The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  My remembrance of that early time is murky. The sunny days of childhood came later for me. I was still frightened by the stormy skies and the blood-red sunsets over the deeply melancholy spaciousness of the landscape, of which we had an unobstructed view on three sides of our house and garden. Clear-lit images, such as that of my mother at the tea table on a summer afternoon before her elfin dreaminess iced over, are rare. If there hadn’t been the brood-warm love of Cassandra and her comical buffooneries, I would now be visited in an even worse way by the anxieties that in those days permeated our problematic family life. None of them are forgotten. My allergies to all kinds of tensions, exaltations and neurotic resistances have their throat-tightening origin in those days, when, presumably, the hardness I displayed to my mother at the end of her life also originated. Her endearments were of a tempestuousness that frightened more than delighted me, and in addition prompted venomous remarks from my sister. Even though I surmised, with the uncanny ability of children to plumb the reality behind the surface, that the bluntness with which my mother interfered in our harmony stemmed from her need to find some firm ground in a life that was slipping away from her, I never forgave her for it. Nor did I forgive her her absentmindedness, which she tried to correct with unyielding opinions and rigid prejudices. The hostility to anyone not sharing her opinions and intentions resulted directly from existential panic. When she was alone or thought herself so, her glance would drift away and she would lose herself in a remote nowhere, initially filled by dreams, perhaps, but later peopled by phantoms from her misspent life—in any case the true scenery of her mind.

  I see her at table, our meals a silent ceremonial. She holds herself stiffly erect and eats automatically, without visible enjoyment, the eyes either downcast to the plate or directed unseeingly straight ahead, apparently indifferent to what happens around her. She herself—or her soul, her fantasy or whatever; in any case, her true life—is miles away, beyond the dining room walls. All the more persistently she insists on the ceremony of the meals, on our table manners, on a letter-perfect service; she devises sophisticated menus, watches over our nutrition by serving us foods that promote our health, appetite and digestion, and punishes us excessively if, overfed and sated, we reject it. She requires sound corporeality to convince her of our physical reality. We have to prove that we actually exist, by means of thriving health, growth, appetite, regular bowel movements, red cheeks and bubbling exuberance as much as by unconditional submission to her unending instructions, prescriptions and proscriptions. What she understands to be maternal love clutches at the visible and the tangible. Intellectual development is by tradition left to professionals, hired employees: governesses, tutors, teachers. But the supervision of our weal and woe devolves upon her alone and it turns into a rankling obsession. She holds on to it desperately, as if it were her only support in the whirlwind of the times.

  And it is true that that whirlwind was exceptionally violent. One no longer realizes today the extent of the changes that the 1914–1918 war wrought in the world in general and Europe in particular, though it did not bring so much destruction as its continuation in the even fiercer 1939–1945 war. Only the regions of the embattled fronts lay in ruins; the hinterland was largely spared. There was not the terror of aerial bombardments night after night, nor the horror of flattened cities across the continent, nor the misery of their ruins and the wretchedness of swarms and mobs of bombed-out populations and refugees. On the surface, the world seemed unchanged, but it was all the more spooky for that. In the first installment of the worldwide war which had come only to a temporary halt in 1918 and broke out all the more fiercely two decades later, an order had been destroyed in which, up to then, everybody had put faith. Critical voices had not been lacking: the world before 1914 no longer considered itself the best of all possible ones. But it was a world in which culture still rated high. The meat grinders of Ypres and Tannenberg, the hellish barrages of Verdun and the Isonzo shattered all illusions. A species of men arose from that ghostly landscape of bomb craters and trenches whose bestiality was unconstrained. A free field was given to the Hitlers and Stalins to come.

