The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  He always impressed me as the prototype of the flourishing bourgeois at the turn of the century, during the so-called Gründerzeit. His well-to-do family was of Swiss origin; they had come to Vienna early in the eighteenth century and, together with cousins who also had emigrated from Fribourg, gained merit through their service with the then emerging Austrian tobacco monopoly. The cousins rose high in the world, they were made counts and married into the aristocracy. His branch of the family gained only a modest title of nobility, and whether there rankled in him some envy of those favored ones or whether the entrepreneurial spirit of his commoner forebears was reawakened in him is a moot question, but his life was that of an American-style self-made man. His admirers, especially his daughters, liked to retell with unquestioning adulation the legend of how, against the will of his family—but the why in this remains unfathomable—he turned his efforts to the lumber industry, how he became a leading figure in forestry circles and amassed a fortune that allowed him to marry the beautiful, well-born and well-endowed daughter of a general of Irish extraction. (That on her mother’s side she had Greek ancestors who in the distant past had plundered some Wallachian fiefdoms increased her value—and thereby his reputation as a man who knew how to acquire the best on the most favorable terms.) This version of his triumphs, which surely in reality was not such a black-and-white thing, incensed my father, who never tired of stripping the mythic figure of his father-in-law of his nimbus; his scorn helped to set the seeds of my cordial dislike of my grandfather.

  I saw him only seldom, though. My maternal grandparents no longer lived in the Bukovina. They too were part of what my father liked to call “cultural compost’’: envoys of the civilizing administration of an empire that no longer existed. Even before the First World War, they and my mother’s siblings had returned to Vienna, whither we, who after 1919 were Romanian citizens, visited them at most once a year for a few days—usually when passing through on our way to the Carinthian lakes, where my mother dragged my sister and me for summer vacations, hated by both of us and clouded by homesickness for our house and our dogs. Eventually we came to understand that these “fresh-air resorts’’—as if the Carpathians were lacking in fresh air and the fragrance of pine woods!—were a pretext for Mother to see her family and to afford one or another of her sisters a few weeks of relaxation. For those sisters had by then become impoverished and had to work for a living: the war and subsequent inflation, as well as some ill-advised speculations, had reduced my grandfather’s legendary fortune to nothing more than its zeros.

  So I never saw him in the fullness of his life, but only as a sick and broken man; and on the strength of my father’s denigrations of the family myth, according to which he was the sole proprietor and protector of all civic and paterfamilial virtues, I thought of him as an unpleasant, despotic, petty, hidebound old man. He gave no evidence in his last years that contradicted this impression. He would sit immobile on a sofa in the drawing room of his apartment in Vienna, filled with heavy baroque furniture, family portraits, bronzes and layers of dark Oriental carpets, chin supported on his hands and lavishly beringed fingers clutching the ivory crook of an ebony cane. I fancied that this stick was the same with which he had thrashed my mother’s back when she was a little girl. I was certainly not the only one who breathed a surreptitious sigh of relief when he died in the icy winter of 1927. In triumph my sister showed me one of the rings that had made his large pale hands, worm-streaked by thick blue veins, so especially repellent to me. It was given her as a reward for her skill in countering his temper tantrums with the slippery smoothness of her good manners. Strangely enough, an heirloom also fell to me, who was not endowed with such diplomatic skills: an intricately worked gold pocket watch with a dial in Arabic numerals which he had brought back from one of his trips to Turkey. It disappeared, like so many other things during my student days, at the pawnbroker’s, never to be seen again.

