The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Kronstadt lies in a hollow surrounded by steep hills, still medievally walled in and clotured, its little gingerbread houses and ancient trade manses angled narrowly around the church and town hall square. The Transylvanian Saxons had become Lutherans during the Reformation: in front of the massive Black Church—so called because it once had caught fire and some of its Romanesque brickwork still bore the blackened traces of that conflagration—stood the bronze statue of the churchman Honterus, in Faustian pleated frock with ruff collar, capped by a floppy hat shaped like a champagne cork, and pointing an admonishing outstretched arm to the old vicarage, where I, under the laconic supervision of Court Counselor Meyer, had ample opportunity to ponder what ill wind had blown me into this confining, hidebound community, which seemed to have retrenched in an act of stubborn self-protection against scimitar-swinging, slit-eyed, rattail-moustachioed Mongols.

  Court Counselor Meyer’s pedagogic qualities resided solely in his persona and not in any educational method. His entire being breathed discipline. He was so small that even when I was nine I already equaled him in height: a ramrod-straight old gentleman whose head, with its spare bone structure, short-trimmed gray hair and neat short beard, bore a striking resemblance to Joseph Conrad’s. Indeed I found in his library bound issues from the 1870s of the periodical Über Land und Meer (Over Land and Sea) from which, it seemed to me, emanated as from a whiff of tar all the romance of the Tall Ships. When I later read Conrad, it was as if on the bridge of every one of his ships a youthful Court Counselor Meyer were standing in full command.

  I had plenty of time to spend with books. In the mornings, while Court Counselor Meyer, who was by no means ready to resign himself to idleness, labored at some honorific bureaucratic activity at the municipal consistory, I went to school—first a year at primary school, then two years at the Honterus Gymnasium. Both of us returned home for lunch, washed our hands at a foldout washstand as thoroughly as surgeons scrubbing up for an operation and sat down to our meal. This was served by a Polish housekeeper, who occasionally would teach me some Polish words by the tersely rhymed method favored by the Court Counselor (whom she worshipped): “Koza—goat; suknia—coat; krzeła—chair; włos—hair.” At table she served wordlessly, and neither the Counselor nor I uttered a word; we mutely faced each other, he sitting bolt upright and handling knife and fork noiselessly and with a minimum of motion, I trying desperately to imitate him. As we ate the simple but filling dishes, we both would sip from glasses of water. After the meal I thanked him with a formal little bow, and then we walked in the garden in accordance with the dictum “After dinner walk a mile—or be sure to rest awhile.’’

  The garden was a tiny square squeezed in between ivy- and vine-choked walls, with beds of leathery purple and yellow pansies and sky-blue forget-me-nots edged by miniature boxwood. A narrow gravel path crossed the flower beds diagonally in both directions and ran along the four sides of this diminutive horticultural plot. That is where we paced our postprandial “little mile,” the Counselor ahead, I following, both straight as guardsmen, arms crossed at the back, audibly breathing in through the nostrils with the mouth closed during three strides, and then breathing out through lightly parted lips during four strides. Every hundred paces or so, the Counselor would voice without further elaboration some gnomic adage, as for instance: “Cool the head and warm the foot, stomach full but empty gut!” Or: “One single friend is better than the many you may lose; therefore be careful whom you see and wary whom you choose!’’

  When we had done our “little mile,” Counselor Meyer would rest for half an hour—a concession to his age which, he said, I too could expect after another sixty years, but for now I was left with my homework. Once it was finished—it wasn’t very hard usually—I was free to do what I wanted. And what ordinarily I liked best was to scan through the old and crumbly issues of Over Land and Sea. There wasn’t much else for me to do. I had trouble adapting to my new environment. I had no friends. My all too solicitous upbringing had not accustomed me to unconstrained intercourse with coevals: I was timid and felt awkward. In addition, I suffered much from homesickness.

  The monastically labyrinthine vicarage was deathly still in the brooding Romanian summer afternoon. In the main building— the Counselor’s small apartment and my own little room were located in a side wing—Dr. Glondys might be preparing one of his famous sermons, and in view of this awesome possibility everyone naturally was tacitly enjoined to be as quiet as possible.

  Dr. Glondys was an important man and was granted special status among ordinary humans on the strength not only of his ecclesiastical office and the prestige that devolves on patently large talents and responsibilities, but also of his awe-inspiring appearance, his manly handsomeness. Tall, slim and of innately dignified bearing, he carried on his broad shoulders a head that was the image of the classic portrait of Goethe. It had become known that he was a neo-Platonist—the term obviously drew a blank with most people, but nevertheless prevented one from raising one’s voice, slamming a door or, unimaginably worse, engaging in guttersnipe whistling. Therefore not a sound was heard throughout the vicarage; the square in front of the Black Church, where the harshly imposing Honterus drilled his accusatory index finger into everyone’s guilty conscience, was deserted.

  My little room was confining and rather gloomy. So as to have better light, I sat in the window recess, cut so deeply into the building walls that I felt as if I were sitting in a cell. The window, with a view of the tiny garden, was closely framed by an ancient vine, its trunk as thick as an arm, which wreathed it with leaves like Silenus’s head—a very drowsy Silenus, for the whole world dozed in the wine-hued afternoon light. The confused buzzing of summery flies threaded the hour, sluggishly trickling away. Across from me, among the leaves on the ledge of a wall, a cat slept rolled up into a furry black and white ball, and up above, in the high skies—those spanking blue bright Romanian June skies—swallows tweeted.

