An Ermine in Czernopol (49 page)

I gave her names such as
Mother of Corn—
because of the glory of her shoulders and breasts, or
Stallioness—
because she struck me as the mythic mate of that sinewy steed the hussar had ridden, or else
Thetis
or
Nereid
—on account of the gritty curliness of her hair, which contained the churning swish of waves. But the most beautiful, the most divine of all her names was the one bestowed on her by Herr Adamowski:
magnificently shameless
…

I eyed her through the window, yearned to go out to her—all the while secretly conspiring with my fate, grateful that the wall of glass panes separated me from her and cut me off from the reality outside, which I would have lost had I ventured out—just as every reality is lost as soon as we enter with a mind to act: just like the air in which we breathe is not visible to us. In my room I was fully transported, and also removed from her, therefore fully gifted with her presence: the window of my room was set before the transparency of the bright October day like the facet of a prism, refracting its image into a spectrum without disowning its structure; it focused my visions into a perspective whose vanishing point was the woman at the garden gate—a sparkling equilibrium of correspondences, which showered me with riches, weightless like the joy of forgetting oneself while dancing.

I took this being separated from the world by a glass pane as a kind of pictorial correspondence—a reflection of the transported condition my sickness had left me in. It happened that I was sick longer than my siblings, and my case was more threatening: the scarlet fever led to a completely abnormal case of pneumonia and pleurisy that kept me laid up for weeks with aches and fever while the summer simply passed by.

And it was only reluctantly that I recovered: I had no intent or desire to return to the loud, crude, and tumultuous world of the healthy, with their ruddy cheeks, where one robust thing alters another, and connections of a base nature cheapen the worth of everything. That world possessed nothing of the floating interchangeability of all that is perceived, a quality I had learned to love, thanks to the fever and the exhaustion, like a delicate intoxication. As the care and attention I was being shown began to taper off, I responded with a kind of charitable scorn, which I wielded like a dagger, either turning the point inward toward myself or out and away—at least for as long as I was visibly sick. As I recovered, I could feel how I was being cheapened, how my senses—which my ailment had honed to a fine, excitable edge—were again getting sucked into the undertow of a life that struck me as full of fake cheer, that seemed artificially packed with pointless actions and gestures, and overflowing with wholesome precepts—all aimed at deliberate deception. And the harder people worked to peddle this concept of worthy
life
, the more they aroused my suspicion, just as if they were hawking one of the Dobrowolskis' more dubious goods. Consequently, while I hated the dishes that were designed to make me stronger, and which with every meal were meatier, spicier—more masculine, so to speak—what disgusted me even more was the fact that my appetite for them was growing. And as much as I despised the eager voices full of anticipation, and modulated to cheer me up, as if wanting to transfer their own impatience onto me—“Just a few more days, then you'll be able to go out and get some fresh air and play with the others. I'll bet you can't wait, can you?”—I detested the excitement that I felt against my will, and which was all too closely related to that uncouth cheerfulness.

I had the feeling as though now were the time for me to leave my childhood once and for all. Because what was expected of me, this ideal of “being healthy and taking part in all of life's joys and duties,” meant renouncing the earnestness I had developed in the great unconscious tension of my unmediated confrontation with the world. It meant exchanging the inscrutable autocratic splendor that accompanied each new thing as it
entered
that world for a routine interaction with the all-too-familiar, where things were ascribed functions merely as needed—thereby
manufacturing
a world that was falsely acted, instead of
experiencing
a world full of mysterious play.

Not that the reservoir of things to be experienced seemed depleted. Had that been the case, I would have had no cause to lament any loss: I was sensing that my own ability to experience things was diminishing as I recovered. There was clearly a limit—not of the wonders that surrounded me, but of my strength to perceive them, as if my soul, which had once again been exiled to my body, possessed only a limited facility to comprehend, an unalterable capacity that could contain a finite quantity of basic images and not a single more.

