The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  She realized that for those who had acquired it, the ability to read conferred power over those to whom the written or printed word remained a sealed mystery. But she also knew that this was a power pertaining to black magic—that it turns against its own practitioners and transforms them into slaves of the abstract. She saw in it a truly devilish power, since its manipulators, who also were its most immediate victims, were not even aware of its nefarious effects. To be sure, she was unable to say what was meant by the abstract and, even less, in what consisted its peril. Yet she carried within her innermost self—not only since she had left the monastery, where, on the walls of the church, the angels, devils and saints, as well as the tormented or redeemed bodies of the mortals, together with the beatitudes of heaven and the torments of hell were most wondrously and graphically depicted in ocher, red, blue and gold—she carried from her very beginning the clear and unshakable conviction that anything supernatural that does not lead directly to God and His heavenly kingdom must bring about a downfall into damnation. Books were either sacred or devilish, and since almost all books could be interpreted either way, they also could have both holy and diabolic effects. It seemed to her that with the opening of the covers of a book both the gates of heaven and the jaws of hell were being unlocked, and the angel or devil who then emerged from its pages separated the questing spirits according to either their longing for the one and only truth or their susceptibility to devilish, pernicious lies. To expose oneself to such a momentous decision in trite everyday circumstances seemed to her downright sacrilegious. And from that she protected me.

  My father’s infatuation with my sister, his loving understanding of her fancies and moods, the constant interest he devoted to all her doings bestowed upon her an exaggerated importance throughout the household, which she also displayed impudently in the nursery in her dealings with Cassandra and me. Everybody thought the world of her cleverness, and all too often my ignorant nurse and I had to acknowledge her unquestionable superiority. She was able to read long before I had learned to speak properly, and she read almost all the time. But when I was five years old and she was nine, she claimed to understand Latin—which she hadn’t yet been taught.

  Cassandra and I knew this well enough. But how could we call her bluff? She strutted in front of us, an open book in her hand, and moved her lips as if speaking the words she was allegedly reading, but when we challenged her to read aloud, she only replied disdainfully: “You can’t understand that; it’s Latin!” I was about to jump on her and wrest the book from her hand when Cassandra restrained me, wrapped me in her hair and murmured in my ear: “Don’t you believe her, she is only pretending to read. She’s probably holding the book upside down and lisping nonsense to annoy you.” But against the visible evidence of the purported reading, which we could not contest, this was a mere supposition, further weakened by my father, who, laughing maliciously, made himself my sister’s accomplice by confirming: Yes, what was written in the book was indeed Latin.

  The looks I shot at my sister from the haven of Cassandra’s sheltering hair and under the fire protection of her flashing black monkey eyes were white-hot with impotent rage. Nevertheless I exulted in the certainty of a later, all the more powerful vindication—a steadfast faith in the revelatory power of truth which stayed with me and reassured me all my life whenever I saw through some mental sham that, for the time being accepted as valid, could not be exposed because of some vested interest or simply because of general stupidity.

  Among the experiences from which we learn nothing that we didn’t know already, there is to be counted the insight that the reality we consider as all-dominating in truth consists mostly of fictions. My family’s fictions were only too transparent: we lived the years 1919–1939 in the illusion of having a pseudo-feudal position in the world; this was based neither on prestige enjoyed in an existing society nor on wealth, but merely on the position my parents and particularly my grandparents had held before the First World War.

  This strange make-believe, challenged by no one, was promoted by the leftovers of colonial gentry in which we were left, powerless relics, at the end of the Dual Monarchy. We considered ourselves as former Austrians in a province with a predominantly Austrian coloring, like those British colonials who remained in India after the end of the Raj. Neither my father nor my mother had been born in the Bukovina. My father had arrived there before the turn of the century as a government official of the Empire. My mother’s parents had lived there temporarily, connected with the country by an originally Greek bloodline that over the centuries had become Romanian. (None of this was in any way singular in the great spaces of the former Habsburg Empire. In many ways—but mainly through the constant migration to far-off provinces by individuals of the most variegated backgrounds, military men or civil servants, pioneers or traders or fortune-seeking entrepreneurs—the situation was not unlike that one finds in the United States. Indeed, the fad for all things American which soon was to conquer all Europe fell on especially fertile ground in our neck of the woods.) So as long as we lived there, albeit as citizens of the Kingdom of Romania yet in the presumptuous feeling of belonging to another, superior civilization, the country in which my sister and I were born held only a provisional and specious character for our parents. Even we, constantly reminded that we were born there only by chance and were not real natives, could not free ourselves of a certain skepticism about our homeland, whose “Balkan” character now sharpened noticeably under our new sovereigns.

