An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori

were scarcely born when they took us to live in the country—and then the notion that it was winter when he first rode past us, whereas the fact is, we had moved back to the city early in the summer. But I am happy to stick to this delusion, because it expresses the idea that the memory of that house and garden, a memory I hold dear, is completely inseparable from the first time we surrendered to a vision of perfection, and much of the painful delight we feel when we call to mind certain pictures from our childhood stems from this delusion.
    The garden was protected from the street by an iron fence. A sandstone plinth extended out on either side of a small gatehouse—which we called the dvornik ’s hut—up to the hedges of the neighboring properties. Tall, slender pickets rose out of this base and were connected by two long ribs; their pointed-leaf finials presented a straight row of beautiful lances whose form and order delighted us immensely. To this day I can physically sense the powerful magic that emerged out of the absolute symmetry of those lance-leafed finials, pulling us into its spell. And I don’t just mean the unbearable craving to heft and wield one of those spears, which were more perfect and more genuine than all those we had carved for play, but a desire that was unquestionably erotic, an urgency that was intensified by its sheer unattainability, similar to and no less pressing than the yearning felt later in life after possessing a woman we loved, and which despite the physical stilling—which always remains superficial—never achieves its true goal. But we were even more taken with the equilibrium this fence presented, the sparkling symmetry of picket upon picket, all coming together to form a single decisive perspective. And just as when we played inside we never tired of arranging our lead soldiers or other toy figures into the same undeviatingly square formations, so as to discover in their repeated regularity a magical geometrical essence that corresponded to mysterious structures within ourselves, so we were drawn outside to what was undoubtedly a very ordinary iron fence, with an emotion that verged on the sacred, because we sensed or suspected something in that line of pickets, something possibly close to the wellspring of ornament and dance and ritual.
    Incidentally, even back then we must have been consciously prepared for beauty. Because the day we spotted the hussar had been preceded by another notable day, when Herr Tarangolian was walking through the garden and picked up a maple leaf that had decomposed into an enchanting filigree of delicate ribs and tiny veins. As he held it up to the light for us, the prefect declaimed with pathos: “But what is this? Art—art! And what has wrought it? Destruction. Ah, let me tell you, my young friends, learn to love destruction!”
    Thus we had already seen what kind of artist winter can be in populated areas, for we loved winter in the city, especially in the gardens that skirted our street. And particularly the heart of winter, January, which brought Christmas, according to the reckoning of the Orthodox Church. We loved its dryness and severity, its veiled light in the frost, when the snow that had blanketed the entire landscape and erased all shapes finally subsided, and the contours emerged crisp and clear out of the immaculate white—no longer tinged with gray or yellow like on the days weighted with snow clouds—and were finally covered with a brittle, icy down like a tender mildew, lending a fragility to the hard surfaces and muting the colors that still shone through here and there—such as the dark brick red of the neighboring home, which we could now see, as if through a filter that simultaneously softened shapes and heightened them. Things then spoke to us with a more serious purpose, they gained deeper meaning, acquired a timeless symbolism. Nothing captured winter’s adamantine quality better