Die Zypresse, die Olive,
Pinienwald und Berg und Au
tauchen in das himmlisch-tiefe
fleckenlose duft’ge Blau.
Um die Wasser, um die Lande,
Näh und Ferne, weit und breit,
legt der Himmel weitgespannte
Arme der Unendlichkeit. [7]
“Tildy thinks that these verses couldn’t possibly come from the same divinely gifted person who wrote a poem like ‘One Drink of Love.’
“The mark of culture in a man,” Blanche concluded with her most beautiful smile, “is not his knowledge. I think I know why you are so taken with Herr Tildy. It’s because he has a kind of perfection, as my father has confirmed. He is complete in his form, and so he is related to all other forms of perfection. He is the peak of what we can attain. I’m envious that you know him, and can’t wait for the day he’s set free so you can show him to me.”
“Can’t you ask your father to let you visit the institution just once so you can see him? You could speak with Tildy!”
“No,” said Blanche. “That’s impossible. I’ve always wanted to see the poor souls my father looks after, and to be just as brave as he is. But he thinks I wouldn’t be able to stand the impact. I was very sick as a little child. I’m sensitive. It shames me to admit it, but it’s stronger than I am.”
A mark of forced concentration showed in her face that made her almost ugly. “Besides, I have to admit that at first I was put off by Major Tildy’s intention of dueling with everyone. My father tried explaining to me that the resolve to kill or die for the sake of order and righteousness was worthy of respect. I don’t approve of that view, since I detest any kind of violence. But when I started reading about duels I came across a very beautiful saying. You know that Pushkin was killed in a duel. He asked the doctor examining him to tell him frankly how long he had left to live, and when he was told ‘Three minutes,’ he closed his eyes and said, ‘Il faut que j’arrange ma maison.’ That is beautiful. I’m looking forward to when you show Herr Tildy to me.”
Tanya stroked her hair. “You once wanted to tell us a poem that was called ‘Springtime’ which you found very beautiful.”
Blanche hesitated, almost a little embarrassed. “I don’t want to repeat it,” she said. “It would lead you down the wrong path. It was the first of the poems ascribed to poor Piehowicz and then proven to be not his. It almost pains me to see the miracle shattered like that. As for that poem, ‘Springtime,’ the one with the last stanza that so delighted everyone—
Alles Schwere sinkt
von den Dingen, die sich weiten
und die Erde trinkt
Wunder der Entbundenheiten [8]
we now know for sure that it was written by someone else. He seems to be a gifted poet by the name of Count Karl Berlepsch.”
She must have seen our astonishment, even though we tried to suppress it. “Do you know this poet?” she asked, amazed.
Indeed, we thought we did. In one of the old issues of Gartenlaube, which Aunt Elvira had subscribed to, we had come across a poem by Count Berlepsch and had learned it by heart, fascinated and wickedly delighted and simultaneously repulsed by the realization of what was wicked in our delight. Just as the hunchbacked figure of Fräulein Iliuţ seemed attractive to me in a way that left me feeling guilty, so this poem acquainted us with a kind of forbidden longing — a longing for the opposite of beauty, and for what consciously and shamefully sets out to destroy it. We didn’t know whether we should consider the piece a satire. It addressed the injustices suffered by cavalrymen deprived of their mounts, forced to dig trenches with a shovel, and was composed in a tone people generally referred to as “witty”—a genre our parents steered us away from in no uncertain terms whenever we encountered it. This was not due to the childish silliness of the writing, but because of something worse: a vulgarity of spirit that can infiltrate the soul and as such constituted a latent danger one must take pains to guard against. We had seen this deep-seated vulgarity in the smirking Kunzelmann, and every line of this poem brought him back to us; its bumpy rhythm and dreadful German called out to be recited in Kunzelmann’s awful dialect, and we never tired of repeating the lines in his voice:
Not so long ago, it seems,
riding was held in great esteem
It continued in that vein, with an orderly who springs “from wing to wing,” and dragoons “who lost their jades,” now consigned to the barricades, where “instead of being tossed off by their steeds,” were digging dirt with mole-like speed.
Enough of that. We took our wicked delight in the jocose grotesqueries that struck us as even more bizarre for having come from the German war camp, from that terrifying world of earth caterpillars and fire butterflies. The verses brought the horror painfully close to the absurd, and what was fearful was brought into the soul-crushing proximity of the ridiculous. We would declaim certain lines in Kunzelmann’s voice and intonation, using the raw Czernopol German dialect, lines such as:
If they don’t shoot him into tatters
he’ll learn that other weapons matter
or
See the army engineers
deep in dirt up to their ear
but it was only much later that I realized we did so out of a particular sense of despair, which often seems far more painful when we are children than later when we are grown. These were idle hours spawning devilment, empty but for a nervous aversion we couldn’t explain — not for the world that surrounded us, but for all the awful things that characterized life in this world that we were part of. In such moments we felt the malicious urge to destroy beauty, the craving for satire. And I would later learn that Czernopol’s nasty passion for laughter, for mockery and scorn, stemmed from a deep-seated desperation, and probably sprouted from the vast emptiness of the countryside that besieged the city. The threat of this looming emptiness was what made the soul unable to resist the dreadful spirit of the satiricaclass="underline" instead of the little elves known as Heinzelmännchen, we had “Schmunzelmännchen, little gnomes, that by night in secret come,” enlisting “all of Satan’s powers to erect a town with towers”—the town we would have to fend against our whole life.
“Satan is coming closer to us, and he is smiling, my little ones,” Uncle Sergei used to say, himself smiling with his irresistible charm. And since we didn’t notice Satan hiding behind all the smirking, we assaulted Blanche with rhymes from the dreadful poem, and added insult to injury by reciting them with the crude gesticulation that we had picked up from Solly Brilclass="underline"
“Oh me, oh my
another shell comes flying by:
first we listen to the whine,
next it’s Boom!
behind our line”
as if Blanche’s lovely story of the insane poet and Tildy’s noble strivings on his behalf had become a farce, a joke. Even Tanya couldn’t refrain from laughing along, in a sudden disregard for Blanche that clearly let it be known that she, Tanya, had little regard for herself in that moment. “You’re overexcited,” she said to Blanche, using an expression the grown-ups applied to us whenever our enthusiasm tried their patience, because their souls could no longer summon the same unbridled fervor. Today I know that this act of cruelty came from a different source, a secretly concealed despair with deeper roots.