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

cups, and spent a long time clumsily positioning his long military-issue rifle. He was unable to hold the gun with outstretched arms up to his temple. As a result, various projectiles had gone into the walls and ceiling, with him falling down each time in the process. Not until he placed the muzzle of his weapon in his mouth—“like a bottle” is how Widow Morar put it—while lying on his back, and using his big toe to squeeze the trigger, did he manage to kill himself. He had locked his wife and children in the next room; they were able to follow the proceedings through the keyhole.
    This ghastly experience, which she could portray to few others so often and in such detail—and which appeared to have left her with an affinity for similarly shattering incidents, because she knew of further gruesome accidents, incurable diseases, and bloody crimes to relate—this experience made Widow Morar so attractive in our eyes that every time she showed up we would sneak away from whoever was watching us in order to get near her. Then she would treat us to macabre depictions that, far from repelling us, absolutely enthralled us, because they dealt with life’s darkest and least comprehensible riddle—death, which even in childhood seemed so close it verged on horror. But her attraction became utterly irresistible when we learned that Widow Morar also helped out at Tildy’s home. What’s more: she could boast of being a close confidante of Madame Tildy—to what degree this was true we will yet discover.
    But back then could we have had any doubts? Everything about our hussar and the woman in the sled seemed so much like a fairy tale that we would not have been amazed at all to see these two mixed up in the strangest circumstances—and especially with a woman such as Widow Morar, whose mysterious ugliness made a mockery of any true human form, and put her in the company of djinns, ghosts, and demons from A Thousand and One Nights , not to mention her inner psychological connection to the eerie and the horrible.
    In short, what we now heard about the woman in the sleigh, whose face we hadn’t seen, hardly helped bring our fantasies to a more down-to-earth reality. Her beauty was something we took for granted: we had never expected anything else. But just to have something concrete in mind, we asked: “How beautiful is she?”
    â€œAs beautiful as your doll with the bird,” said Widow Morar.
    And of course we had known all along that she had some secret suffering—“a disease of the heart,” as Widow Morar put it.
    â€œCan a doctor help her?”
    â€œNo, said Widow Morar, closing her eyes and smiling knowingly, almost happily. The fire of her gold teeth transformed her amazing ugliness into the mask of a shaman. No, it was not a sickness that could be cured by any human art or wisdom: Madame Tildy was born a Paşcanu.
    That was news to us, though not surprising. Who else could the woman be but a daughter of the man whose celebrated rise to immeasurable wealth had made him as legendary as his wild life and, in the end, his grotesque downfall! Naturally, at the time we still had no idea about his touchingly ridiculous and dreadful end; we only knew his name from phrases that had become nearly proverbial: “Rich as Old Paşcanu,” or “a fox, a tiger, a wolf … a real Paşcanu.” Or else: “A peasant, a muzhik with no more manners than old Paşcanu,” and, finally, “as love-crazed as old Paşcanu.”
    He had had a mausoleum built for his wife—a certain Princess Sturdza, the mother of Madame Tildy—in a small forest at Horecea, just out of town, modeled after the Taj Mahal. People said she lay there covered with jewels. But he also buried his mistress, a strikingly beautiful peasant girl with the common name Ioana Ciornei, right next to his wife. It was on her account that Princess Sturdza had died, under