An Ermine in Czernopol (48 page)

“So we'll start without him,” said Madame Aritonovich. “All right, then, children, to your places!”

But the parents had already decided to put off the performance to another day. The way things were, it was time to get the children home as quickly as possible.

“Please,” said Madame, “consider the fact that right now is the worst possible time to be driving through the city. At least wait till after the promenade. Besides, I don't believe that anything serious is going to happen. There's no reason for …” She interrupted herself.

“What was that?” someone asked. “Those were gunshots.”

For a few seconds all of us in the festively decorated Institut d'Éducation were deathly silent. We heard the same roaring crowd that we had heard in the afternoon coming from the playing field—except now they sounded much closer, just down Iancu Topor Avenue. We heard a noise as though a handful of beans were being tossed into a bucket. After that it went quiet for a moment, and then the noise broke out again, louder and higher by a whole tone. We could now make out individual voices, very agitated, shouting.

“A salvo,” observed Uncle Sergei, gleefully.

Panic broke out among the grown-ups, though not among us children. They threw coats on top of our costumes, grabbed our clothes, and fled to the carriages.

“What you are doing is insane!” Madame Aritonovich cried out. “Don't go out onto the street right now while there's shooting going on. It's bound to be over very soon.”

“That was just a warning,” one of them countered. “If things don't calm down after that, then the shooting will really start in earnest. And we want to be home before then.”

That point of view was compelling and ultimately proved correct. Madame Aritonovich's request to spare the children the sight of the pandemonium was ignored. After all: there was property and furnishings to protect.

Our mother was inclined to stay in the institute until the worst was over. But Aunt Elvira said: “I wouldn't take the risk of waiting in a school like this. The bitterness is clearly directed toward Jews.”

Uncle Sergei also thought it would be better to return to the villa district, which would be relatively free from danger.

“I beg you, think of your husband,” Aunt Elvira added. “I refuse to be held accountable if anything happens.”

“If you do decide to go,” said Madame Aritonovich, “please take little Brill and Blanche Schlesinger and see that they get home. They're both on their own here.”

“Yes, but you have teachers from your institute at your disposal,” said Aunt Elvira. “For us it would mean taking a long detour through downtown.”

“That's true,” said Madame Aritonovich. “But we don't have a carriage. Please, do it for the sake of your children's friendship with them.”

“Of course,” said our mother. “After all, we have Sergei to pro- tect us.”

Our coachman was a long-serving, reliable man, whom we had brought from the country. “
Ach
, that's nothing” he said. “People beating on each other like at the fairgrounds, knocking out windowpanes, firing into the air to chase everyone away. We'll put up the cover so we won't catch a stone on the nose, that's all. I'll see that everyone gets home.” Uncle Sergei sat heroically next to him on the box. And in fact the noise seemed to have passed in the direction of the Volksgarten.

We made a loop through several streets that were completely deserted, and crossed Iancu Topor Avenue just before the Ringplatz. The pavement was strewn with shards of glass, but otherwise empty. At the main street, however, we ran into the commotion. Our coachman charged so fiercely into a mob of suspicious characters that a few of them barely escaped getting run over. One stone hit the cover of the carriage.

Solly Brill was fidgeting between us anxiously, as much as the cramped space allowed. “There's our shop,” he called out. “Look at what they're doing, the pigs!”

Some of the rabble was in the process of systematically demolishing the Brills' store. The roller-shutters were torn off, the windows shattered. A few men had crawled into the display window and were tossing the wares to the others outside.

“Look at the robbers!” Solly cried. He jumped up and clambered onto Aunt Elvira's lap, stuck his head out the window, and shouted, full of tears: “Why does it always have to be us! Aren't there any other Jews?”

He was pulled in as quickly as possible.

But then we saw something that made us shout with jubilation.

From the darkness of the chestnut trees in front of the provincial government offices, a troop emerged and fell upon the plundering mob like a flock of avenging angels. They were muscular young men dressed in white linen pants covered with flour; their shirts were open, and their heads were covered with little visorless felt caps—apprentices from the numerous kosher bakeries. Swinging their long wooden peels like double-edged swords, they mowed their way through the streets like threshers.

