An Ermine in Czernopol (12 page)

The little monument with the real propellers always held a powerful attraction for us. We constantly arranged to have Miss Rappaport walk us past it, and as a result we knew that part of the neighborhood and were able to imagine the festive goings-on that had caused such excitement in our servants' quarters.

The colonel's special day began with a processional trumpet serenade early in the morning, followed by a parade at the barracks grounds, a grand ceremony of congratulations, followed by a banquet that the city fathers and provincial delegates attended, and then there were untold other honors. The newspapers published his picture and reported on his brave and simple soldierly life. That evening the Mircea Doboş sports club—of which he was honorary president—conducted a torchlight parade, in which practically the entire national fraternity participated. All this extravagance served only to make the colonel extremely uneasy.

Turturiuk exemplified a type of soldier that even then was obsolete. He was just as famous for his coarseness and gruff good-naturedness as for his thick-headedness, which was extraordinary even by the standards of the cavalry—a bowlegged peasant whose mouth was the bravest thing about him. He kept his massive backside straight as a board, with his two overly long arms lunging forward; he had an enormous potbelly and an apoplectically red head of stubble, as well as a mustache that stuck out like a pair of buffalo horns. The elegant hussar uniform refused to fit him; it would burst at the seams at every one of his impetuous moves, and the gold-braided collar cut into his bull neck so much that it was unclear whether the purplish tint of his skull was really due to his temperament or perhaps to strangulation. He would unbutton it at the first opportunity, revealing the gray wool of his chest, which he would then scratch with his fingers to produce an audible rasping. With his saber dragging between his bowlegs, wearing neither cap nor gloves, which he constantly took off and immediately mislaid, only to demand in his smoke-ridden drill-sergeant's roar that they be found immediately, he looked like one of the Cossacks in Repin's famous picture. But he also had something of Balzac in his house dress with his fat neck, and indeed, his rough manner concealed a tender nature in need of love.

At an advanced age he had decided to marry a lady who, though she lived in the capital, came from a highly unsophisticated background—a step which made him quite sympathetic but was hardly beneficial to his career in an army that had to catch up in matters of prestige, as well as everything else.

The time of Repin's Cossacks, too, was nearing its end. In short, Colonel Turturiuk was standing on shaky legs in more than one sense, and he feared, not without reason, that the only reason for all the fuss was so that he could be sent off all the more quietly into retirement afterward.

As usual in Czernopol, this was a public secret, openly circulated by all and everyone. Of course the servants knew every detail of what was being provided, and how and where Madame Turturiuk had obtained the fancy food for the enormous cold buffet, and where the colonel had procured the wine and liquor—and they debated fiercely among themselves as to whether it was proper to borrow a neighbor's bathtub to keep the suckling pig on ice. Similarly, Herr Tarangolian would sit in people's living rooms and go over the list of invitees with malicious thoroughness, never stinting in his highly amusing explanations as to why each individual had been invited. The ball was staged on a scale that would give the city something to talk about for weeks and in the end did the colonel more harm than good by setting off a public guessing game concerning the source of funding.

As an active member of the national student fraternity Junimea as well as the Mircea Doboş sport club, Herr Alexianu had been among the invited, and, incidentally, this was the only known occasion when he made use of the socks that had been set out for him. He stayed through the entire affair from the very first minute to the very last, and didn't show up at home until two days later, whereupon with head still throbbing he managed a hasty hour or two of lessons before repairing to Fräulein Iliuţ's sewing room, where he delivered a detailed account of the evening.

In this way we learned more about the events that had already been rumored through the house and which had sparked our curiosity all the more because any questions were dismissed with a sentence or two.