  I also have a picture of the young girl driven by that cane stroke from childhood ingenuousness into the baffling quandary of her being, to a realization of inadequacy in the face of the tasks with which life would confront her. In this photograph she stands, straight and lissome, in a high-necked summer dress in front of a bench in the parental garden—a large garden of the kind that even grandchildren, when told of its splendors, will dream about. Something of its freedom-promising green glory can still be seen in her eyes, but already it is tainted by the nostalgia of leave-taking. She is every inch the young girl brought up according to her social position—and at the same time she betrays the bedevilment of a young being imprinted by the stereotypes of convention. Her comeliness cannot conceal a puzzled consternation that has become second nature to her. She knows what’s in store for her, as the saying goes: she foresees her future and the impossibility of coping with the demands that will be addressed to her—without conceiving for a moment that she might be able to change anything. The “grand life” belongs to the world of dreams: it may happen, but this will change hardly anything at all in her preordained fate as a woman. These are the sober facts: she will be married as well as possible, to a man in comfortable circumstances and not below her own standing; she will have children and will try to educate them according to the same stereotypes that marked her own education—verbal stereotypes, which she may even recognize as such but to which she has bowed without demur. She must live in accordance with the rhetoric of her caste and era, and if she does not succeed, her failure is her own and not due to the emptiness of the phraseology.

  My father, to whom she was engaged shortly thereafter, following a tennis game, told us that she was an excellent pistol shot—under his personal instruction, it goes without saying. She rode horses well, though never without being accompanied. She cut a pretty figure as a skater and she loved to swim, though again always under supervision. The secretly entertained dream of becoming a pediatrician—after all, she had obtained a diploma—could not be realized by a girl of her class, which differed from the average philistines only through its greater pretensions. Instead, she attended in succession two well-known home economics schools, one in Bonn and the other in Lausanne. But the unrealized dream of serving humanity as a pediatrician curdled into a bitter residue at the bottom of her soul. Only her naivete remained unaffected.

  I have not forgotten the wistfulness of her look as she watched an ophthalmologist—a woman of eminence, a Russian and, so it was said, a morphine addict—the chief physician at the Czernowitz eye clinic, which, under her leadership, was recognized as state-of-the-art. This aristocratically thin-boned, eagle-nosed lady in a white smock was treating me after an accident in which I almost lost my eyesight. While examining me, she chatted of this and that. My mother’s anxious, attentive, wistful expression as she listened changed to horror when the doctor said in passing, in her smoky, Slavic voice: “No woman who hasn’t had syphilis can call herself truly a woman.” No, Mother’s notions of feminine self-fulfillment were less radically emancipated.

  Shortly before her engagement, she danced at her first ball — one waltz too many—with a young lieutenant of the lancers, a golden-blond Pole with an interesting nervousness in his behavior, no doubt due to his being hounded by creditors. She was taken home forthwith. Decades later, when I had grown up, she confessed to me that she had fallen in love with him at first glance and irrevocably had dedicated her life to him. He remained the “great love” of her life even though—or rather because, although she could not admit this—she never saw him again. She still remembered his name but would never disclose it. “A name with a great many twittering sounds,” she admitted with a bewitching smile and a surprising touch of irony. He cast a fair shade over her entire life: her sole, her lost great love which forbade her ever to love another man. The punishing stroke with the cane had been sublimated. After being sent home from her first ball after one too many waltzes, she knew herself to have been cheated of life’s happiness.

  And what about that other shade in the slouch hat
and the artist’s flowing lavalliere, on the sea cliff near Trieste? She never spoke of him and I never dared ask her about him; no doubt there is an unutterable reason behind both her silence and my discretion. So this man remained a mystery between us in a twofold way: as a sign of that most intimate core which every human being conceals in his innermost self, and as that undefinable and most private reserve which keeps us from penetrating the innermost self of another being.