  My sister in particular, who was eight years old when the old Austria fell apart in 1918 and who thus spent the formative part of her childhood in the ambience of a bygone era, never managed to feel at home among the sheepskin- and caftan-wearers, the spur-jingling operetta officers and garlic-scented provincial dandies. I, for my part, had no difficulty in that respect. I loved the land and its beauty, its spaciousness and its rawness, and I loved the people who lived there: that multifarious population of not one but half a dozen nationalities, with not one but half a dozen religions, and with not one but half a dozen different tongues—yet a people showing a common and very distinctive stamp. I could not have been connected to it more intimately than through Cassandra.

  Our house stood at the edge of Czernowitz in a garden which on one side bordered the spacious and attractive public park and on the other, the botanical garden, also under the city’s administration. This embeddedness in park greenery, and the nearby opening out into agricultural countryside, conveyed an illusion of living in something like a manor—a fair deception, strengthened by the severe isolation in which we children were kept, without any contact with our coevals. A large arterial road bordered by poplars and leading out into the country separated us from the extended grounds of a cavalry barracks where, in Austrian times, lancers and, after 1919, Romanian Roşiori were quartered. Not-withstanding the barely concealed scorn of my father for those “victors” who, as he was wont to say, “pounced on the dying old monarchy at the very last minute,” I myself was passionately attracted by their uniforms, their weapons, and their manly and self-assured demeanor, in short, by everything that demonstrated the lethal seriousness of their profession.

  Cassandra shared this passion with me, though not for the same reasons. I was never alone when I rushed to the garden gate to see if the sound of hoofbeats announced merely the passage of a hackney or the spectacle of a lieutenant riding by with his orderly, or perhaps a sergeant major with the fierce mien of a bronco tamer. In her eagerness, Cassandra was almost quicker than I. The officers were in the habit of visiting in the neighborhood and liked to show off their horses to the ladies living in the nearby villas. Cassandra, of course, was out for lower ranks. When the weather was bad, I did not have to beg to be let into the front drawing room or onto the balcony, so I could see better whenever a squadron, rain-soaked or dust-covered, returned from its exercises: Cassandra, alerted by some sixth sense, would already be at my side and take me by the hand or lift me up in her arms, a
nd together from the best vantage point we watched the oncoming ranks in rapt silence, following them with our eyes long after they had filed past, our emotional harmony as perfect as that shared by art lovers before a masterwork.

  Soon we harbored a common secret: during one of our walks (my sister was at home doing lessons), a noncommissioned officer accosted Cassandra. We already knew him by sight: in his squadron he rode a white horse that I especially admired. For several weeks we met him regularly. He wasn’t much taller than Cassandra and at least equally unprepossessing, bowlegged, with arms hanging almost to his knees, a diminutive pitch-black moustache of exactly the same width as the nostrils under which it was glued, framed by two sharp wrinkles like two parentheses. Whenever he opened his broad mouth in a friendly grin, his big teeth shone white like an ape’s. He could have been Cassandra’s brother. But his tunic glittered with gold braids, spurs jingled on his boots, the spit-polished shafts of which were decorated with brass rosettes on heart-shaped cutouts below the knees, and it was with the unmatched verve of the experienced Lothario that he raised his arm to his shako in salute. I resolved to imitate all this in due time: this was supersharp and had true class; this was the right way to deal with women. I kept secret even from Cassandra that I exercised these gestures at home in front of a mirror.

  The encounters were not limited to strolls along the so-called Nut Lane in the public garden—the name derived from the thick hazelnut bushes bordering the path, bearing to everyone’s delight a profusion of fruit, almost always stripped bare before they could ripen to their full doe-brown, glossy hardness. Fairly soon our chaste perambulations ended with the three of us in our garden, into which a narrow door in the wall gave access and where a small pavilion, hardly more than a toolshed, invited strollers to rest. There the cavalryman, to my joyful delight—so overpowering as to make my temples throb—took off his saber and handed it to me to play with. I quickly withdrew to the remotest corner of the garden, where I could relish to the full the agonizing thrill of drawing the naked blade from its heavy, dull-metal scabbard, letting it glitter in the sun and then using it for nothing more martial, to my sorrow, than the beheading of nettles. My fantasy was excited even more passionately by the gold filigree of the saber knot, which in a most tactile way manifested the reality of the military world, making me realize all the more acutely the mere “as if” of the world of my games.

  It was, alas, only a borrowed reality and it mocked me: I could not include it in the world of my games without feeling that I was deceiving myself—especially since I knew full well that I had been bribed by Cassandra and her corporal to get lost. I also knew that by letting myself be seduced so willingly, I was giving them time for their own games—games of factual reality, not make-believe ones. I did not have the slightest doubt that I had become their accomplice in something prohibited, though what this was I could imagine only vaguely. According to the degree of my enlightenment at that time, it could hardly be anything else than that these two were now squatting together to crap on the ground. After I had been called back and had returned the bribe and both of them had gone on their way, I felt impelled to return secretly to the pavilion, where I searched for the traces of their encounter. But when I failed to find any, my conscience was not appeased. The secret that separated the world of adults from my own make-believe one remained impenetrable, even though it seemed to be present, shimmering provocatively, everywhere and in everything.

