The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  He may scarcely have known that facet of her nature—and, if at all, only in fugitive moments; the futile hope that these might occur more frequently could serve only to accentuate her less attractive qualities. Because his constant high spirits and his playfulness irritated her, her behavior with him emphasized her worst traits: harshness, triggered by mimosalike sensitive pride; intolerance, jaggedly sharpened by her grinding subterranean rage; jitteriness, grounded in her obsessive assumption of responsibilities and simultaneous dread of failing them; rigidity. I enumerate these features as if they made up a single, coherent character bundle. But this was not the case. It was rather as if, in response to a given irritant, she recovered one or another response from among the broken pieces of what once had been a homogeneous whole, an otherness shattered by a misspent life. Her harmonious and pleasing moments were its far-off echo; her harsh explosions stemmed from despair over its loss. At times, when she sought to take revenge—that is, when she punished—there emerged something truly diabolical in her.

  The experience that made me callous enough to bear with pretended stoicism her suicide threat and the subsequent make-believe scenario of an alleged departure from that hotel in Velden, in Carinthia—a situation more likely to occur between lovers in the dramatics of D’Annunzio—that experience had occurred much earlier. She had experimented with this shock treatment on me in the first years after the war. In those days her anxiety for her children was at its peak, and she incarcerated us in the garden with corresponding severity. One time—and only this one, fervently enjoyed time—I found myself there without supervision. My sister was inside for lessons and even Cassandra was not close. I had been playing with an especially beautiful ball, decorated with circus scenes, given to me for my birthday. As a result of a clumsy throw, it rolled through the bars of the garden gate.... Outside stood a boy, older than I and—so it seemed to me—with the seductive mien of the street-wise urchin, holding the ball in his hands. It was useless to ask him to return it to me through the bars. “Come and get it,” he said, “then we’ll play together.’’

  What he expected of me was monstrous. Was I to leave the garden and go out into the street to play there with this stranger, unkempt and so obviously irreverent? No doubt his games would be wilder—and more temptingly adventurous—than my own tame hopping around with a colored ball. But to give in to this temptation would be not merely to transgress a rigorous prohibition, but openly to rebel, wantonly to disavow the authorities safeguarding the laws of the universe. I felt my pulse hammering in my temples.

  Derision glittered in his eyes. He doubted I could muster that much courage. I flung misgiving to the winds and slipped out. Immediately he dropped the ball and kicked it some hundred yards down the road. We ran after it. Of course, he reached the ball long before I did, and kicked it even farther away; when I finally caught up with him, only because he had waited for me, he dribbled the ball over my feet and sent it flying away in a flat curve. Thus we played—if one can call this a game—until we reached the edge of the city proper and its more populated streets. He continued to “play,” and soon I had lost all sight of him. I went on running desperately. I loved my ball: its vivid pictures of clowns and trained poodles, acrobats and jugglers inspired my fantasy, and it had been my mother’s birthday gift to me. I dreaded to lose it. Almost worse was the disillusionment that I could have been betrayed so blatantly—for the first time in my life and obviously as punishment for my disobedience. In vain I searched for my treacherous playmate among the crowds and in the flow of vehicles. Soon I found myself in the center of Czernowitz on the Ringplatz, my heart filled with all the bitterness of the world: grief over the loss of my ball, dread of the evildoer weighing on me, and now, in addition, the fear of having lost my way without hope of return.

  I must have been a pitiful sight. My long locks and velvet suit with lace collar—my much hated daily attire at the time — together with my tears, could not remain long unnoticed among the Jews in caftans, the coachmen slouching against their fiacres, the spur-jingling Romanian soldiers, the colorfully dressed peasant women with baskets of eggs on their heads, the rabbis and solid ethnic-German burghers in their stiff shirt-collars worn, according to local tradition, with wide knickerbockers and Tyrolean hats. Czernowitz was a city in which everyone knew almost everybody else. A gentleman who saw how obviously lost I was rescued me by putting me in a hackney coach and sending me home.

