An Ermine in Czernopol Read Online Free PDF

didn’t. In any case, it was entirely in his nature to hand us the key to restricted areas he may not have intended to enter himself. And never was he more dangerous. He left it entirely up to us to decide which was Bluebeard’s secret chamber. And so, when all was said and done, the contradictions inherent in his character were impossible to interpret. For just as his mincingly affected manners and general foppishness suited neither his intelligence nor the gravity of his position as statesman—far more significant posts than the prefecture of Tescovina would later be entrusted to him—at the same time they could not be separated from his peculiar personality, so his empathy, his capacity for sincere friendship, or even affectionate devotion, moving as it often was, came coupled with an extreme unreliability. Behind his permanently unclouded kindness he could be dangerously moody, and everyone who had good reason to consider himself a close confidant of the prefect learned sooner or later that Herr Tarangolian had made a scathing remark about him behind his back.
    I will no doubt sound naïve if I say that his unreliable traits never showed in the summer. In reality they were just as visible then as at any other time, but their relationship to his other traits was different—the distribution of weight, if that’s what it might be called, was different. The change showed chiefly in his dress; after all, it’s an irrefutable fact that despite the equalizing effects of convention, our clothes remain a very telltale expression of character and even affect the wearer, so that, for instance, someone who fancies a tweedy suit of gray, yellow, and blotting-paper-pink, cut in the English style, instinctively imagining himself as one of the aloof sons of Albion touring the Continent, is bound to feel some of their stiff upper lip and dispassionate interest, while the same person wearing krakowiak boots and a corded tunic would unquestionably show a fiery disposition.
    Herr Tarangolian’s own summer dress was distinctly Mediterranean. His cream-colored suit of raw silk, and particularly his broad raffia-like woven belt with the sewn leather pockets, connected by a threadlike golden watch chain with a double drape, gave him a casual, holiday air that called to mind Adriatic promenades and siestas on hotel terraces in the shade of dusty agaves: a restrained exoticism that tempts one to accept certain things and even reinterpret them. Accordingly, his gallant clichés and charming nonsense seemed, if not natural, then at least in the right place—something like the tinselly polish of a former dragoman of the Sublime Porte enjoying the permanent holiday of the retired Levantine civil servant, a man of some means sitting in front of a street café, staring at the women with the jaundiced, heavy eyes of the liver-diseased, rolling cigarettes with delicious-smelling tobacco drawn from a silver niello case, sporting a freshly bedewed rose boutonnière to match his panama hat and his ebony cane with the ivory handle.
    In winter, on the other hand, Herr Tarangolian looked like a colossal, menacing elemental force. Only then did you notice the rough cut of his face, with its strong cheekbones that seemed lifted by the enormous bear collar of his sledding fur, glowing in the cold like a hot samovar. In this season his protruding stomach, which the summer belt had gently and healthfully kept in check, nearly burst his heavy coat, turning it into an unmanageable hide, thick and prickly, while his white shirt, very spruce and stylish, with stiff collar and starched cuffs, and his glistening shoes with bright felt spats flashed deceivingly from underneath, with the waxy perfection of a horse chestnut glistening through a cracked shell—a tree, by the way, that thrived in our part of the world, and which has remained my favorite, perhaps because the prickly balls encapsulate what always struck our