Hesitantly, then, and with an anticipatory sadness, since I was growing out of my childhood anyway and registering the renunciations that this entailed, I took leave of my sickroom, within whose walls everything had been calibrated to my sickness, with gentle consideration and tender care, and which was filled with the echoes of heightened perceptions that had grown in time and space, and which I had savored to the fullest, just like my aches and pains. For years I wasn't able to pick up a book or look at a picture that I had studied then without feeling the vague stimulus of a deeper recognition, an impact that strikes the core of our being, the sense of déjà vu mingled with nostalgia that comes when we reencounter motifs from our childhood and we regret having lost the power to experience the world in a way that brought us closer to the essence of things. Because we never again experience the world with the same thoroughness as in the stillness that fills us when we are completely alone and close to not-being, the tranquility that is either the echo of the not-yet-being that precedes our birth, or of the no-longer-being that follows death. The other states of rapture we encounter—love and intoxication—merely borrow this proximity to not-being, and are therefore merely reflection and illusion. They do not entirely come from us, do not spring out of that same enigmatic element from which our life arises, and into which it ultimately descends. Neither love nor drugged exhilaration can be attained without assistance: they require other means to transport us and connect us to their qualities. Only the most lethal narcotics or the most feminine—that is to say, the most changeable—woman are able to temporarily create the illusion of the truly lived life, owing to their deadly effects. And the despair into which they plunge us is the voice of our innermost conscience, which opens our eyes to our illusion and reveals the underlying fact
that we turn to surrogates to still our true desire—the desire to be extinguished.

In the autumn air, the morning frost was sharp, pungent—like a mild odor of fire and mold. I went out into the garden and joined my siblings. I felt estranged, no longer able to follow their games. What's more, they had acquired new friends—or rather reacquired old ones: the two Lyubanarov daughters had come home, shy and a little feral after their long stay in the country, where they had acquired the exaggerated and somewhat clumsy manners of a God-fearing household, amid the black-bearded and unctuous patriarchy of their clergymen kin. They even smelled like church candles, like the spice cakes laced with icing and adorned with almonds, and the aromatic brandies of baptismal celebrations and wakes; their hair still contained the shady cool of the untended corner of the parish garden where the blue glint of jays with their rosewood breasts squawked away. They were suntanned and hardened and wore sleeveless summer dresses, and I felt mollycoddled and awkwardly dandyish in my scarf and coat, like a scholarly bookworm confronted by peasant beauties.

Looking through the lance-leaf fence, which once again appeared indisputably slender and erect against the trembling gold of the leaves on the bushes, we saw the prefect's shiny black coach approach, the gleaming brass and polished lantern panes like heraldic emblems, towed behind a whirlwind of red spokes and horses' legs blurred in movement. The carriage stopped at our gate. The batman jumped off the box; the martial eagle on his heavily polished spiked helmet gleamed above the silver buckles of the chinstrap, and Herr Tarangolian leaned heavily on his shoulder to climb out of the carriage. Then he stepped into the garden with the mincing gait of a bon vivant, a red carnation flaming in his buttonhole. Without turning his head he walked past Frau Lyubanarov, who was leaning against the wall of the
dvornik
's hut, giving her a restrained greeting by placing three fingers of his gloved right hand to the brim of his stiff hat and barely lifting it. His heavy eyes, however, rolled out past the twirled ends of his mustache in a meaningful sidelong glance and sank inside the depths of her topaz gaze. She leaned her head back and smiled, without changing her overall expression—except for a barely perceptible narrowing of her eyes, and a tiny upward tilt to the corners of her mouth. But her shoulders and breasts smiled from under the hem of her colorful embroidered blouse; her crossed arms smiled as if they wanted to open up to receive a guest; and the curve of her full hips smiled with provocative irony. The prefect's bon vivant gait seemed to pick up a mechanical whirr. His knee action—as the horse experts call it—increased, and he started to strut like a peacock. The immaculate white linen spats above his dainty shoes showed a vain display of carefully aligned buttons; his collar and cuffs were flashing; his tie was a billow of silk beneath his pompous chin. His arms, slightly angled at the elbows, rowed alongside his flanks, which seemed to shrink, so that his gloves suddenly appeared too large, as if he were shoveling the air in front of his silvery gray vest like a clown, or securing a path for his virility through a tangle of unwelcome advances. He seemed to sense how silly they looked and so he gave them something to do by twirling his ebony cane between his fingers and then rapping it against his left palm. We were expecting him to pucker his lips under his executioner's mustache and whistle a few tense, jaunty bars from under his bulbous Levantine nose, while his jaundiced eyes bulged more than usual above their heavy bags, and his pupils stayed as rigid as archers' targets.

