An Ermine in Czernopol (10 page)

We tried to imagine Fräulein Iliuţ hunting down her sustenance in the form of deer, hares, and all manner of wildfowl, like a hunchbacked Artemis—and it didn't strike us as outlandish at all. Despite all its gentle kindness, her face had a trace of slyness, though this was trumped by her soft eyes. But the skillfulness of her hands suggested she would be very capable at setting snares and laying traps; we also believed her legs were capable of greater speed than the shape of her back suggested. So we went on listening, full of excitement.

“To put this in medical terms,” said Herr Alexianu, “you would have supplied your body with enough oxygen to truly feel well. And this applies to your mind in exactly the same way. It's not enough to simply perceive things. Now and then you have to fall into a state of rapture, of ecstasy, to force the organ of your soul to function at its highest capacity. But you also have to be capable of contemplation, of trance, of completely shutting down all mental activity. Only then will you feel yourself pulsing with the full current of those substances that place you in harmony with the world and life. But here, too, ongoing exercise is essential.”

Herr Alexianu made a small, highly effective pause, during which he raised his head and closed his lips tightly. He breathed deeply through his flared nostrils, in long harmonious breaths. We could see his jaw muscles chewing away.

“Up to now, according to Năstase,” he went on, “these mental gymnastics have been the province of the religious institutions. Religious exercises were devised to shape and form the soul: from the prayer mouthed without thinking but still fervently felt, to the raging self-flagellation of the fanatic. The saint, according to Năstase, was the soul's champion athlete, while the regular believer merely played in the neighborhood league. This formulation is compelling. If such a healthy, demystified concept as to the true nature of religious instruction were to take hold, the churches would fill up again right away. But the religions fail to achieve this. And why? Năstase believes it is because the soul has yielded to the brain its place as the central organ of life. It's not our souls: it's our brains that are in need of purification. Just try to imagine the consequences.”

Fräulein Iliuţ looked up at him with her clear gaze and an expression of soulful courage that promised she would give it her best try. The absurd growth of her hump stood around her angelic head like a halo of earthly burden.

Herr Alexianu, however, refused to be convinced and made a dismissive gesture.

“In any case, you see,” he said, not without a hint of bitter sarcasm, “that we are not simply a bunch of banal rationalists. Far from denying the irrational, we accord it its place in life. Take love, for example. Something utterly irrational. In fact, Năstase calls it the paragon of irrationality. But only in its origin. Its course can be ascertained empirically; it may be observed to follow certain natural laws. And its implementation, too, may be determined rationally. Năstase's thoughts on this subject are both persuasive and very deep. He says: theoreticians of love from all times have wasted far too much time on metaphysics. True metaphysics is to be found in what is palpably obvious. Whatever the transcendental goal of love may be, we may see that it has two completely different, or actually contradictory, objectives—one to love, and the other to be loved. Not only are those two different aims, each of which requires a special theoretical treatment and, in practice, a separate implementation—in other words, its own strategy and tactics—but they are, above all, the products of two completely different emotional states, which in turn produce other mental conditions. Imagine what a clean separation of these two opposing tendencies would do for our entire mental climate. Năstase's amazing insight is that Western civilization's underlying dilemma is rooted in the fact that these two distinct motives are constantly mingled and confused. And that, he suggests, is the fundamental difference between Christianity and heathendom.”