  For the class to which my parents belonged, this meant a fall into chaos, into impotence and deprivation, hopelessness and squalor. What today is designated by the collective noun bourgeoisie lived with an imperturbable faith in what Robert Musil’s Count Leinsdorff called “property and learning.” All the trust in life that these two pillars had supported collapsed together with them. The resulting changes in reality were so sudden, unpredicted and incomprehensible that at first they seemed more like a monstrous nightmare. The desire to wake from the bad dream gave rise to the Utopia of the 1920s, one of the worst by-products of which was to be the Third Reich. But most people remained stunned and paralyzed: sleepwalkers in an alienated present.

  My mother, born in 1890, was almost thirty years old when the First World War ended and had—as she used to say—“hardly lived at all, in fact.” She had been raised in a golden mist of expectations about the future, which in the imagination of a young girl of her generation were nourished by ambiences and impulses, lights, colors and sounds, an intoxicating vision of an enchanted, permanently celebratory existence: the “grand life” in the style of Madame Bovary. Seen in this light, her first married years, in a hated house which she had fled for the daffodil meadows of Montreux and the palm shades of Luxor, were indeed a time devoid of meaning. Those years of refugee subsistence in the remoteness of a small villa near Trieste and in a cowherd hamlet in Lower Austria must have seemed even more estranged from what she thought of as the “true” life. She had borne two children and had assumed the role of a conscientious mother, but the dream of her life had remained unrealized. For this she blamed mainly my father, but also in part the country we lived in.

  After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Bukovina became part of Romania. While in Austrian times its linguistically and sartorially kaleidoscopic mixture of people had given an attractive touch of color to the placid and mannered everyday life of a flourishing crown land, the opposite now occurred: a thin foil of civilization appeared to have been superimposed on an untidily assorted ethnic conglomerate from which it could be peeled off all too readily. Neither my father nor my mother belonged to the indigenous population. Each in his or her own way lived in a kind of exile: they had both ended up in a colony deserted by its colonial masters. Hardly anything remained of the former social world they had inhabited—however confined and provincial it must have been here under the double-headed eagle—and that had been composed of more or less high-ranking government officials, owners of landed estates, officers of the garrison, university professors and like representatives of the so-called educated classes. Those who remained in Romania and did not return to the shrunken remains of the Austrian republic or emigrate elsewhere split into groups determined by nationality. The Romanians holding important government posts established themselves as the new masters under the aegis of the Romanian military establishment, which flaunted the brassy glitter of its fresh victory, and they remained largely isolated from those who spoke other languages and now were the new minorities. The so-called Bukovina Swabians—settlers who had established themselves in the region in the times of Emperor Joseph the Second—segregated themselves in a flag-waving Greater Germany clannishness, casting nostalgic sidelong glances at Bismarck’s Second Reich. The Ruthenians refused to have anything to do with either former Austrians, who they felt had treated them as second-degree citizens, or the Romanians, who cold-shouldered them in return. Poles, Russians and Armenians had always congregated in small splinter groups and now more than ever kept to themselves. All of these despised the Jews, notwithstanding that Jews not only played an economically decisive role but, in cultural matters, were the group who nurtured traditional values as well as newly developing ones. But one simply did not associate with Jews—and thus obviated the danger of undermining credulously cherished ideologies or “bolshevizing”
so-called healthy artistic canons through an encounter with what was regarded as too radically original and modern. We, as declared (and declasse) former Austrians, were counted willy-nilly with the so-called ethnic Germans.

  In a town that at the time had a population of some hundred fifty thousand inhabitants, it would have been possible, of course, to find a dozen or so like-minded persons to associate with. But this would hardly have allowed for the intoxicating illusion of a “grand life” (which in other parts, incidentally, had meanwhile also become tainted), certainly not in the company of the ladies and gentlemen of the ethnic-German singing societies at their summer solstice celebrations, with fiery pyres over which black-red-and-gold banners swirled in the wind while full-throated choir bellowed into the flying sparks: “Tshermany, o Tshermany, my lohvely faderland ...” The person who saw through all this from the very beginning was my father, and he cared all the less for it since he was indifferent to anything that was not in some way connected to hunting. Mother thus was left all by herself. Her efforts to escape her growing isolation were pathetically touching; ultimately she became resigned and almost completely isolated herself and her children in the hermetic solitude of our house and garden.