  I found the garden empty and the house closed. All was silent; there was no sign of life. I knocked, I rattled the main door and hammered on it; all in vain. I ran around the house several times: all the doors were closed, the shutters were shut, and the Venetian blinds on the porch were lowered. I stood before each of the windows and called and called. For an instant I thought I saw the pale mask of my sister through the blinds of the French doors on the veranda, but it disappeared in a trice and must have been only an illusion. Desperately I called for my mother, Cassandra, the housekeeper Mrs. Hofmann, the maids and my dog Rauf. Silence. I was in a panicky sweat. Any neighbors were quite far off, and of those I knew only a Polish surgeon by the name of Dr. Buraczinsky. For some time I had been allowed to play with his son, but our friendship had fallen apart over a toy: a tin armored cruiser that ran on wheels. That something that belonged in the water should move on dry land by means of small concealed wheels as if it were on the high seas seemed to me as running against nature and worse than a fraud. Miroszju—the name of Buraczinsky junior—declared I was merely jealous. This was what had caused our breakup and since then we hadn’t seen each other.

  It was true I was jealous, though not of his fraudulent ship but rather of the freedom he enjoyed. He was allowed to play with other boys in the gardens of our district without having to fear that this would mean the end of the world. Yet he was well brought up and always kept within calling distance from his house: when, in the evenings, Mrs. Buraczinsky would pop out her head from the dormer window of their small villa and let a long-drawn-out “Mirooohszju!” reverberate in the smoky turquoise of the darkening summer skies, an obedient “Proszju!” (“Yes, please!’’) could be heard from far away in reply, an exchange that, in my loneliness, always left me forlorn. The dutiful answer to the call for homecoming seemed to attest to a day’s work done; I heard it as one condemned to idleness, excluded from the world of connecting activities and affectionate relationships that find expression in the interplay between a name and its echo. It was this that now came to mind in my moment of dire need. I ran to the Buraczinsky house, pushed Madame B. aside, scaled the stairs to the top floor, stuck my head out the window and yelled all the names of my missing family into the countryside. In my innermost core, I may have known, of course, that their disappearance was make-believe, but greater still was the fear that it was otherwise and that they had actually left house, city and country, forgetting me. I was only six years old. Madame Buraczinsky took me by the hand and led me back to our house, where she energetically rang the bell at the entrance; when it was finally opened, she delivered me to my mother with the strong recommendation not to play such jokes again at the expense of a child.

  But my mother did not mean it as a joke; it was a punishment that was supposed to teach me a never-to-be-forgotten lesson. She achieved that goal—though probably with corollary effects that invaded my whole nervous system with fine-webbed ramifications. My father never heard of it. If he had, he surely would have dampened, in this one case, the jocularity with which he generally commented on my mother’s pedagogic measures.

  They separated after thirteen years of marriage, in 1922. It happened rather precipitately. One day our mother packed up her things and her children and brought us all to Vienna. Those came with us who, in any case, had been eager to leave the household in Czernowitz: her erstwhile and presently our own governess, Miss Lina Strauss; Mrs. Hofmann, our housekeeper, who for reasons of age returned to her native Bohemia. Cassandra remained behind, for my mother intended henceforth to keep me for herself
alone.

  My father let us leave in good faith. He expected us home after a few invigorating weeks at the Carinthian lakes and after some spiritual regeneration at the hands of our Viennese relatives. He was to be proven wrong. The choir of my mother’s kin, which had always provided the tonal background for my mother’s tribulations, as is traditional in tragedies (“exile under the yoke of slavery’’), was jubilant: her sisters, whom the war and the hard years thereafter had made independent and self-sustaining, notwithstanding their consonance with the collective spirit of the family, had adopted the rhetoric of the new era. (Most of the catchwords so freely used by feminists today had already been hatched at that time.)