Once again Herr Alexianu made an artful pause, but it was impossible to tell if this one, too, was for rhetorical reasons or whether his mind was straining to grasp the full profundity of this discovery. He had taken the pointed end of the heavy sewing shears, which we were not allowed to play with—ostensibly because they belonged to Fräulein Iliuţ, but in reality because they were too dangerous for us—and was keeping time, striking the broad looped handle against his left palm, as though to prolong the swordsman-like thrust of his, or rather Herr Năstase's, pronouncements, even beyond the silence. We found him exceedingly dislikable, but the somber glow with which he so ardently conveyed the mental capers of another person won us over, as if they were bound to inspire everyone the same way they did him. Despite his ponderous pronouncements and ludicrous seriousness, which we clearly recognized, without fully understanding what he was saying, because with heads buzzing from the bewildering, Volapük-like jargon, we paid that much more attention to his facial expressions and his gestures, and these brought us much closer to the true content of his words than if we'd succeeded in following the abstruse train of thought—yes, despite this ungainliness there was something that secretly moved us, perhaps because it was something with which we could identify: the fire of unconditional admiration. But we also perceived something phony, even creepy—what Herr Tarangolian would have called
the perils of the proselyte.
Today I'd like to think that back then I figured out one of the processes that contribute to our great spiritual tragedy: namely that no thought can be effective without expending a measure of unspent energy, and as a result no thought can ever be conveyed in pristine form. Of course this happened unconsciously and completely by coincidence—in this case all because of the nickname we bestowed on Herr Alexianu—Ali. And whoever it was that came up with the moniker “son-in-law of the prophet” had, with the amazing intuition that makes children seem like geniuses, captured both the disciple-like nature of his being as well as the second-rate nature of the disciple. Even many years later, when he came up in conversation, and someone remarked that Herr Alexianu wore a halo made of iron, that was an amusing and fit metaphor—but what really stuck was that particular nickname.

“Năstase has undertaken to cleanse the Christian view of love of its heathen elements,” the son-in-law of the prophet continued. “His thesis is that Christianity has yet to be perfected. It calls itself the religion of love. But in order for this to be true in a new sense, it has to eliminate all vestiges of heathen views of love—and there are myriads of them. In their craving for political power, the Church elders wanted to reconcile the legacy of the past with the exigencies of the present, and as a result Christianity became the most complex religion around. It needs to be reformed, and this requires a resolute and unambiguous reframing. But Năstase has no intention of devoting himself to that particular task. He says that to be convincing, you have to swing the club of the plebeian. ‘The way I think, and the way I express things isn't exactly popular. So I'll leave that to you'—by which he means me, as the editor-in-chief of our journal. He himself plans to take an advisory role. A critique of Christianity will be at the top of our agenda. Imagine the daring, the audacity of such an undertaking. I'm not referring to the difficulty involved. Năstase is by no means a specialist, but he has a broad, comprehensive education, and whatever specific training he may lack is more than made up for by his mental acuity and his enormous powers of comprehension. But we will have to contend with all Christian denominations, who will close ranks against us. Because what we are espousing strikes at the root of their teachings and creeds that have turned to dogma. Religious scholars, for example, will be arguing to the point of irreconcilable hatred over Năstase's views on the Mother of God—which he sees as a figure of heathen origin representing a parthogenetically renewable capacity for love, a pagan symbol that has no place in Christianity. The latest scholarly results support our theory. It's long been known that Mary was not originally accorded the significance that the Church later bestowed on her—a fact clearly demonstrated by the Savior's utterance:
Woman, what have I to do with thee!
Archaeology has uncovered some provocative correspondences between this figure and the prehistoric mother-goddesses of the matriarchal societies around the Mediterranean, including a number of symbolic details: cross, snake, crescent moon, star diadem, lilies, the blue cape, the child cradled in arms. But as Năstase says, let's leave that type of proof to the scientific bookkeepers. He offers an alternative to this heathen view of love, with its mother-of-God worship. He takes the Christian injunction
Love thy neighbor as thyself
and gives it a new meaning, or rather, he restores its original meaning. He considers the statement inherently ironic: after all, Jesus was a rabbi. It's in keeping with the tangled Jewish tradition of thought not to state a basic principle directly as an axiom, but rather to pose it as a mental problem. The solution is usually surprisingly simple. This unexpected mental shortcut is what produces the irony, the joke. Năstase interprets the command like this:
You know that love, which helps attain happiness, is something good. Therefore create in your neighbor that which can make him equally happy; lead him to the happiness of love.
More simply put:
Do not love so much as act so that you will be loved.
”

Herr Alexianu rapped the handle of the shears hard against his left palm and closed his fingers around it so tightly that his knuckles turned white. His cheek muscles contracted and released.