  Of her engagement with my father she told only horrifying stories. According to her, he was bent on hurting her by shocking the whole world. In the fashion of the times favored by lady-killer bachelors, he had shaved his head completely. She was too inexperienced to perceive that he was anything but a lady-killer. He was simply a man who lived a more full-blooded life than all the straitlaced people around them. He bubbled over with irrepressible zest and vigor—different from her stealthily tenacious vitality, which was to help her survive him by several decades. His overwhelming good spirits never failed him; he was always spontaneous, full of humorous notions and scurrilous ideas. Because only a very few could match his lust for life, he rubbed almost everyone the wrong way. Out of a puerile defiance that remained one of his distinctive features all his life, he took pleasure in his role as the philistines’ bugaboo. No stranger to the accepted rhetoric of the day, he used it in antithesis. One of his favorite sayings was: “Il faut épater les bourgeois!” To my mother’s Victorian soul, this was sheer blasphemy. She soon saw him as a true monster.

  My father was a full fourteen years older than my mother; when she was eighteen he was already thirty-two, an age at which he could be expected to show a manly, staid character. Instead, he behaved as if he had just emerged from puberty. He joked frivolously with my mother’s younger sisters, who were silenced, baffled, repelled by and, at the same time, hopelessly enamored of him. What they might have found amusing in a contemporary scandalized them in a mature man. He countered by calling them a bunch of silly geese and soon no longer spoke to them. He even dared to contradict their father—and had the additional temerity in proving to be in the right. Nothing like that had ever happened to my grandfather; he almost had a stroke and would have canceled his daughter’s engagement forthwith if he had not feared the embarrassment this would have entailed. Meanwhile the son-in-law to be, from whom more respect was to be expected—after all, the bride had a quite considerable dowry—amused himself by composing a little song satirizing the arrogance of the propertied:

  I own a theater box

  Where I’m seen in tails and high hat.

  I have servants and horses and cars,

  My money allows me all that....

  The ditty bore the hardly flattering title “The Show-off.’’

  Of his future mother-in-law my father asserted that, when preparing for bed, she wore white heron feathers in her hair along with her nightgown, and that when she wrote to her couturier in Paris everybody in the house had to walk on tiptoe. Instead of a bouquet of flowers, he presented his bride with a brace of freshly shot woodcock tied by a leather thong. His dogs attacked the idolized scion of the family (the only son and heir after five daughters), a boy of extraordinary beauty and equally exceptional stupidity, and almost bit off his nose, so that it had to be sewn on again; the scar remained visible to the end of his days. When the bride summoned up her courage to ask her maverick bridegroom whether he might not please let his hair grow again, he replied, smartly clicking his heels, that to his everlasting regret he unfortunately was totally bald but would see to it that the matter was redressed: henceforth, throughout the summer of 1908, except at meals, he wore a heavy woolen cap with a red pom-pom, headgear suitable for winter sports. My mother’s grandmother was then still alive, over ninety and no longer in full possession of her mental faculties, but highly respected as was her due according to her rank in the family and her forebears in far-off Wallachia. During a tennis match, Father managed to smash an overhead ball straight in the face of the venerable lady— unintentionally, it goes without saying—and this did not make him more popular with the family, especially when we children learned of the incident years later and found it irresistibly amusing. “It’s obvious they’ve taken after their father,” was the tart comment.

  And indeed this was true in that we could always see the grotesque or comical aspect of a situation and express our enjoyment of it in a rather exuberantly Rabelaisian way. My mother’s legacy seems to me more dubious: from her we inherited irascibility.

  In the myth that my mother created of herself, she ascribed her perennially smoldering rage to the disappointment in her marriage. It was not to be expected of her to recognize its other sources, least of all the helplessness implanted in her long before. She stubbornly stuck to the notion that all the shortcomings in her life originated in that period when she should have experienced her true flowering as a woman and instead, at the side of an unloved man—one whose undeniably lovable qualities she never appreciated—was confronted with inadequacy both as wife and later as mother.