  Still, we children had that stereotyped experience of seeing Mother enter her bedroom, her deep décolleté glittering with jewels and she herself transformed into a movie star, followed by my father, who left it undecided whether the high color of his face was due to the tightness of the stiff collar he wore with his tails or to his rage at having to spend the evening on diversions he hated and in the company of people he despised. There existed in Czernowitz at that time a theater in which German-language plays were put on with “leading talents from the homeland,” as it was advertised, until Romanian students ended these performances with a violent demonstration. This chauvinist manifestation sufficed to prompt my father never again to set foot in that theater. But other social events tempted—or repelled.

  The Gay Twenties were upon us. From the illustrated magazines arriving at the house, we received graphic instructions on the fashionably updated life-style models, saluted by popping champagne corks. Even our unworldly mother knew enough of the world to recognize the difference in quality between these glittering images and the true level of the locally available entertainment. Father’s ruthlessly acerbic comments the morning after such nights of revelry left no doubt concerning their real worth. Still, some romance remained in preparing for the hoped-for enactments of the great dream-life, however inadequate these might turn out to be. Whenever we found ourselves in my mother’s dressing room, Cassandra would rummage with monkeylike curiosity in the costly fabrics of evening gowns and wraps from a more expansive prewar era, the heron feathers, diamond clasps, silk shoes, brocaded caps and other paraphernalia. But the atmosphere of real or imagined festivities was felt most vividly when the baubles had been put away and left once again gently to gather dust. And this happened soon enough: Mother’s fairy-queen appearances at our bedside became increasingly rare and eventually ceased altogether. My father, once more in the best of moods, set out on his hunting trips and stayed away for weeks, while my mother again wrapped herself in manically conceived maternal duties. We children were her only connection to reality, her sole life possession, and she claimed it for herself alone. The shell around us closed hermetically while the years bypassed her life dream.

  Nevertheless, the no longer so young woman—she is past the “Balzacian age,” la femme de trente ans, after all—is granted a short, late bloom after she separates from my father. For me it is a difficult time, for I am away from home and suffer much from homesickness. On the other hand, I too am given a new life, for I am freed of my sister’s affectations of superiority; she is with our grandparents in Vienna and about to go to finishing school. I am almost nine and I am sent to Kronstadt (now Braşov), in Transylvania, to begin my education at the renowned Honterus Gymnasium there. Among strangers and released from Cassandra’s guardianship, I am faced for the first time by the question of who and what I am. There is no doubt in my mind who is the steadying keel that gives me at least some self-assurance, which from the start had been weak and had been shaken further by the loss of my parental home: I am in love with my mother. Whenever she visits me, she is followed by glances of admiration, respect, desire. I find her at the Hotel At the Crown, an exemplary establishment of the old-fashioned Austro-Hungarian kind. The lobby with the deep leather chairs I founder in, the restaurant with its black-white-and-silver table settings and tailcoated waiters, the coffeehouse with its marble-topped tables and gypsy orchestra, the winter garden with its tropical plants and the diffuse light from its colored glass windows—all bespeak the elegance of a period about to vanish: the legendary luxury voyages on international trains such as the Orient Express and at palace hotels. We are privileged guests. The way my mother is treated by the employees, the waiters and the reception clerk makes me proud to be her son. The high regard and courtesy shown her by the men and the assiduity displayed by the women extends to me. I am spoiled because I am her child. I observe her sharply and compare her with other women, including the mothers of my school comrades, and the result makes me arrogant. The assurance with which she gives orders and makes her wishes known in her clear French to a chauvinistic assistant concierge at the hotel who alleges not to understand German and insists on speaking Romanian (which my mother never mastered); her girlish blushing when a gentleman of the old school who chances to witness this unpleasant scene (a typical one, incidentally, for the successor states to the Empire in those early years) compliments her for her fine bearing by a wordless bow—these are lasting impressions. In photographs from that period I see her gathering a fur piece around her naked shoulders in a gesture that nowadays is frequently imitated by transvestites; with her, it conveys an inimitable grace, seldom seen in the fatidic stars of the society sheets and the movies (beginning to flicker with their omnipotent promise even in those remote parts), who forfeited in the theatricality of their gestures a good deal of their ladylike pretensions.

