An Ermine in Czernopol Read Online Free PDF Page B

childlike imagination as autumn’s most compressed form, like a pearl; or perhaps because the drumbeat of their falling announces a yearly parting that leaves more behind than merely another summer; or else perhaps because there was something exceedingly human in this downpour of fruit, in the sheer extravagance of flinging these beautiful things to the mercy of a frosty wasteland. I can’t really say why, but then you don’t always have to be able to say why it is you love.
    Along with his sledding fur, Herr Tarangolian wore a creased, melon-shaped cap with ear flaps that were pulled halfway up and stood out like a pair of wings. There was something architectural about it—an odd mixture of cupola and pagoda that called to mind the baked-mud palaces of Samarkand, and Mongols in quilted robes hunched against the icy wind, driving their yaks and camels across the high plains, only instead of a face smooth as soapstone and old as the grave mounds of Tibet, the prefect’s martial mustache and devilishly black eyebrows gazed upon us in strict and terrible judgment.
    The prettily spotted Dalmatians stayed at home; Herr Tarangolian arrived in a sled. Wrapped in his driving fur, the coachman sat enthroned on the box, massive and shaggy, towering overhead like a mammoth. The pitiful batman, by contrast, was blue with cold in his pathetically thin uniform coat. He kept his arms crossed over his chest and his hands buried inside his cuffs, with his shoulders tensed in a high shrug and a scarf wound tightly around his chin and ears. Like some primeval bird, he peeked forlornly out from under his turned-up collar; the brass buttons of his coat had frosted over and had lost their gleam. The humble gratitude with which he accepted a glass of brandy was moving; he seemed not to have had a decent bite to eat for weeks. Whenever we heard about the suffering of the emperor’s great army, which had gone down in the ice of the steppes—about the glorious regiments scattered as food for the ravens, while a small train of the defeated trudged off to distant forests, doubled over against the wind—we always called to mind the prefect’s batman, who even in summer brought us a whiff of martial excitement, with his gleaming spiked helmet. And in that way the tragedy of that campaign always struck us as the victory of gray-white colorlessness over the jubilation of color whose symbols, the flags with their soaring eagles, were left behind, buried in snow and bleached by the icy winds.
    Herr Tarangolian appeared even more massive than his enormous coachman within a veritable bear’s den of furs, foot-muffs, and blankets, which the batman hastily tried to peel off. But the prefect made little headway, since his fingers were so stiff from the cold, and in his frustration he fell into a desperate rage and set upon the furs as if he were attempting to flay the skin off a dead animal. Once he was halfway free, Herr Tarangolian strained to pull himself up and, giving an ice age–like groan of satisfaction at the frosty landscape, set his richly ringed hand on the man’s shoulder for support and stepped off the sled, his enormous weight appearing to press the man deep into the snow. We watched this scene through little peepholes we had revealed with our warm breath in the window of our children’s room; the pane was feathered over with frosty patterns, so that the entire event seemed to take place in a wondrous forest of glittering palm fronds and acanthus thickets, ornamented like the tendrils of an illuminated manuscript, where reality was raised to the realm of fable, and everything seemed sharper, brighter, and more intense: A powerful and mighty man leaning on his beggarly servant … As far as we were concerned, the sheer fact that this servant was a soldier had a ring of biblical righteousness, and that canceled the sacrilege he had committed in our eyes by wrapping a tattered woman’s shawl