Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

When the sergeant returned to ask the girl for another dance, Tildy placed his hand firmly on her arm and looked at the other with such authority that the man automatically clicked his heels together and pulled his shoulders together, just as his face filled with a dark-red rage. Meanwhile the girl withdrew her arm from Tildy’s grasp and rose from the table. “What do you want?” she said, in her ugliest voice. “It’s my profession.”

She stepped, erect and resolute, up to the sergeant, who put his arm around her. After only dancing a few measures, he said something to her. Then they disappeared through the door to the stairs that led to the rooms on the second floor.

Tildy found himself driven to a desperate act of rumination. Here people fenced by rules he didn’t know. He waved the waiter over and asked irritably what apart from bad wine there was to drink, and ordered a bottle of cognac. Following the time-honored custom of the officers’ casino, he filled and drained his glass in one motion, several times in a row. With a dull sense of gratification, he felt the alcohol entering his blood and making his limbs heavy; this gave him the illusion that his spirit was being lightened. The delayed reactions of his nerves led him to believe he had gained some perspective. He followed this process with a kind of schadenfreude, a rage directed against himself. Once he had sufficiently numbed the wound within, he set out on his daring feat of thinking.

Yes, here people fenced according to rules he didn’t know; what’s more, it was clear that no one knew the rules apart from the person called on. Consequently there were no rules. In the end it was a duel in the dark, even if only figuratively — it was Tildy’s misfortune that it was only figurative, because had it been real, he could have stood up to his opponent, even if it meant resorting to the same underhanded tricks: a duel in the dark with all conceivable weapons, tooth and claw. But even this image was false; nothing could convey how helpless he was against feints and thrusts like these. And yet he felt an ungrounded conviction, an inner certainty, that there were certain rules, and that this contest was chivalrous like no other, because it posed the most difficult challenge to his knightliness. He could have made it easy for himself and despised the girl. But he wasn’t capable of despising her. Because he loved her. Not that his pride would have permitted him to love what he secretly despised. But it forbade him to despise what he loved. And he loved her because he could not despise her.

He tried to put a temporary halt to his thoughts. He was confused by what was coming out; it bordered on wordplay, on the tangled platonic drivel he had just heard from the drunkard Lyubanarov. He, Tildy, had a deep mistrust of wordplay, which came alarmingly close to wittiness — that is to say, it wasn’t pure, wasn’t fair. Wordplay was clever, analytic. He wasn’t used to analyzing. He was principally opposed to anatomizing a matter, because matters pressed for decisions. Dissecting them lessened their true weight. He was no lawyer. It was not his profession to talk things to death, but to face them. Astonishing as it might be, he loved this girl, and it was equally amazing how and why and in what a short time that had happened. Something inside him had called on him to love her, something like an order. But ours is not to reason why: orders are meant to be obeyed without grumbling. Nor did he have any cause to do so. He saw her face. If he closed his eyes, he saw her face before him, the beauty of a young woman, a beauty fashioned not only by the tenderness and delicacy of her features, but also by the grace of a deep-seated connection with the world — here again a raw pain sundered his thoughts, drowning them in a sharp, dark anguish. But even despite that pain, her face emerged unscathed, and her eyes focused on him. Never would he be able to extinguish this grace that was indelibly stamped onto his innermost being, the beguiling charm of this face. Its imprint would cover and erase any other face he might peer into. There were no words to say what lent it this power. It was the reflection of a creature he loved, or rather of that creature’s substance and core. Because even if she were unstable, labile, one moment brimming with kindness, the next inexplicably cruel, even if she didn’t know herself and was a plaything of demonic drives — indeed, even if her face itself were merely the mask of some crafty quick-change artist — he knew that it contained a core and a substance fashioned from the same material as his own.

So it was the essence of the face that made the mask, and not merely its surface. Any discussion about its expression was simply a sham. Everything that Lyubanarov had spoken was nonsense; he was drunk, and didn’t himself believe in what he was saying. Of course there was no way to reach the core of the creature we love that does not pass through the creature. And she places herself between this core and us, and takes us prisoner. Whoever does not wish to suffer as a prisoner must love his prison. Love the forms that hold us captive, the forms that lead us to surrender … Tildy recoiled from the word. He was a hussar, and a hussar does not take surrender lightly. But he realized that he, too, had become ensnared in a game of words. Love the forms that hold us captive— that was an unambiguous statement, let’s forego everything else. So, love the creature that conceals her own substance and core. Love the creatures —all the unstable forms that merely signify the unrelieved torment of the core from which they spring. Did he not even love her ugly, spoiled hands, her barbaric movements, the fuzzy hair on her forearms that bespoke a low origin? It wasn’t that he forgave her faults and flaws because he loved her; it was precisely these faults and flaws that he loved, because they revealed her to him , they gave her away. He didn’t love her despite everything , but simply because she was. He loved what she was and the way she was. Did he therefore also have to love what she called her “profession”? No, rather the manner in which she practiced it. He loved the courage with which she acknowledged it.

The simple fact that she spoke of it as her profession was beautiful, it elevated her above the despicable activity. And exactly what was so despicable about this profession? Any more than, say, that of the professional murderer — the soldier — so clearly marked by the garb known as his “dress of honor”? It was a question of perspective, of point of view. To be sure, he, Tildy, was still ready to exact blood for the slightest sign of contempt for his profession, and he hoped, in fact he was certain, that he was prepared to stand up for hers as well. He now realized that his attempt to deprive her of the decision whether to follow the other man or not was foolish and less than chivalrous, and he believed he would have had less respect for her, seen her as less than equal, had she stayed when he wanted to force her to do so. It was her profession to follow men, and thus also her duty to do so. Her honor forbade her to stay. The ferocity with which she had retracted her arm from his grip when he wanted to hold her, matched what he would have done had she attempted to keep him from performing the duty that his honor commanded. He loved her for this toughness. She was his equal.

When she returned he stood up, as was his custom before a lady. She didn’t understand, and gave him a frightened, hostile look, but once she realized he had risen out of respect, she sat down, placed her hands in her lap, assumed the same lost expression she had shown in front of the extravagant waste of the plate full of shredded orange peels, and said: “Forgive me. I won’t do it again.”