  It is difficult to reconcile this image of her with the last two-thirds of her life, when she increasingly distorted and coarsened herself. Two decades later she was so different that no one possibly could have recognized her, let alone have found in her the willowy girl with the grave and dreamy glance she had been prior to her ill-fated marriage. Perhaps someone might have realized, on the strength of faint signs—the claim to respect that betrayed itself in her bearing; a certain fastidiousness; her still well-formed hands—that what had occurred here was not only a personal decay but one of the countless individual destinies swept away and crushed by the eclipse of an entire world.

  The surprising thing, given the rigidity of her character, was the pliancy with which she adapted to that fate. Her angry resignation somehow seemed like an act of revenge. She adapted to increasingly uncomfortable circumstances not only without resistance but almost with alacrity, as if she derived some perverse satisfaction from it. In her last years, she displayed a teeth-gnashing, reluctant submissiveness. By grimly bending under the blows that fate delivered to her, she could prove to the world the magnitude of the suffering for which she had been predestined. This psychological pattern must have had very deep roots, reaching back to her earliest days.

  One of today’s many overused words deriving from popular psychology is frustration. In the case of my mother this term is to be applied not merely in the figurative sense of bafflement but quite literally, as a castigation, a flagellation. In my mind rises a horrifying scene from her early girlhood that she once told me about, half in saddened forgiveness and half in awe of the pedagogic harshness it demonstrated with such naked brutality. The time is just after the turn of the century and she is thirteen or fourteen years old, on a summer afternoon bathed in a vine-green light that invades the house from the garden. She is doing four-handed piano exercises with her sister, younger by one year, and believes herself alone with her, for once unobserve
d, and so she begins to joke, to fool around, to laugh and to twattle—and is abruptly called to order by the biting stroke of a cane across her back. Her father stands behind her in all his mythic authority, as he towered all her life over her parental home, the embodiment of law and order in the entire world. When he punishes her he is not merely her idolized papa but the incarnation of universal law in all its inflexible severity. An irrevocable verdict has been pronounced: she is unworthy in her role as the oldest child and model for her five siblings, unworthy of the expectations placed on her, and of all those that will be placed on her throughout her life.... Never again will she regain full trust in herself. She was destined to fail, and she did not rebel against that fate but accepted it in smoldering rage and suppressed culpability, a self-lacerating readiness to suffer that she invested with the aura of martyrdom.

  This anecdote did not make me fond of my grandfather. I did not at first understand how he could have been capable of so brutal an act. He was a man of the world with excellent manners and even a sense of humor. Photographs I preserve out of scientific curiosity show him in the smartly cut uniform of an officer in the reserves; as a culture-seeking tourist, clad in plaids and looking at some Near Eastern ruins; as imperial counselor in a frock coat. In all of them, a short-trimmed beard half conceals an ironic smile. He was known to be exceptionally stubborn. Molded by all the fatal preconceptions of the nineteenth century, he drew his overly developed conceit from contemporary ideas about one’s “position in the world” and from related cast-iron moral and aesthetic principles, in particular those that were grounded in property. A pompous plush-lined Victorianism imbued him toward the end of his days with a cigar-smoking vulgarity in such sharp contrast with the elegance of his appearance that paradoxically—you see this in portraits of Edward VII as Prince of Wales—it became part of it.