Frau Lyubanarov glanced at him tenderly as he passed by, then focused her smile on the batman, who was following the prefect with a large bouquet of flowers, loosely wrapped in crackling tissue, along with several unwieldy packages tucked under his arms. Her goat-eyes took in his strong neck and strapping legs with appreciation. He pulled himself together like a soldier snapping to attention, turning red underneath his spiked helmet; he seemed on the verge of hot manly tears, humiliated, emasculated, and ashamed at having to perform the duties of a maid in carrying such fragile trumpery. With great effort he kept his eyes fixed dead ahead, his heavy boots stamping defiantly on the gravel.

And so they passed, one after the other, the master and his servant, dancing like marionettes on the string of a woman's smile, until they reached the house and were safely removed from the singeing gaze on their backs.

Herr Tarangolian had come to say farewell.

“Take this visit,” he said, “which may seem somewhat premature, in the spirit in which it is undertaken—namely as an expression of my inner need to thank you, and to bid you adieu before all others, and not at the last minute. I may be recalled tomorrow or a year from now—I confess that I have only been informed in confidence, albeit from a highly reliable source, that this is something I must reckon with. I don't need to tell you how painful it will be for me to take my leave of this city, and especially of you. I am being moved, as they say, up the ladder—
hélas
—and I would be lying if I were to say that weren't some solace. But believe me: it is a very weak consolation. Even if I have no desire to hide my pride at being granted a chance to serve my country in a position of greater responsibility than hitherto—perhaps yet as a minister—you realize that my heart is here, and here it will stay forever.”

He handed us his abundant gifts, and I received what I considered the most beautiful of all—the unabridged edition of
A Thousand and One Nights
, which was immediately taken into safekeeping, for when I would be “mature enough.” Herr Tarangolian was served some of his favorite walnut liqueur. He lit a cigar with delighted meticulousness, crossed his legs, and leaned back in his chair. Giving one of his black eyebrows a diabolical arch, he let his eyes wander from face to face, meeting each of our gazes and then moving on, in one quick, intelligent sweep, as if they were registering once and for all the fixed points of furniture, the corners of the room, the windows and doors, arranging them in a linear plot that would serve as an abbreviated diagram, like a stenographer's shorthand, until finally, glassed over in a kind of blank meditation, they came to rest at the glowing tip of his cigar. The smoke rose in a fine perpendicular thread, billowing into a veil-like ribbon that trembled in tender, wrinkly grooves. All of a sudden we felt the space surrounding us, the room where we had been with him so often in the commonality of the old friendship we took for granted, a powerful presence, a spatial reality we had never fully appreciated— as if it had never been real. And, strangely, this freshly produced reality imparted something peculiarly false: it was as if the curtain had risen dramatically on the last act of a play that had begun with the same set, and as if all of us—supernumeraries and principals alike—found ourselves arranged exactly as at the beginning, tasked with working out some inner drama—a highly effective director's trick that had the immediate consequence of seeming untrue. We became sentimental: in other words, we supplied an artificial melancholy with the first motivation we were able to summon. We thought about our hapless Aunt Aida, whom God knows we had missed too little hitherto: now her death acquired the significance of a practically spiteful martyrdom, and seemed to us like an irreplaceable loss that demonstrated how hopeless life had become, and how the connections between us had been torn once and for all.