  My mother considered the war, the uncertain postwar period, the disintegration of the old world and the dawning of the new (from which, up to then, she had felt excluded) as penal extra aggravations to her imprisonment in marriage. She now heard this awakening call of the new spirit of the age from the mouths of her younger sisters as a clarion call promising final freedom. These nestlings seemed to her to be taking wing like a covey of larks flying toward the sun. That her barely grown-up youngest sister was to become an artisan in the newly formed Wiener Werkstätte seemed to her as bold and spirited as that the next youngest professed herself a theosophist; that the third youngest was a pioneer of women’s rights; and the fourth, the eccentric bluestocking in the family, went so far as to endorse socialism. All these fresh, confusing breaths now blew in unison into the horn of emancipation, particularly that of the liberation from the marital yoke. A sensitive, high-minded and physically frail woman had been deprived of her right to a fulfilled emotional life and to social evolution; moreover, a passionately self-sacrificing mother had been saddled by a mentally unbalanced (the woolen ski cap!), monomaniacal (the hunting!) and amoral (lack of respect for his father-in-law!) egotist and brutal sensualist.

  My grandmother somewhat reduced the ideologically high-flown polemics against the fiend who held her oldest daughter under the yoke of serfdom, by declaring that, yes, she too never had liked him but that, as a Catholic, she had to exclude any thought of divorce. My grandfather, on the other hand, already then in the habit of commenting on events around him only with abrupt barks, his decrepit head leaning on the spastically clutched crook of his cane, asserted bitterly that in view of the present proletarization of the whole world and the general decline in manners and morals, “nothing matters a damn anyway,” and everyone should do whatever he felt like doing or not doing. This was the backing with which my mother sued my father for divorce. With great understanding, my father did his best to facilitate the proceedings. The marriage was annulled with the provision that both parents were to share equally in the rights to the children. My sister and I coped with the confusion ensuing from this arrangement in the years to come with the patience of the much tried and with, of course, occasional outbursts of laughter.

  It would have been understandable if my mother had used her freedom to start an entirely new and, if possible, active life in Vienna. But Vienna was desolate for her in those years; her parents, distraught over the loss of their fortune and the proletarization of their world as a result of war and inflation, led a very secluded life. She had grown out of her own family and had become alienated both from her parents and from her siblings, who were trying to adapt themselves to the times to an extent beyond her own capabilities. Also, she may have had already some inkling of what, twenty years later, was to become bitterly evident—namely, that her family’s vaunted cohesion was merely rhetorical in nature and the cohabitation of all its members under one roof did not go as smoothly as one would have hoped in the case of like-minded, devoted kinfolk. Just about everyone in the family had either inherited or acquired by imitation from the head of the tribe his inflexibility, foremost his eldest daughter, our mother. Although forever conscious of her inadequacy, she, after all, had managed her own household for thirteen years, and it was unthinkable that she might conform to the stiflingly conventional concepts and customs of her family; even less was it to be expected that she could adapt to the radical new notions inherent in the spirit of the times. On the other hand, it was also out of the question for her to live alone. All unmarried daughters lived as a matter of course under the guardianship of the family and under the parental roof; now that she was once again unmarried, she was counted among them: the independence of a young divorcee—she was thirty-two at the time—was considered as something shady, almost disreputable.

  She got off the horns of this dilemma by returning to the Bukovina. An admirer, the same who years later told me of her peculiar fascination, placed at her disposal a quaintly but tastefully furnished peasant’s house in the midst of a magnificent landscape an hour’s drive from Czernowitz. It was distinguished by an attractive collection of Romanian folk art, leather and ceramics, roughly woven rugs and hand-carved wooden table utensils, and by a total lack of bodily comforts. Even today my bones ache from the unforgivingly hard bedsteads, and I still can smell the sharp fumes from the hearth and the sooty clay of the open fireplace, the odors of rancid mutton fat, charred thyme, and garlic, and I am haunted still by the fly-infested lapidary hole provided in a wooden plank over the cesspool. But to my mother the little house, with its thick straw-covered roof, its crooked whitewashed loam walls, the rural knickknacks in the three small rooms, may have appeared as something playful out of a fairy tale, maybe even as an expression of emancipation, given the newfound taste for folklorica.

