get from all this worrying, on account of this stupid ballet! Mama brought me here but she left right away to tell Riffke to stay away from all the passions running high and such what a nebekh —what’s it going to hurt her if Jacky Seligmann gets a bump on the nose. Oy, am I sad that Bubi’s in jail! He’d have a good chance of losing his spleen — they’d sooner slap him as look at him. I can’t tell you how worried I am, really.”

Aunt Elvira remarked pointedly to Madame Aritonovich: “This young man seems to regret missing the opportunity to see his family killed.”

“Not exactly,” replied Madame. “He’s merely behaving like the farmer who prays for a few drops of rain to fall on his field when he sees it’s pouring at the neighbors’.”

“Very well put, since we come from the country,” said Aunt Elvira, with an alkaline smile.

“Really!” said Madame Aritonovich. “I know some very charming people from the country.”

Our mother looked at Dr. Salzmann. Madame Aritonovich introduced him. Mama spoke a few half-friendly words about how she hoped our inadvertent participation in his course had not wounded the sensitivities of any of the other pupils’ parents.

“Absolutely not, gnädige Frau . Jewish parvenus are usually quite tolerant.”

“Well, that’s reassuring,” said our mother, nodding to Dr. Salzmann.

“Not for me,” he replied, ignoring her gesture of parting. “Among the better-off members of the Mosaic faith, at most sixty percent still believe in a personal god — the remaining forty percent do not. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, as usual. Those of us with convictions would prefer to see a better proportion.”

He reached below his mighty stomach into his waistband pocket, pulled out his thick watch, glanced at the face, wound it, held it to his ear, knocked it against the back edge of an armchair, and listened once again. His jocund, awe-inspiring face was redder than usual, and his thick mustache bristled warlike over his scarlet lips.

We were shooed into the bedroom that had been designated as our dressing room. A few latecomers arrived and reported that the soccer match had been broken off because a tumult had erupted just as the second half was beginning — at which point the game was tied four to four. The fighting was still going on and had spread into the city. Reinforced squads of police and gendarmes were trying to restore the peace.

They started getting us into costume and applying makeup. The theater barber and his assistant applied scented creams to our foreheads and cheeks, dusted us with powder that tickled our noses, and under the careful supervision of Madame Aritonovich, shaped Tanya’s and Blanche’s eyebrows into the wingtips of demonic butterflies. We were enjoying ourselves immensely, and performing every conceivable nonsense. In fact, Solly had to be reined in; he had fashioned a ball out of a bundle of stockings in order to show how Moishe Eisenstein, the center-forward for Makkabi, dribbled.

Meanwhile, more disquieting news continued to filter in about what was going on in the streets. Evidently the police, heavily reinforced by the gendarmerie, had managed to restore order outside the playing field. However, it was time for the daily promenade, which usually filled Iancu Topor Avenue — and, at least on Sundays, the paths in the Volksgarten as well — with alarming masses of people. But today it was positively frightening to find out how many inhabitants Czernopol really possessed — and what kind of people they were. Apparently the entire rabble from the outlying districts had formed a mob. The matchyorniks from around the train station, accompanied by hordes of streetwalkers, the burlaks from the settlements around Kalitschankabach, the huligans from Klokuczka, and whatever the other particular groups might be called, roamed across the avenue so that even the spacious Volksgarten was practically overflowing. Even the fashionable patchkas of young flaneurs had armed themselves with sticks; individual groups of Junimea had taken important strategic positions at specific corners and intersections; the ethnic German fraternity Germania — wearing the colors of their club, with ribbons and caps and provocative glances — approached anyone coming their way, and the Jahn Athletic Club was in the beer cellar of the Deutsches Haus, ready to spring to action as a man to the cry “ Brothers, come out! ” And finally it was impossible to overlook the throngs of young Jews — including some who were practically children — who were streaming in from all sides. The police had been ordered to disperse groups of more than three people, and performed this task — at least the older watchmen among them who recalled their “German” from the Austrian days — by saying the words: “Either go where it is you’re going or stay where it is you’re staying but don’t be making any kupkis !” which, in their mix of Polish, German, and Ukrainian, meant, quite simply, “Either move on or stay where you are, but do not defecate.”