Nor could Herr Alexianu resist whetting our curiosity to the point of torture; without paying the slightest attention to us, he turned to Fräulein Iliuţ and gave a colorful description of the ball, from the arrival of the guests to the high point of the evening, which, according to him, occurred after the military band—which played smartly enough, if a bit too briskly—was replaced by a group of Gypsies led by Gyorgyovich Ianku, who was quite famous in Czernopol at the time, and the more stilted members of the company had left. Only then, according to Herr Alexianu—in other words, only once the younger guests had won the upper hand and were able set the tone—did the fraternal and familiar atmosphere come to life such as the colonel had had in mind from the beginning. The older company lingered in the rooms on the ground floor, with the still-impressive remnants of the cold buffet. In the meantime the younger and more enterprising guests moved upstairs, where they could go on dancing, if they so desired, or spread out comfortably on the sofas to listen to the Gypsy violins in the muted light of the stained-glass lamps.

Perhaps it was on account of his headache that Herr Alexianu's report failed to show off his usual stolid gymnastic determination, and was instead tinged with something brooding, unresolved, and even agonizing. For us, however, his depiction was so powerful we never forgot it. Summoning the atmosphere of those advanced hours, when the festive lights shifted into a mystical glow, he managed to conjure the night as it rushed along, with all its tender and awkward moments stirring amid the commotion, how the surfeit of light and color blended into a golden undulating fog in the blinded eyes of the partygoers, occasionally pierced by the musical rhythms slipping in and out of perception—when the overwrought and sensitized nerves take up a life of their own within the twirling bodies, a life that proceeds like a strange and deep conversation on a skittering vehicle, remote and yet unmistakably clear, when finally, as Herr Alexianu quoted Năstase, “man in his most advanced state returns to his cave, where he transforms the horrors of the world into religion”—in other words, when the hour of drunken melancholy sets in, in which loneliness, the inner cage from which there is no escape, “turns into desire and torment and consolation …”

Herr Alexianu even allowed himself to be carried away enough to describe the Gypsy fiddlers, “whose music weeps even when it's joyful.” To relieve his headache, Fräulein IliuÅ£ had persuaded him to place a moist cloth on his forehead, so that his fanatical gymnast's eyes stared out like the feverish gaze of a wounded soldier in the field hospital.

During this phase of the festivities, he went on, Major Tildy could be seen examining a picture hanging between two tapestries, with his uniquely unmoved and arrogantly expressionless manner—what might be called his “English” face—while Năstase and his friends were sitting with a few ladies on the sofas. The picture in question was the kind of enlarged photograph they sell at fairs, with an artificial background; it showed a peasant couple in traditional dress in front of a well, framed in unfinished birch twigs that overlapped at the four corners.

People were dancing in the next room. Gyorgyovich Ianku's curly black head was visible through the open double doors, snuggled against his polished, chestnut-colored violin, rocking back and forth, utterly abandoned to the rhythmic swaying of a tango. The cimbalom player, who had a bean-sized purple-brown growth hanging from his lower lip, watched the tender intertwining of the dancing couples with olive eyes sticky with melancholy as his felted mallets raced over the strings, hammering out bewilderingly fast cascades of melody. Everyone had yielded to the magic of the very popular tango, and joined in on the refrain—“when the streetlights start to glow / and the evening shadows fall”—and consequently Tildy's aloof manner, the unseemly attention he was devoting to the family picture, seemed conspicuous and somewhat offensive.

Colonel Turturiuk, a supremely cordial host who constantly encouraged his guests to eat and drink by setting an excellent example, himself noticed Tildy's rigid and much too prolonged examination of the picture. With the tip of a napkin stuck in the opening of his full-dress uniform tunic, long since comfortably unbuttoned, carrying a full glass in his left hand and swinging a partially gnawed turkey leg in his right, he approached Tildy and addressed him, as Herr Alexianu reported, with a moving mix of good-natured annoyance and gruff reconciliation—“that kindness of character,” according to Herr Alexianu, “which blithely and directly dismantles the barriers of mendacious convention that serve to divide people, which is proof that our nation is truly still a child, and an expression of its admirably unspoiled character.”

I will recapitulate the small scene as related by Herr Alexianu, eyes fixed, the damp cloth clinging to his forehead, his face showing an occasional twitch of pain.

Colonel Turturiuk (approaching Tildy, raising the turkey leg above his shoulder to point at the picture): “So, you're getting a close look, eh, Tildy? Getting a good look, Niculaie, my son. But do you know what you're looking at? No, you don't. You don't know who those two people are up there. Shall I tell you? Do I, your colonel—do I, Mitică Turturiuk, dare tell you who they are?”