  She could have moved to the Odaya. The rural property, from the estate of her Phanariot great-grandmother, belonged to us all—to her mother, to her and her siblings, and to all the grandchildren—and thus to no one in particular. Because it was in a remote location on the left bank of the Prut River and was not productive—a few Easter lambs and some Christmas carp from a muddy pond were among its meager farm produce — it was despised as not worth the price of its upkeep. All the same, the house was there, on the estate that in 1909 had been intended to shelter my mother’s new family and whence we had fled the Russians in 1914. In Romanian, odaya means “room,” and I did not know that the word derives from an older one meaning “estate,” or “property’’; I didn’t understand why such a fairly spacious building and the holdings around it had the name. Perhaps it was a term used only within the family, but in any case, the factual anonymity indicates how little pride of ownership was involved when we spoke of it. Even my father did not think much of it: as part of his bride’s dowry, he had considered it almost insultingly puny, even though he liked to shoot hares and ducks in the wetlands of the Prut. Mother’s hatred of it was unconcealed; for her, it represented exile, the scene of all the horrors of her first marital years, whence she had fled as often and for as long as possible to Switzerland and Egypt. It was there, in the Odaya, that, in danger of her life and under great pains, she had borne my sister and, in the attempt to avoid repeating that ordeal, had almost lost me. She had never thought it worthwhile to bother about its furnishings.

  Nowadays interior decorators seem to be inordinately stimulated by the chance to modernize old barns, attics and warehouses. This was not yet the case either in 1909 or in 1923, at which time my mother—even though she was homeless—ruled out the Odaya as a possible residence. The building, originally constructed as a cloister and later converted into a rural mansion, stood like a forbidding fortress on the flat steppe, and it included stables, barns, granaries, carriage houses and living space all under a single roof. Before us, generations of predatory estate managers had lived there and only a few rooms had been reserved for the masters. Their furnishings may have been fashionable in the time of Cuza Voda, the first elected Prince of Moldavia in 1859; since then, mice had nested in the tasseled plush of the neo-Gothic furniture; moths swarmed from the sun-bleached taffeta curtains; the dried decorative flowers sprouting in discolored bunches from gigantic Manchu porcelain vases, edged in brass in the fashion of the Rococo period, were crumbling to dust; the mirrors were blind;
the steel engravings on the walls were foxed by brown mold; and cracked oil paint flaked from the portraits of genealogically unidentifiable forebears. There was no plumbing of any sort: one bathed in tin tubs, filled with innumerable pails of heated well water, and performed one’s other elemental needs in oriels, glued like swallows’ nests to the building’s outer walls, from which pipes led directly down to the dungheap of the stables. That my mother had preferred a house in town to such discomforts after our return to the Bukovina was readily understandable, and even now it was comprehensible that she felt little attraction for the place. Yet in a sense it was her ancestral home, and it seemed astounding that now she would swallow her pride and accept an even more primitive shelter from friends.

  It was the first of a series of undertakings that were acknowledged by those who wished her well, including my father, with an uncomprehending and somewhat ironical shaking of the head; but the motivation was fairly transparent—they were attempts at ultimate liberation, trial flights to escape the cage of convention and lead a life according to her own notions. Unfortunately, the fact that she had no self-evolved ideas and that she merely adopted others’—usually the most prevalent and hackneyed— soon brought her enthusiasms to a halt. At the same time her maneuvers camouflaged some quite purposeful strategies: she managed to rid herself of my sister, as well as Cassandra. Without any objections on my father’s part (he favored a German education for us), my sister was placed in a boarding school in Vienna while I was to be sent, at the end of the summer vacation, to the German-language Gymnasium in Kronstadt. I was removed from the care of Cassandra and yet remained within my mother’s easy reach.

  At school I was entrusted to the guardianship of the father-in-law of one Dr. Viktor Glondys, then municipal vicar of Kronstadt and later bishop of all Transylvanian Saxons. My house warden, the long-retired Court Counselor Meyer, was a wiry little man of some seventy years, spartanically tight-lipped and of patriarchal sternness. I have carried in me for a lifetime the gloominess of the untold hours I spent behind the gray walls of that massive vicarage, but Kronstadt itself was another matter: it seemed to have emerged whole from a toy shop, a fairy-tale German enclave in the elemental Romanian countryside, spanned by a cupola of boundless blue skies.