Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

If you belonged to the local jeunesse dorée , you wouldn’t be left alone very long but would find yourself in the company of your peers in front of, say, the White Eagle Hotel or the Lucullus sandwich shop for a casual meet-up, called a patchka. These were truly ephemeral friendships, and although they displayed an intricate range of fine social distinctions, they fulfilled no other function than the twice daily common stroll up and down Iancu Topor Avenue. In the mornings, these groups of young idlers — students who studied everything and nothing, children of the well-to-do, spongers, dandies, and the doll-like lieutenants of the garrison — would exhaust themselves in a short saunter and then disperse, splitting up for a “bite” of slivovitz as a snack, or to eat some ice cream or drink a glass of fruit sorbet at Kucharczyk’s. In the evening, the pack lounged under the bright archway of lights of the Trocadero, next to the display windows with the photos of the current Argentine, French, or Russian dancing stars. There they watched the procession along the Herrengasse that ebbed and flowed with tidal regularity, noting with casual expertise what the collective unrest had driven out of the houses and onto the street, and then moved on, chatting and joking through the dove-blue twilight. Later these hunting parties broke into groups of two and three and set off sniffing in pursuit of the pretty game that they spotted earlier.

Iancu Topor Avenue first cut away from the line in a sharp angle, but then swung back toward it in a gentle bend, rejoining the tracks at the officers’ casino. Here the procession turned around. Whoever was in the mood for stronger fare could continue the hunting and venture into the Volksgarten, whose broad main avenue served as promenade for the mass of plebeians. There the crowds were bigger, the milling about more robust. Now and then the traffic stalled against a row of six Ruthenian girls locked arm in arm, dressed in traditional skirts that seemed to spray color, briskly walking in step and plowing through the crowd like the Colchis oxen under Jason’s firm hand; at other times the current split the girls apart amid a general tumult, shrieking and hitting. Whoever the main avenue couldn’t hold, or who was looking for solitude, got lost in the extensive network of side paths in the darkness of high hedges.

In the middle of the park a military band gave concerts inside a pavilion mobbed by gawkers. Myriads of beetles and moths buzzed and fluttered around the harshly bright arc lamps, whose white dusty glare made the surrounding darkness deeper and turned the foliage of the chestnut trees, where they were hung, into islands of bright transparent green cut out against a backdrop of black iron. Regular soldiers strolled in pairs, linking the thick fingers of their heavy peasant hands like frightened sisters, following the corporals with wishful respect, full of admiration for the down-to-earth way these men — accustomed as they were to giving orders — had with the girls, and hummed their melancholy tunes while chewing on a carnation stem or sticking the flame-colored flower under their cap behind their ear. From the bushes came tender sighing. At that time the city of Czernopol housed around a hundred thousand souls, of whom a not insignificant number undoubtedly owed their existence to the dense plantings of mock orange and lilacs inside this amply landscaped and generously administered public park.

So much for the setting of the events I’d like to tell you about. After all of this, it will doubtless come as a surprise to hear that they were set off by an event more likely to occur any place else but here — namely, by a challenge to a serious duel, with army pistols at fifteen paces. In a typical display of linguistic prowess, local parlance expressed the incongruity of such an occurrence with unparalleled brevity — with a turn of phrase that said everything and nothing: In Czernopol, of all places!

THE EXTRAORDINARY hero and initiator of this duel to the death — which, incidentally, never came to pass — was a certain Tildy, or more precisely, a Major Nikolaus Tildy de Szalonta et Vörösháza, of Hungarian background, as the name indicates. His story strikes me as worth a few pages, because he belonged to a nearly extinct class of humans: those who mold their destiny. Destinies have become as rare as people with character, and they are becoming harder and harder to find, the more we insist on replacing the concept of character with that of personality .

Major Tildy, however, was a man of character, and an extremely aloof and stubborn one at that. Unshakable in his principles, and with the absolute conviction of a religious zealot, he abstained from any and all participation in that which is commonly understood or misunderstood as humor. In the context of Czernopol, however, this meant that among the hundred thousand blameworthy citizens, he alone was righteous. To quote Herr Tarangolian: “A white raven — well, it’s a freak of nature, no matter how you look at it. And in a world such as ours he was bound to fall victim to ridicule …”

You will see that I am a very biased portraitist of our hero: I must confess that I’ve never been able to see him in any way other than transfigured by that first great boyish adoration, which is one of the purest emotions we are capable of. This was my only case of love at first sight, although where this came from is a mystery. Because whether we are attracted to what most resembles us, or, as they say, our exact opposite — whether we give shape to our own innate image or whether images shape the preferences we then rediscover in other images — this will forever remain a mystery. Nothing can explain the passionate admiration that we as children secretly — because it cannot be communicated — bestow on a person, a person who has never said a word to us; and no experience, not even time, is capable of destroying this childhood adoration. One day we caught sight of a hussar on a horse, we knew him, and we loved him.

We saw him, as is indelibly engraved in my memory, on the same day we returned to our house in the city for the first time after the Great War. But that is undoubtedly a delusion. Too much speaks against our having seen him so early, so soon after the end of the war; first of all, our familiarity with the house and the garden — we were scarcely born when they took us to live in the country — and then the notion that it was winter when he first rode past us, whereas the fact is, we had moved back to the city early in the summer. But I am happy to stick to this delusion, because it expresses the idea that the memory of that house and garden, a memory I hold dear, is completely inseparable from the first time we surrendered to a vision of perfection, and much of the painful delight we feel when we call to mind certain pictures from our childhood stems from this delusion.

The garden was protected from the street by an iron fence. A sandstone plinth extended out on either side of a small gatehouse — which we called the dvornik ’s hut — up to the hedges of the neighboring properties. Tall, slender pickets rose out of this base and were connected by two long ribs; their pointed-leaf finials presented a straight row of beautiful lances whose form and order delighted us immensely. To this day I can physically sense the powerful magic that emerged out of the absolute symmetry of those lance-leafed finials, pulling us into its spell. And I don’t just mean the unbearable craving to heft and wield one of those spears, which were more perfect and more genuine than all those we had carved for play, but a desire that was unquestionably erotic, an urgency that was intensified by its sheer unattainability, similar to and no less pressing than the yearning felt later in life after possessing a woman we loved, and which despite the physical stilling — which always remains superficial — never achieves its true goal. But we were even more taken with the equilibrium this fence presented, the sparkling symmetry of picket upon picket, all coming together to form a single decisive perspective. And just as when we played inside we never tired of arranging our lead soldiers or other toy figures into the same undeviatingly square formations, so as to discover in their repeated regularity a magical geometrical essence that corresponded to mysterious structures within ourselves, so we were drawn outside to what was undoubtedly a very ordinary iron fence, with an emotion that verged on the sacred, because we sensed or suspected something in that line of pickets, something possibly close to the wellspring of ornament and dance and ritual.