Tildy collected himself, very correctly and properly, in his unique, provocatively expressionless manner—his “English” face—displaying a nonchalant polish that according to Herr Alexianu would have been considered ironic coming from anyone else, but from Tildy, who was known for being incapable of irony, could only be taken as an attitude of supreme arrogance. Meanwhile the colonel continued, raising his voice:

“I want to tell you who these are, these two peasants, by the devil and all his relations with his mother. Because I am proud of them, you understand. Understand what I am telling you, Major: these are my parents, my father and my mother, legitimately joined before God by the Orthodox priest, exactly nine months before my birth. Yes sir. Not one day too early and not one hour later …”

Here the colonel paused briefly—Herr Alexianu couldn't say whether it was to reflect on the somewhat confusing time relationship, which the colonel might have expressed more precisely, or to ensure that his words had the proper effect. In any event Turturiuk immediately continued:

“Yes sir! Both parents. Father and mother of a soldier, by all the whore's churchbells. You understand, Major? Father and mother of your comrade and superior. Your colonel and your commandant. Do you understand what that means, Niculaie Tildy?”

The colonel was merely trying to dismantle the barriers that exist between people—it was a salt-of-the-earth attempt, candid and direct, but Tildy found no other way to react, according to Herr Alexi–anu, than to click his heels together so that his spurs gave a slight clink, ostensibly as a sign of polite respect, but one that showed the same provocatively dismissive mastery-of-military form for which he was all too well known … According to Herr Alexianu and the accounts of all those who had the opportunity to witness this scene, Tildy's gesture—at that precise moment and in that precise context—seemed cold to the point of confrontational, and caused the colonel to stop for a few seconds and stare at Tildy, shaking his head and wagging the turkey leg in disapprobation.

Turturiuk: “No, Tildy. No, you son of boyars. That's not the way to do things, understand? Not that way, Major! I ask you: Do you know who these people are up there? And I answer you: Those are my parents, in the name of the holy whorey Trinity, yes sir, my parents, the parents of Colonel Mitică Turturiuk—these two boorish peasants who couldn't read or write, photographed on the fairgrounds for three hard-earned kreuzers. But they were real people, you understand? Real people with real hearts. You aren't a real person, Major. You are a good officer, and a fair man. You wouldn't be capable of hitting a recruit. There's no other squadron like yours. But you're not a real human being. What are you, anyway? A Hungarian? I shit on the Hungarians—we're not afraid of them. Or are you a Russian? I shit on the Russians, too. Or what, then? You're a German. Or are you a human being? Tell me yourself, Niculaie—are you human? If you are, then take this glass here and drink! Drink to my parents. To these two simple peasants, the parents of your superior comrade, Colonel Mitică Turturiuk.” The colonel's head, already deeply flushed, now turned a shade of purple. “To the parents of all your comrades. The parents of this country, which you have the honor of serving, with your arms and with your blood. Drink!”

With that the colonel held his glass out to Major Tildy, while his right hand held the turkey leg aloft like a club.

What followed, according to Herr Alexianu, caused the witnesses of this encounter great dismay, or even disgust, and provided proof after the fact for the legitimacy of the indescribable inner aversion people had always felt for Tildy. Because, as Năstase put it: “Coldness of heart needs to be paired with character. Then it becomes a form of being that deserves acknowledgment, a biologically correct attitude—nature is cruel—in accord with the basic precept of intelligence in dealing with one's fellow human beings: the respect we receive only grows to the degree we show disrespect for others. Coldness of heart without character, however—in other words coldness of heart that is kept within certain bounds and is coupled with sentimentality and timidity in the face of conventional institutions and ideas, grand phrases and melodramatic situations—that is nothing more than being German.”

In any event Tildy, without a moment's hesitation, grabbed the glass and, standing to attention, with eyes so fixed on the photograph he failed to notice the smear marks from Turturiuk's lips, drained it in one stroke.