An Ermine in Czernopol (2 page)

3.

Speaking of Major Tildy, Prefect Tarangolian relates: “He himself supposedly said he knows only two types of response: the
witty
one and the
just
one.” The prefect's clever turn of phrase may also be applied to Rezzori's writing. He didn't intend his work to be “just,” in other words clear and well-balanced, with no fluctuation in quality; he wanted his writing to be “witty”—erratic, unpredictable, enjoyable, and shimmering. He wanted to live well and make money, act in films, travel the world, be a friend of the rich and famous and a great writer on top of that. In all of this he succeeded, and because he cared so little for the just response and so much for the witty solution to things, he personified the trickster, the capricious conjurer, able to mix low vernacular and high tone like few others. Like all good novels,
An Ermine in Czernopol
is also a portrait of its maker: mischievous and fun, wise and unjust, impossible to reduce to a single formula, extraordinarily intelligent, and marked with a humor that reaches deeply into the darkness of things.

—D
ANIEL KEHLMANN
Translated by Philip Boehm

W
ITH
An Ermine in Czernopol
, Gregor von Rezzori conjures a world we cannot inhabit except in fiction. The once-upon-a-time city of Czernowitz becomes the invented city of Czernopol. The voices in the book are real, though the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Nowhere but Czernopol could such a story take place. And no one but Rezzori could call this city to life, with its variety and mix of languages, its range of characters, its register of voices … And he does this with words. Words that tug and stretch at the German language, playfully, mockingly. Words that must find a new home in English.

Nor is that the only challenge facing the translator. Rezzori's prowess as a raconteur hardly eclipses the depth of his philosophical inquiry or the breadth of his erudition, and the text contains layers of style and levels of thought that go beyond the recounting of personal experience, ranging from journalistic reporting on social movements to Proustian ruminations on memory—all tinged with melancholy—not only for the passing of childhood but for the loss of all that ended with the Second World War.

In the translation I have made certain stylistic choices to help bring readers into the world of the novel without burdening them with too much “foreignness.” Spellings of names and places that were “Germanized” in the original appear here in their proper Romanian (or other) form. Passages cited in another language are translated in the text or, in very few instances, with a footnote.

Many people have helped see this project through. I am particularly grateful to Beatrice Monte della Corte for her generosity at Santa Maddalena, where I had access to the author's handwritten corrections to the novel (Rezzori frequently edited and emended texts long after their publication). For their careful editing I would like to thank Edward Cohen, Edwin Frank, Sara Kramer, and Helen Graves. Special thanks to Joana Ocros-Ritter for her keen ear and careful reading across so many languages. As always, I am especially grateful to my family for their encouragement and ongoing forbearance. For any and all lapses I can only hope that they, as well as the readers, show the same leniency as the citizens of Czernopol, where “lowliness was never a fault.”

—P
HILIP BOEHM

T
HERE
are other realities besides and beyond our own, which is the only one we know, and therefore the only one we think exists.

A man staggers out of the howling recesses of some seedy dive into the uncertain gray of dawn.

His movements reveal the combination of bold daring and practiced confidence that mark a habitual drinker—the deadly serious parody of a clown.

His face is the crater field of some lost satellite.

His senses are seething with impulses: the din of the tavern, philological disputes, pride, humiliation, love, quotations, dirty jokes, hate, loneliness, faith, purity, despair—

He doesn't know his way home.

So he sleepwalks to the next intersection, where the tram tracks cross the street—two dully glistening snakes.

Keeping his head aloft as though he were blind, he taps and tests the ground with his cane, then he pokes it into one of the rail grooves, and lets himself be led as if tethered to a pole.