  The idyll was not to last long. One evening we strolled in vain along Nut Lane: our cavalryman did not appear, nor did he come the following day or the day after that, and so on for a stretch of one or two weeks. Then, quite unexpectedly, we met him once more. The verve of his salute was restrained. No, he could not accompany us to our garden but allegedly had urgent business in the opposite direction. A violent argument ensued between him and Cassandra, the words flying out so fast and vehemently that I did not understand any of them. Suddenly he hit her brutally across the face. I screamed. The impulse to throw myself at him lapsed in futility, for as he hit her he turned and walked away quickly, almost at a run. Cassandra loosened her hair and wrapped me in it. The jingling of his spurs was lost in the distance. She took me by the hand as I sobbed uncontrollably, and silently she walked me home.

  Cassandra had no tears. She brought me to her little room in the attic, rummaged in one of her drawers and produced from under a pile of laundry a photograph of the cavalryman: it showed him in the traditional lady-killer pose, leaning on a rudimentary birch-lattice fence (the standard background of the while-you-wait photographer at the entrance to the public park), one arm bent akimbo, the sleeve embroidered with a filigree of gold braids and his hand nonchalantly holding a pair of white cuff-gloves, the saber hanging low in the belt. Cassandra placed the picture on a table, lit a candle in front of it, knelt down, crossed herself and started to pray ... at first in a murmur, then ever louder, first in deep seriousness and apparent piety, then ever more satanically, her rising rage driving her into demonic merriment, praying ever more wildly and interjecting into her prayers increasingly terrifying invectives and the most shocking gestures ... until she finally grabbed the picture, drew a pin from her hair and with it pricked out his eyes, drove it through his heart and time and time again at the juncture of his legs; then she tore the picture into small scraps with which, after lifting her skirts, she wiped her behind, finally burning each scrap separately in the flame of the candle.

  At first, I was deeply frightened. Cassandra, the piously strict, for whom God the Father, Jesus Christ and all the saints were part of the world as real as the mountains, the rivers and the trees in the forest where she had been born, all of them as firmly grounded in her life as the walls of the monastery in which she, a sinner, had found refuge, she who never failed to make the sign of the cross before speaking the name of something holy, she who had led me into every church that happened to be on our way— she now celebrated right here before my very eyes a black mass, she sinned in the most blasphemous manner imaginable, she indulged in shamanic magic and invoked satanic powers for the lowest of purposes: to take revenge on one whom she had loved. It was so monstrous, so unexpected and so baffling that, irresistibly, it reverted to the comical. I ended up raked by laughter. I could not wait to tell my sister about it and I rejoiced in anticipation of that moment, even though I knew this would constitute a betrayal of Cassandra and our twin togetherness. Our family storehouse of anecdotes had gained another pungent Cassandra story—and I had lost one more part of my innocence.

  Retrospective perception of the milestones of life, which tends to make you see existence as divided into distinct phases, leads me to see this episode as marking the end of my true childhood. After it I could no longer identify myself with Cassandra naturally and spontaneously. For the first time I “saw” her consciously and perceived her through the eyes of the others to whom I betrayed her. I had left the safe haven of her hair, in which I had been sheltered from those others, and I had switched over to their camp. We still lived in a time in which an almost unbridgeable gulf gaped between the so-called educated classes and the so-called common people. My family’s situation, based on the abstract image of a once privileged position—mainly the myth of former wealth, which encouraged us to live beyond our true means and to indulge in expensive habits we could no longer afford—placed us absurdly far above the “common people,” who, for the most part, lived in abject poverty, a poverty borne humbly and with eyes raised in admiration to their “masters.” For the first time I thought of Cassandra as belonging not to my own lineage but to that other race of the poor, the know-nothing and the lowly. At the same time, there awoke in me a sense of the social pecking order. The longings for my putative milk-brother began to fade. Had I met him then, I would have felt separated from him by the same gap that set me apart from the neighborhood children with whom we were forbidden to play.

  It may be that this event was preceded by another less spectacular one that had an even gr
eater impact, an initiation of a different sort, the dark terror of which, though belonging wholly to childhood, at the same time presaged its end. My magpie died. One afternoon she lay dead in her cage. That very morning she had been hopping around as gaily as ever. I could not believe that this cold and rigid piece of rubbish that lay in the sandy gravel at the bottom of her cage was she. I trembled with sorrow. My sister was all eagerness to arrange a solemn funeral, but Cassandra with bewildering roughness forbade any such un-Christian nonsense and saw to it that the little corpse was discarded with the garbage. In so doing she was seconded by my mother, who thought the magpie had died of tuberculosis and might possibly infect us; this only increased my grief. For the first time, Cassandra was not my ally. My lamentations went for naught. Cassandra remained coarsely peremptory, as if, faced by the unavoidable fact of life and death, her unbroken peasant sense of reality revolted against citified fussing. “Dead is dead,” she said gruffly. “One day you too will be dead.’’