  I suspected at times that her anger had yet another root, namely in a profanation of her naive faith. She had been brought up in a thoughtless Catholicism that saw in regular religious practices — church visits, the telling of the rosary beads, occasional confessions and Holy Communions—a more than adequate fulfillment of one’s duties toward God and His Holy Son, toward the Holy Mother and the Holy Church. This in no way equaled the self-evident reality of God’s world as Cassandra saw it, though it was equally unquestioning—but unquestioning only with regard to dogma and mere theology: any discussion of the Pope’s infallibility would have left my mother as empty of thought and as blankly incomprehending as an inquiry into the dual godlike and human natures of the Savior. As a Christian and a good Catholic, she lived in the innocence of ignorance, which unfortunately vouchsafed only a vulnerable and trivial state of grace. Her fiance’s booming atheism, with its bold Nietzsche quotations and Wagnerian background music (occasionally also bitingly ironic—still more disconcerting) was bound to throw her off the comfortable path of her shallow faith. He was destined to be her spouse, her lord and master, to whom on principle she was to grant the same authority as her father had, and if his views were shocking to her, they also opened up a confusing vision of a spiritual freedom in which she was anxious to participate so as to please him. Had her parents been aware of even a hint of this dilemma, they would gladly have allowed her to pursue the study of pediatrics. This, after all, was the direction in which the winds of the time were blowing. Meanwhile she thought to assuage her burgeoning doubts by reading Renan, and what in all probability remained concealed was a remnant of guilt, which she later attributed to her husband’s subsequent misconduct.

  Even decades later, the question whether she could not have refused to marry him encountered total incomprehension. How was that? It had been so decided, and therefore it had to be gone through. But hadn’t her parents soon realized how little the two suited each other? Why, certainly, but who truly “suits” another? The miraculous power of love is precisely that it can overcome such discrepancies, and love is alleged to develop automatically— though not immediately—in marital life. All the external circumstances fitted well enough: it was a good match for both of them. Theirs was a life deep in the provinces, in the most remote crown land of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy; her parents too lived in the Bukovina, drawn there by the lumber of the Carpathian forests and properties inherited from their Phanariot ancestors (among these the Odaya, the house where my sister was born and whence we fled in 1914). Though it was true that the future son-in-law had no money to speak of, he was in a promising position in government service, he had a good name and high patronage, as well as an influential father in Vienna. Had there been no convulsions, no outbreak of the war and no collapse of the Austrian monarchy, had the Bukovina remained part of Austria, and had the fortune my mother brought to her marriage not been lost, it could have been for her, while not an ideally happy life, at least a
n acceptably pleasant one—but only with another man.

  In his role as husband she found my father farcical, a parody of what a head of family was to represent; in his role as lover, outright repellent. When, after four years of her staying in various sanatoria and another four years of separation caused by the war, the two finally lived together in 1919 in a radically changed world, he showed no comprehension whatever for her desire, natural with a young woman, nevertheless to keep a house where an active social life would endow her with a measure of prestige. He was unable to understand that she expected the real (albeit not necessarily “grand’’) life of marriage to conform to a young girl’s dream, to take place in an ambience of evening gowns illumined by glowing candlelight. Still less could he comprehend that this desire was not so much inspired by an urge to achieve social standing but, to her way of thinking, construed as a marital duty. She devoted much love to their house; at least it was in Czernowitz, and she could establish in it something of the solidly anchored family life she had known in her own parental home — though perhaps in a somewhat more relaxed atmosphere and without its draconian severity.

  My memory places the house in a garden where beeches, birches and ash trees convey great airiness and luminosity; it is a two-storied neoclassical building similar to innumerable country mansions built in the nineteenth century throughout the Russian cultural sphere as well as in the American South; it has a colonnaded façade and a glassed-in porch in the back giving out to the depths of the garden. I need hardly mention that, were I to see it today, it would seem considerably more modest than it appeared to me in those far-off days. I had already experienced that shrinking of dimensions attendant upon any comparison between mythicized and factual past whenever I returned home for vacation from my various and dubious schools. Each time the house and garden seemed more confined, more trite, especially when, once my mother left, the familiar and beloved rooms assumed the gently run-down bohemian coziness of a bachelor’s quarters.