And leading them into battle was a Jewish Mars, a stout god of war, powerful and glorious in his ecstatic rage, his fat face flushed red like David when he became a man, his black eyes flashing behind the high cushions of his cheeks, his mustache bristling furiously over his scarlet lips, and a greasy wreath of black ringlets on his neck:

It was Dr. Salzmann in his hour of greatness.

We turned away toward Theaterplatz. Around the synagogue we could see the glow of fire. Evidently a real battle was under way there. Soldiers with fixed bayonets were running diagonally across the plaza as if attacking.

Our coachman drove calmly ahead in a quick, steady trot, then turned onto a side street that led onto a somewhat elevated lot where circuses set up their tents, but which now was empty. Just before the small rise, the coachman brought the horses to a gallop and had them take the embankment in three bounds. We were shaken through and through, but soon the carriage was again rolling smoothly on the hard-packed ground. The shortcut was cleverly chosen, since it allowed us to avoid the streets that might be jammed with soldiers, and we approached the Brills' house from the rear.

Uncle Sergei leaped from the box and helped Solly out. “Don't worry about me,” Solly said. “Just keep driving. I'll make it home on my own.”

But my mother insisted that we wait for him. We stood parked for a few minutes in the shade of the bare firewalls that stood around the garbage bins. Then Uncle Sergei came back.

Solly's mother and sister weren't yet home. “The father cried when he hugged his son. You are a saint,
ma chère cousine
.”

We drove back across the empty circus grounds. Blanche was sitting between Tanya and me. It was the first time that I had been so close to her and could feel her body against my own. Tanya and I had our fingers clasped over one of her hands. The sky above the empty lot was dark—outlined only in the background by the lanterns along Wassergasse. Blanche raised her other hand, laid it around my cheek, and pulled my head to hers. I felt her thick, hard, curly hair; our cheeks touched just briefly, then she withdrew her hand.

I was overwhelmed by the sweetness of this chaste, almost holy touch. All the bottled emotions of my dreams suddenly seemed like pale shadows of an almost painful irreality—although this, too, was only a dream, as it happened so unforeseen and passed so quickly and so irretrievably.

At the embankment the coachman held the horses back: we eased down the incline at a walk, but then resumed our former speed. At that point a man ran diagonally across the street, and we heard two or three shots ring out behind him: the man flung up his arms, stood for a moment like a black cross, then staggered ahead, stumbled, and collapsed on his face, and the wheels of our carriage rolled a hairsbreadth away from his legs, which were still twitching. Tanya cried out. I could feel Blanche trembling. But the coachman kept the horses at a constant steady trot.

We drove up to the Herz-Jesu Church, whose stone towers jutted hypocritically into the violet sky. Outside the nearby police headquarters we saw helmets gleaming under the bright light of the arc lamps that formed a whitish bell as it illuminated the forecourt, where an officer was shouting commands.

Blanche and her father lived in a building behind the Ukrainian high school. Blanche jumped up as soon as we turned onto the short street. The apartments were all fronted by narrow, fenced-in garden beds. Only one of the buildings—the one where Blanche and her father lived—appeared to have been vandalized, but thoroughly: even the cast-iron fence had been torn out of its base, the pieces scattered on the street like giant waffles. Both windows on the second story had been shattered; bed linens were hanging out of one, and a ruined chair was caught in a shrub in front of the other. All manner of household goods lay strewn about—mostly books. At one place they were piled into a heap that had been set on fire, before other people had doused it with water that was now running into a black puddle. A group of men stood facing the devastation; one of them was wearing a tattered coat and a torn shirt and his face was bleeding.

“Father!” cried Blanche. She had jumped out of the carriage even before it could come to a stop, and threw herself in his arms. Dr. Schlesinger had a gaping wound above his temple, with a moist handkerchief pressed against it. His eyes were bruised and practically closed shut; one corner of his mouth was torn; even his hands were hurt and bloody—he could barely move them.

“My child!” he said. “How good that you're here. I was just about to go looking for you. Now everything is all right. There, there, it's all over. We'll put things back to order.”

One of the neighbors standing by stuck his head in our carriage. “One is ashamed to live in a world like this,” he said. “They beat him half to death and threatened to hang him. If we weren't so close to the police station they might have done it, too. But the police are content just to look on, or even take part if possible.”

