Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

He looked through the mask of cheap makeup and saw her face, saw the beauty of a young woman not only in the tenderness and delicacy of her features, but in the expression of deep, intimate connection with the world, arising from her gentle breathing, the intimations and experiences of her body, the ancient innate wisdom of her senses. Later he would discover other faces in her, faces that would cause him torment — but at this moment he was delighted by what he was seeing. Because he looked into her eyes and recognized her as well. Through the deeply mysterious veil of her shortsighted eyes he believed he saw her , the core and substance of her unsettled, unfathomable being, her very identity — that I that sees itself within the conscious and unconscious interplay of the psyche as something fixed and constant. That was what he believed he loved when his emotion surged in her direction, and he realized that he loved her when the echo of her presumed answer brought first the happiness, and then the first sharp pain of disappointment. And I must say: he behaved heroically. He wouldn’t have been Tildy, the knight, Widow Morar’s armored angel, if he hadn’t shown such extreme and patient resolve to love her core and substance, and not the promise of one of her fleeting faces. The report I received of the last horrible scene of that night, when he slapped her, has been corroborated, and therefore I know for sure that he must have expended whatever energy he had left, his last resistance, against the horrors of love. He was clearly not an extraordinary human being, certainly not the hero that our childish fantasy had wished him to be. He was obsessed with duty to the point of being obstinate, a pedant with monomaniacal traits — a true oddball, if you will. His one great virtue was something beyond his own control; it was the legacy of the world he came from, a vanished world. In Czernopol they would have said he was on the slow side, someone who has a hard time grasping the fact that times change. He was so slow at understanding this that he had to die: there was no other choice except to understand. Assailed from the outside, his surface was invulnerable. It had remained unscathed up to this last night, despite all he had been through. It shattered only when tainted by his humanity. It shattered with his love, his love that was bound to be his downfall, since love is only possible in a world of forms. Because he was prepared to love something without a form, he gave himself away. As a character determined to carry every decision to the extreme, he therefore chose to die.

Professor Lyubanarov ranted on, weaving the purple mists of his desperate intoxication into language. Tildy offered the girl a glass of wine. She declined: she never drank. Then she asked, with timid courage, whether she might have an orange. Tildy didn’t understand right away. His Ukrainian was weak; he only spoke as much as any officer needed to know in order to make himself understood to the motley soldiers under his command, which invariably included some Ukrainians. She pointed to a basket of oranges on the counter, and when Tildy immediately gave his consent, she called to the proprietor to bring her one. The innkeeper nonchalantly grabbed the closest one, set it on a plate and nodded to the greasy waiter to take it to her. At that point Tildy’s innate aversion to the baseness of the establishment broke out. He lashed out at the proprietor, ordering him to offer her the entire basket and let her choose for herself. The waiter placed the basket on the table in front of the girl.

She clapped her hands together in delight. “Are they all for me?” she asked. Tildy had no choice but to nod to her, noting that he was rather moved by the unconventional and rather awkward gesture he had resorted to in his temporary embarrassment at her naïve question. He bit his lip. But he immediately found his emotion validated. She sat there a while, her hands clasped beneath her chin as if at worship, in enraptured study of the basket filled with bright balls of fruit, picked one up and weighed it in her hand, her fingers touching the peel almost with awe, stroking the pored surface, with its sparkling, oily sheen. Then she carefully returned it and arranged the others around it, once more sating her eyes with the sheer abundance. Her performance seemed exaggerated; he couldn’t tell if these were mere antics, if her coquettishness wasn’t meant to be deeply ironic, if she wasn’t playing some refined game to accentuate the contrast between her fashionable getup and her evident childishness. But her delight was so genuine that he realized he might be underestimating her in two equally dangerous ways, and the potential of danger put him on guard while heightening his feeling of manliness, which made him happy. For this he was grateful to her, and insofar as he found himself willing to accept both challenges, he immediately respected her as his worthy opponent. He no longer needed to be ashamed of his sentimental impulse; it was part of a legitimate cause: a contest, a duel. Apart from igniting his emotions, which had already turned somewhat brittle, she had provoked his desire to prove himself, to perform a knightly task. From that point on he followed her game with the attention of a fencer under assault , and sensed that the attack was directed immediately at him, and his delight was ignited by her own. Once again she picked up one of the bright spheres and gave him a questioning look. And once again he nodded, smiling in the bargain. And she responded to his smile as if she were accepting a challenge: with one barbaric, cruel motion she sank her fingernails into the thick peel, pulling and tearing it off in huge furry scraps, oblivious to any possible damage to the fruit. Her fingers were dripping with oil and juice as she separated the wedges; she bored deep inside the sopping flesh to dig out the seeds, picking it apart into little pieces. But she didn’t eat any. In a fit of nervous restlessness, a kind of disturbed compulsion for order, she arranged the sections along the edge of the plate, around the growing pile of discarded peels. She tore apart three or four of the fruits in the same barbaric way, piling the pieces on the plate, and finally, when the mountain of ruins threatened to collapse, she took them and stuffed them alternately into Tildy’s mouth and into the mouth of Professor Lyubanarov, who was blindly driveling away.

Tildy parried when with dripping claws she unexpectedly shoved the torn-up piece of orange under his mustache. But her wild, almost primal gesture of maternal feeding was overpowering; against his will, he opened his lips to accept the first piece and then offered only weak resistance to the next one, and the next after that. She seemed to find more pleasure in taking care of Professor Lyubanarov, whose stream of words had suddenly been halted and who with a glassy gaze swallowed whatever was shoved into his mouth. All the while her bearing was suspiciously serious. Tildy had no sense for how hideously ridiculous the whole scene was. The fact that he, too, had become her victim only sharpened his tense vigilance. He realized that he had lost the first round, but was unable to explain how; the contest did not follow any of the rules he had expected. While inclined to think himself duped, led on, and made a fool of — a suspicion that gnawed at him, because it was unchivalrous and would have turned his “cause” into a farce, he was immediately ashamed of his mistrust. Because after the girl had fed the last piece to Lyubanarov, she let her hands — dirty and sticky as they were — sink into her lap, and stared at the mountain of discarded peels, thin and lost before the picture of senseless waste like a sorrowful child, and this was no pose. A deep sympathy for her poverty, her youth, her bad breeding, and the loneliness of her existence overcame him, as strongly as a sense of guilt. She stared helplessly at her hands, and he handed her his handkerchief. It was made of fine batiste, large and unadorned, and she touched it with the same sensual rapture she had displayed while touching the fruit. Then she held it to her mouth, closing her eyes, and inhaled its pure scent.