Their clumsy formality, and above all the sheepish way they exchanged awkward glances in an attempt to arrive at some secret understanding, made the Feuer children unsympathetic. Even so, for a while we felt tempted to make friends with them, because our only playmates, the Lyubanarov daughters from the dvornik’s hut, had been sent to relatives in a vicarage in the country. But our tentative approaches were nipped in the bud by Miss Rappaport. Without ever coming into contact with them, our governess had determined that the young Feuers were insolent and uncouth, although whenever our paths crossed, the older girls never failed to curtsy, blushing as they did, while poking their younger brothers in the ribs to remind them to remove the caps from their blond heads. But a single ridiculous incident, which Miss Rappaport could not get over, confirmed her prejudice. We once ran into the entire horde of Feuers as they were chasing a field mouse through their garden and across the street. The mouse had slipped into a hole along the embankment of the ditch on the other side of the street. While the majority ran back home to fetch a spade to dig it out, one of the little girls bent over the hole and tried to coax the creature out by tenderly saying “Meow!” As far as Miss Rappaport was concerned, this innocent mistake was proof of unbounded stupidity, as well as an ingrained cruelty. From then on we were forbidden to have anything to do with the inhabitants of the miraculous house.
Every day at noon we saw Professor Feuer walking down our street after finishing his classes at the boys’ lyceum. He was always in the company of another man, whose name, as we learned, was Adamowski — the chief editor of the Tescovina German Messenger, the third German-language newspaper in Czernopol, and the only one not edited by Jews. One of Herr Adamowski’s legs was shorter, with a clubfoot, which was shod in a cork boot that was bulky but nonetheless insufficiently padded. While Professor Feuer strode ahead with his back straight as an arrow, draped in loden and wearing his slouch hat low over his handsome forehead, the much shorter Herr Adamowski tottered alongside, struggling to keep up. His dress, which was oddly thrown together, had a certain shabby elegance: along with a heavy plaid ulster with two rows of bumpy leather buttons — the kind of coat that in those days was seen only at very sportive events — he wore a very modest silk scarf, a so-called collar-saver, boldly tossed around his neck, as if he were dressed in top hat and tails, stepping from the grand opera into the pale gaslight of the Parisian night, heading straight for the Moulin Rouge. A monocle enhanced this image of the bon vivant, as well as a beret on top of his faded and straggly hair, which he combed back. The strain of firmly maintaining his monocle between eyebrow and cheekbone had frozen his otherwise labile face into a teeth-baring grimace that also formed the backdrop for a whole array of rapidly changing expressions which flitted like shadows over the fixed scenery of his face. He wore his beret slanting over his right ear, angled so that it pointed to the source of his affliction, and as he walked he would swing his short leg forward, like a pendulum, his progress punctuated by the dull thud of the cork sole. His grimacing face reflected the broken lines of this movement, which, despite all the swaying, was quite rhythmic, as he tottered alongside the erect Professor Feuer, speaking to him through bared teeth, rising at his side and then humbly descending. A bamboo cane served as a support. He always carried a bulging briefcase that was buckled and fastened with complicated locks.
Before telling about one very confusing run-in with this Herr Adamowski, I have to mention another man who also came from the German settlement at the edge of town, where he had a large garden plot with beautiful fruit that he delivered to our house. His name was Romoald Kunzelmann. Several times a day the small cart that he called his taradaika came clattering up to our house, because apart from delivering fruit he helped out in all sorts of ways, as gardener, plumber, paperhanger, cartwright, hauler, and even once as a skinner when our draft horse died from colic in its stall. Although we had been forbidden to watch the sad operation, we managed to observe in detail how our coachman and Herr Kunzelmann loaded the gigantic carcass onto the taradaika with the help of some ingeniously constructed winches, and covered it with a few old sacks. The little Polish pony, a mare we called Kobiela and were much attached to, waited between the shafts of the taradaika, and the undaunted bravery with which she had dragged her fallen big brother from inside the stable, moved us as much as the lyrics of the song “Ich hatt’ einen Kamerad.”
From then on, Herr Kunzelmann had for us a slight air of horror, which made his irrepressible cheerfulness all the more unsettling. His creepiness was different and far more disturbing and upsetting than what we experienced when Widow Morar told her hideous stories. Because while our chatty friend with her tarnished golden smile whispered her message of death like a magnificently glistening promise, an Easter secret that the angels had proclaimed to her sternly and severely, Herr Kunzelmann seemed intent on keeping it hushed in a low-down, tricky way, and in doing so made it all the more frightening. The same day he carted off our dead horse, he came rattling down the street, sitting on the box of his taradaika; when he saw us at the garden fence he gave a sharp pull on the reins and brought our Kobiela, who had been trotting faithfully ahead, to a sudden stop, pointed with his whip to the load behind him, and called out to us, waving, in the harsh, coarse dialect of the Tescovina Germans: “Hey there, if you think you’re smart, what’s in Kunzelmann’s old cart?”
We didn’t have an answer, and he didn’t seem to expect one. He reached under the empty sacks that a little while earlier had covered our horse’s carcass and held up a limp piece of skin, which we recognized from the mane and ears as the hide of our old horse. “Little miss sees and starts to cry,” he sang out, “but all that’s left is horsey’s hide!”
We knew that Herr Kunzelmann thought it clever to speak to us in painfully contorted rhymes loosely borrowed from Wilhelm Busch, whom he evidently considered the favorite poet of all children who understood German, or at least as a great magician of a language that was perfect for fostering an air of rascally conspiracy. Unfortunately, in our case neither assumption was correct. Nothing bothered us more than the ambiguous irony of this ostensibly smiling philosopher of the little man, whose gruesome, sentimentally internalized misanthropy not only made the all-too-catchy rhymed and illustrated stories embarrassing, but also called into question the purported moral. We were far more aware of their crudity than that of the much more drastic Struwwelpeter. That a child who sucked his thumb had it cut off, or was burned into a heap of ashes as a result of playing with matches, we accepted as fairy tale: it was transported to the realm of the unreal, and so, despite the lasting impression it made, it had little actual effect on our childish soul. Even at their most gruesome, the Struwwelpeter rhymes, in a book where cats cry, a hare shoots at a hunter, and Saint Nicholas finally shows up to punish the bad boy, were clearly cartoons. The bloody, knocked-out tooth, on the other hand, which seals Busch’s utterly mean story about the boy with the peashooter, and which is described with gleeful realism, came close to making us feel physical pain and mutilation of the most brutal and direct sort, no matter how fascinated we were by the sight. And just as we had been bothered by Max and Moritz getting ground up in the mill, the death of Fips the Ape tormented us our whole life long: it was an overly enigmatic satire, in which bourgeois morality triumphed over a clever, comical, intelligent, and obviously loving animal.