The tip of his cane sails through the groove, raising a bow wave of moldy leaves and trash, gravel, dirt and muck; his shoes splash through puddles, wrench his ankle on the uneven cobblestones, trip over track ties, churn through gravel, dig through dust. The fog slaps his face like wet cotton wool. Wind tears at the strands of hair that dangle onto his forehead from below the edge of his hat; dew settles on his lips, giving them a salty taste, and collects in tickling drops inside the two creases on either side of his mouth: his pulpy, oily cheeks do not absorb the moisture. He mumbles to himself, occasionally blurts something out loud, launches into a song, interrupts himself, laughs, goes

silent, resumes his mumbling. His eyes are wide open and fixed unblinkingly ahead, like those of a blind man, like those of the gods.

In this manner he travels from one end of the city to the other.

The city lies somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe and is called Czernopol.

He knows nothing of its reality:

He doesn't perceive its awakening, doesn't notice the hanging pearls of the arc lamps, garish against the pallid sky, as they expire with a crackling hiss, or the spaces that come looming up around the buildings on both sides of the street, hoisting the city out of the darkness and into the morning; he doesn't see the waxy bright rectangles of lighted windows as they emerge randomly amid the interlocking jumble of boxes—one here, one there, one over yonder. He doesn't see the Jewish bakers rolling their wagons out of the dark side streets, doesn't smell the heavy, hot aroma of freshly baked bread, doesn't hear the rattle of the farmers' carts wending toward the market, one by one, or the clatter of their small, emaciated horses, poked and prodded down the long melancholy roads from the flatland far away. He is as oblivious to the laughter of the passing late-night revelers as he is to the brutish barking of the policeman who fails to recognize him—a new, and obviously uninitiated, recruit. He knows nothing of the shadowy figures breaking out of the black caves of the building entranceways, wandering the streets toward unknown destinations, nothing of the sulfurous sky rising over the treetops in the Volksgarten, like Heaven on the Day of Judgment, and nothing, too, of the discordant screech of the first streetcar as it leaves the loop to join “the line,” and which is heading straight in his direction—

All anyone ever does is head toward death.

And so he fails to hear the plaintive, wistful call of the trains in the distance as they depart the city of Czernopol one by one and race off into the forlorn countryside, toward a separate, sovereign reality—lonely and lost and full of yearning.

For each is lost in a solitude all his own—people as well as cities.

I
F YOU
were to ask me to explain in no more words than I have fingers on one hand what elevated Czernopol above other cities of the earth, I would have to say: Lowliness was never a fault.

After all, there were rich people and there were poor people, just like everywhere else. And the rich were neither richer nor grander nor more hard-hearted than elsewhere. But the poor inhabited a poverty that you, happy child of socially hygienic circumstances, cannot possibly imagine. There were beggars in Czernopol—swarms of beggars—with pustules and abscesses in colors that would have astounded even Matthias Grünewald, men whose mutilations and malformations would have caused Hieronymus Bosch to question his own sanity, and they appeared, as I said, en masse, or, to put it more precisely, in hordes that crept and crawled, slithered and slid right beside you, so as to encircle you, cling to you, clamber on top of you—as if to drag you down to their lowly level, encrusted with filth and swarming with lice, as though you had stepped on one of their nests and stirred up the entire colony. Hardly a pleasant sight, to be sure. But not a single soul in Czernopol felt moved to undertake any action, as common parlance significantly puts it, either for or against—and the two are hard to separate.

No, on the contrary, if we had been deprived of this daily spectacle we would undoubtedly have sensed that something was missing. In some medieval way it belonged to our picture of the world, a world in which God was assigned not only—I'm tempted to say
not merely
—the role of gentle Creator. So for us it went without saying that whoever wasn't quick enough to avoid being accosted in the first place would strike back and kick away without mercy at the festering stumps and the torsos ridden with painful lesions; in any case this was a far more customary reaction than presuming to implement some sweeping welfare program in the name of humanitarianism, or just plain humanity. In Czernopol, aesthetic considerations were lowest on the list.

