Read Online An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori - Free Book Online

moods, in constantly changing configurations. Perhaps our soul is capable of little more than tracing the secret essence of these basic motifs through everything it encounters.
    As I mentioned, we soon knew our hussar’s name, that he was Nikolaus Tildy, and that he was an officer in one of the cavalry regiments that had moved into the old, former Austrian cavalry barracks on the other side of the Volksgarten, following the occupation of our homeland. We were further delighted to learn that he lived nearby. Now and then we saw his orderly leading a horse into the barracks. We didn’t see the woman in the sled again until later, and then under distressing circumstances.
    Meanwhile, something arose between our everyday existence and the world that had produced Tildy, which for us was automatically exotic and full of wonder—something that we interpreted as a secret connection.
    In those days, our country’s elaborate, unwieldy approach to managing the economy kept a great many people busy. This was not because this system made our lives any more comfortable; rather it was due to a simple inability to think or even act economically—a failing, by the way, which despite all disadvantages did make our lives unforgettably rich in a way that has since disappeared from the earth entirely. For example, if a man offered his services without specifying precisely what these services might be, perhaps by boasting that he was strong enough to lift heavy objects, then no one questioned whether he was really needed but instead went about finding tasks for him to perform, once he had indeed demonstrated that he was as strong as he claimed. A maidservant was hired because she had made a nice and honest impression with her fresh red cheeks, her clean folk blouse, and her neatly combed hair—despite the fact that we by no means lacked for maids already. Another man found a position as a gardener because his face, bright with a simpleminded cheer and sunny to the point of saintliness, along with his gentle manner of speech, seemed clear proof of a green thumb. He was soon unmasked as an escaped convict and a particularly unscrupulous thief and was handed over to the police—much to our regret, incidentally, because we loved him dearly and wound up losing a great friend.
    But such gaps were soon filled. And nothing could shake the attraction we felt for these people who contributed little in the way of service to our household but rather used it as a refuge and a playground for their peculiar idiosyncrasies—just like our poultry yard, which was filled with completely useless ornamental breeds of chickens and ducks, peacocks and pheasants—and we were rewarded with an abundance of experiences and exposed to a rich gallery of people, as colorful and aromatic as a bouquet of grasses and fresh meadow flowers.
    Thus had we won the affection of a certain Widow Morar, a person of revolting, virtually monstrous ugliness, who was occasionally hired to help on the big laundry days, although she undoubtedly hindered more than helped with her boundless chatter. But she was a widow with three sons, and people generally pitied her. Everyone was in complete and unquestioning accord that she should be supported, and this had become a permanent arrangement, notwithstanding the fact that her sons were long grown up and gainfully employed—one even as a streetcar conductor—and that she was spending everything she earned on senselessly replacing some of her healthy natural teeth with gold dentures. Her husband, a drunkard, had shot himself.
    Driven by a pathological need to communicate, she recounted this drama to us over and over, even bringing as evidence a chromolithograph of Christ, at once unsettling and profound, where a bullet had bored a perfectly circular hole the size of a coin right in the sealing-wax-red heart of the savior—his first shot, which had missed. Herr Morar had shot himself when he was in his