Dr. Schlesinger came to our carriage. “Thank you for bringing my daughter home safely,” he said.

“You're wounded,” said our mother. “You and Blanche should come to our home and spend the night. The child can't be left in this devastation. And you need looking after.”

“Thank you,
gnädige Frau
, we have kind neighbors that have offered to take us in. I'm sure you'll understand that I first want to put things back in order as much as possible. Some scientific works that mean a lot to me have been destroyed. You are very kind, and I thank you.”

“But you are clearly the person they are targeting. The violence isn't over yet. You may still be in danger.”

“I'm sure I'm not,
gnädige Frau.
They did what they set out to do. Now it's all over. We'll be putting things back in order now.” He stroked Blanche's head. “Once again, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

Blanche broke away from him to come to us, but then turned around and ran into the damaged building.

Dr. Schlesinger nodded to our mother. “You should take your children home,
gnädige Frau.
As you see, I have help. Blanche and I are not alone.”

“And I know every single one of them,” one woman said. “I can name each one by name. They should be publicly whipped, the lot of them.”

Dr. Schlesinger smiled, resigned. Our mother signaled the coachman to drive on.

Our street was empty: nothing had happened here; the whole commotion had passed by almost unnoticed. We were given a cup of tea with a good dose of rum and sent straight to bed. Uncle Sergei came to our room to wish us good night.

“Was he dead, the man they shot?” we asked.

“What man, my hearts?”

“The one who fell next to our carriage.”

“No, never. He just stumbled. I saw how he got up and happily went on running.”

“That's not true, Uncle Sergei, you're lying to us.”

Uncle Sergei was quiet for a moment. “Would you rather believe the alternative?”

We didn't know what to answer. No and yes.

“Does it hurt when a person gets shot to death?” we asked.

“Not a bit. You don't feel any more than when you get thwacked with the finger—
tuk
—and it's all over. It's no fun at all to shoot someone dead.”

“The children should go to sleep now,” our mother said. “We'll be right nearby and will leave all the doors open.”

Behind the gardens outside our windows, the darkness was rocking the treetops in the Volksgarten. The song of the nightingales rose from there and echoed off the walls of the night. Apart from that, there was no sound.

The next morning we were running a fever and stayed in bed. Toward evening Tanya had a big reddish patch on her forehead and cheeks. The doctor was called. He diagnosed scarlet fever.

“No wonder, in that Jew school,” our father said, who had just returned from his hunting trip and had yet to hear what had transpired.

H
ONEY
-golden like a pastoral goddess, Frau Lyubanarov stood at the garden gate, against the saffron and sandalwood tones of the autumn foliage, a life-mystery pulsing with warm-blooded corporeality, encased in her skin, breathing, peering, profoundly alive amidst a barren splendor, vast and translucent, woven of light and air and color, in which those earthiest of birds, the crows, gathered in flocks as if plowed up from the fields, cawing their gray, brittle, crumbly cries. She stood there in the perfected glory of the fruit, the late sunlight falling through the thinned-out leaves, glazing her face with the thinnest coat of pure gold before drowning in the warm amber of her skin, as though the fires of an ancient sun were raining onto the surface of a pond that lay concealed within a reedy secret beneath some oaks. Her thick black hair curled into a firm wreath above her topaz goat-eyes, her pale, full lips peaked at the corners into a smile full of sweet enticement, and melted into a delicate, sharp clarity like the tone of a flute—that's how she stood there, while the chestnuts came drumming down from the trees, their prickly, ball-shaped hulls bursting apart to release the shiny kernels, which rolled in front of her feet like a cornucopia of peasant offerings: the bright, tenderly yellowing leek-green husks, wrapped around a whitish membrane tinged with shades of violet, like fresh sheep's cheese swathed in a burdock leaf; the eye-catching brown of the tough kernel, sharp with tannins, with a luster rich as old beeswax that refracted the ruby hues of congealing lamb kidneys into a warm and sparkling rusty red, exerting a tangy, satisfying attraction like the smell of woodsmoke; and the bright, pinkish mushroom-and-shell colored blemishes on her skin—a shellfish in the rainbow opalescence of unspoiled purity, with all the slothfulness of the autumn encapsulated in its pearl.