You will be tempted to call that cynical, and I have no intention of contradicting you. I could of course counter that Czernopol, like everywhere else, had its share of bad people, and I'm quite sure there were good people as well. In all probability the bad ones were not much more wicked or depraved than anywhere else; as for the good people, they may have once included in their midst someone as pure as a saint—what am I saying!—an angel. But I never heard of any angels in Czernopol, except perhaps for Herr Perko, he who was called “the angel of the emigrants,” and where Herr Perko is concerned, I'd rather you judge for yourself, later on. Of course there were also the common souls, who were neither good nor evil but simply lowly—there were plenty of those, whole swarms and colonies. Yet you can probably no more imagine their lowliness than you can envision the godforsaken misery of the poor. To continue: Nor was it customary to kiss these beggars on the forehead in blessing, as Dostoyevsky envisioned, or to bow down before them, as if their extreme lowliness were a sign of their being chosen. Oh no. One simply kicked their shins, or their vastly more sensitive body parts, whenever the opportunity presented itself—but at least one spared their
face
, and that, please understand me correctly, meant they were free within their lowliness. Naturally they didn't feel particularly elevated, but at least they had no cause to stoop any lower. They were the way they were, but they were that way without blame or fault.

I realize that all this likely infringes on your good taste. But once again: taste was not a consideration in Czernopol. Those who struggled to maintain fictions of that sort were at best viewed with the ironic bemusement reserved for the bizarre, and stared at like some outlandish foreigner. More often they were shrugged off as being out of touch with reality, dismissed as extravagantly eccentric, or left as easy marks for the local wits and wags, who always found listeners eager to laugh. Meanwhile, the poor souls truly born with such a discriminating personality simply perished, without fanfare or flourish: they didn't even have the laughers on their side.

And that's saying something. Because if I had to name a second distinguishing feature about Czernopol, it would be its humor, or, more precisely, its laughter. Because laughter was everywhere, part of the air we breathed, a crackling tension in the atmosphere, always ready to erupt in showers of sparks, or to discharge itself in great thunderous peals. Its full range of nuance and timbre and tone lies somewhere beyond description. In this regard, at least, the city was quite cultured, although the culture was a very specific one, for laughter in Czernopol had been elevated to an art form, a folk art of unparalleled authenticity, stemming from a broad tradition, and widely cultivated to a degree of finesse, sophistication, and extraordinary piquancy—an art form understood and appreciated by all, drawing as it did from everyday life, and well endowed with the most vivid references, not to mention all manner of innuendoes. Nowhere but Czernopol could you find such an infallible sense of style, which could take a single laugh emitted in a large throng—a small group, a quartet, a trio, or a duet—and develop it into an elaborate interplay of voice and chorus, like Gregorian chant, and which resonated with the architecture until finally reaching its conclusion.

Just so there's no misunderstanding: I'm not talking about catharsis or some other purifying process. It's true that, every now and then, somewhere in Czernopol you might hear a simpleminded side-splitting guffaw, and then you would incline your ears to listen—after all, as I said, laughter was truly an art, so it was only natural that it should wind up both its own object and its own proximate cause. And for us there was nothing more laughable than those laughers whose hearty booming aspired to liberation. We had countless ways of laughing, but nothing of that sort. We laughed skillfully, artistically, indecently—but without the faintest intent of finding relief for, or release from, our compulsion. As a result, our laughter defied the words most often used to denote its various shadings—we did not roar, bellow, whinny, bleat, or blat, but rather performed a kind of smirk or sneer for which our language has, sadly, no expression (just as it has no way to convey true
human
laughter, for which it mistakenly borrows terms from zoology instead): a quick exhale dispatched through the nose, with scarcely sound or grimace. Because while Czernopol may not have been a good or beautiful city, it was, without doubt, an extraordinarily intelligent one.

This should not be construed to mean we had lost all vestige of loftier transcendence, however. It's well known that some types of silliness can verge on the sublime: short-circuited connections that spark back and forth for ages without producing any perceptible phenomena—except for the sharp trace of ozone they leave in the air. A rabbi joke, to take one example, or some top-rate prank, might strike us as inspirational, even uplifting.