“Christianity, you see—and I mean the original, unspoiled version—is essentially a male religion, as we can see in the apostle Paul's hostility toward marriage. This rejection of the feminine was not, as people assume, a product of the apocalyptic mentality of the era; it comes from a moral-aesthetic system of values that ranks
acting
above
suffering
, and therefore endorses whatever we might
do
—regardless of the motive—over what simply happens to befall us, for active doing is inevitably more character-building, more personality-strengthening, than passive receiving. Acting is masculine. But for women life is something that befalls them. Duns Scotus's
potuit, decuit, ergo fecit
, which he offered as proof for the Immaculate Conception, speaks volumes.
Her son
the Mother of God
befell
: the loftiest symbol of the feminine. Anyone inclined to doubt the biological possibility of the fact is faced with God's utmost masculinity: yes, he could do it, it was fitting, he did it. To act is divine; to suffer is earthly. What in us is divine, acts. This is our manly part. What is earthly in us, suffers. The earth is feminine.”

“So does that mean the Savior's crucifixion wasn't divine?” Fräulein IliuÅ£ dared ask.

Herr Alexianu gave a narrow smile. “I expected this objection. In fact you might say I even coaxed it out of you. The answer is obvious: No, Christ's death, his enduring of death, was not divine; that was the human fate he took upon himself. But the metaphor goes further and deeper than that. He died
out of love.
And therefore his death must also be a symbol for love. Above all, his suffering. And that is the case. Because it is true that in love, acting and suffering are transposed. He who loves, suffers love. He who is loved, produces love—and therefore acts. Christ's suffering contains a terrible warning.”

“But also an example!” Fräulein IliuÅ£ objected with a severity that seemed to be more rooted in convention than conviction.

Herr Alexianu held up his hand in a Roman gesture of dismissal. “First and foremost it is an image. An image that each can and should interpret as he will. Or would you be ready to let yourself be crucified out of love? Would you be prepared to do that?”

Fräulein Iliuţ did not answer. But it was clear that she was suf–fering.

“Understand what I am saying!” exclaimed Herr Alexianu. He was so worked up he had turned red; his sentences, which up to now he had been drumming into Fräulein IliuÅ£ with clipped precision, now became hasty and frayed, tattered like flags in the hail of fire during an assault; we watched as the swarming squads of his thoughts dissolved and regrouped, in order to take a height that had been set as their objective, at great sacrifice, while Fräulein IliuÅ£'s face also displayed a delicate, modest blush of red. “Understand what I am saying! I confess the idea sounds outrageous. But it contains the secret of salvation. To make yourself loved —to produce love, without falling into the passion, the guilt of love yourself—the loftiest form of being human—an extraordinary degree of dignity … We can even see a forerunner of this viewpoint in Plato —except that's insignificant, it doesn't matter where the idea comes from, and yet it holds the secret of Christ. It's absurd to imagine the Son of God as a sentimental loving person. He was extremely lucid. His powers of perception are so refined that he has nothing to do with the emotional drivel of the rabble. He rejected every outburst of emotion, just as he turned away his suffering mother. What he acknowledged was the love of Mary Magdalene.
For she loved much
—in her case that was completely unambiguous: she let herself be loved; she created love.
That
is the essential moral religion. To love—to love from within one's self, in order to experience the momentary happiness of being extinguished in eternity—that is the apotheosis of selfishness. To love, without asking for love requited, without hoping for love requited, according to Năstase, requires the lonely strength of the man in the wilderness. In actuality it means scorning and neglecting one's fellow man. Goethe's “
And if I love you, what's that to you!
” is utterly solipsistic. He was a self-confessed heathen. Christianity is the religion of the ideal society. As a continuation of Judaism—a tribal religion—it is the only faith that counts on its God loving back. Consider the role hope plays in Christian teachings. Their aim is for God to take us up into himself lovingly—in other words: to make us beloved in his sight, to make him love us. But that, too, should be understood metaphorically. Tenets of faith are the metaphors for the most earthly form of existence.”