  I had before me an 1873 issue of Over Land and Sea. From its yellowed pages rose a subtly musty whiff. A foxed steel engraving of a three-master with reefed sails in a small palm-fanned harbor in front of a background of steep volcanic cones—this lured my imagination into the airy remoteness of spiced shores. But there remained a floating core of consciousness filled with nothing but a transparent void—I would have called it my “I,” had I been asked—that was neither here nor there but, instead, in an anguished and tormenting nowhere.

  The bright light falling through the vine leaves drew serrated curlicues on the magazine pages, and the brownish-black letters of the old print took on a green hue, as in the scarlet-fever book of my early childhood. As if the paper bore a visible watermark, another even more remote vision was superimposed on the picture of the exotic harbor with its bare house-cubes, zebra-striped awnings over the windows and corbeled balconies under the palm fronds through which the spice winds blew. It was a vision so dim and fleeting that not even its outline could be perceived: more impression than image, more remembrance of a mere echo than an actual sound, more a hint of a feeling than a feeling itself. And yet it could be expressed in words. It was a vision rendered in the pale color-tints of English children’s books, with the changing light coming through curtains barely moving in the breeze, between which the eye could follow, over massed crowns of trees, a row of poplars lining a country road that extended all the way to the darkly purplish mists of a faraway horizon—a vision that for me contained all the sweetness and warmth of my parental home, all its luminosity shimmering through the birches and rowan trees, the smell of baking, the sound of my mother’s voice. It all now seemed more remote, more fanciful and more inaccessible than even the three-masted earth-circling schooner of a bygone era, and much more irreal and incredible than the medieval surroundings in which I found myself transposed as if by a spell, sitting between these thick walls, entwined by thick creepers, with a thick book on my knees.

  I looked up. Over the heavy roof of the vicarage, the stee
ple of the Black Church rose heavenward. The blueness into which its pointed spire cut like the prow of a large vessel was swarming with swallows flitting hither and thither. Among them also hovered falcons around the spire; at times pigeons threw themselves from a ledge with a splattering of wings, circled the church tower, then dropped down on its roof like a handful of snow, or they slipped into holes in the brickwork that had been put there to hoist blocks of stone when the church was built. I had been told that falcons sometimes pounced on the pigeons with such wild impetuosity that they shattered their own heads against the stone whenever the pigeons managed to escape into those flight holes. I didn’t like to hear such stories, for my heart was on the side of the falcons, but I believed them. Just now, a swallow swung from a hole and rose vertically, as if drawn fluttering along an invisible string, in total disregard of the falcons and in an apparent enraptured longing for heaven; it alit on the uttermost extremity of the minute hand on the tower clock. It was a quarter to three.

  I waited for something to happen, but nothing happened. The falcons kept on hovering and the pigeons flitted to and fro in passionate hunting. Nor did the minute hand of the clock continue in its upward motion. The weight of the swallow was enough to keep the pointer horizontal. (Thus, another story also was proven a lie—to wit: that the hands of the clock were so heavy and the strength of the clockwork correspondingly so powerful that once, when an incautious sexton had looked out through the peephole in the dial as the hands were pointing to five minutes before twelve, he got his head wedged between them and cleanly cut off as by scissors.)

  The skies were a piercing blue. From afar, coming from the hilly slopes beyond the town moat, could be heard the cheerful noises of a bevy of boys—lost in the wind and as if shrunk and made transparent by the distance: a sound merely dreamed, possibly. And indeed, the reality it evoked for me was totally abstract. I imagined those boys as being lively, but they were also abstract to me, like the sailors from the schooner pictured in the old magazine, whom I fancied roaming through the streets of that exotic harbor town. The boys were surely engaged in wild games, and I almost could feel their hot breath; at the same time a sense of being excluded from the rich stream of life cut deeply and painfully into med, whether at a remove of a mere hundred paces or of thousands of miles overseas. I was overcome by a fear I had hitherto not experienced. The world around me split up into imaginings, illusions and lies—and I was no longer one with the world. The tangible world around me—the book on my knees, the gnarled tangle of vines along the wall and even the wall itself, the vicarage wall in front of the mighty Black Church of Kronstadt in Transylvania—all this no longer truly contained me. The core of my being had been left behind in a lot, homefelt at-homeness in Bukovina, remembrance of which I could no longer summon up; even less could I have demonstrated that it was more than a phantom, an illusion, a myth of myself. I was in the Bukovina in as abstract a way as I was in that far-off exotic harbor or with the boys playing games. I began to doubt my own factuality. I could not have given my name with any kind of conviction; it would not have sounded as if it were my own.

  The swallow sitting at the end of the minute hand of the tower clock did not move and the hand itself stood still. Time stood still. The sound of the children was lost in space. The tweeting of the swallows fused into a single piercingly high note like a thread spinning away into the skies. The deep blue of those skies, in which thousands of swallows were scattered like tiny playing-card clubs, seemed all at once transformed heraldically into a reverse ermine: a black sky seeded with swallows of a forget-me-not blue. And thus it became transfixed. The whole world stood still.

  Then, quite suddenly, the swallow flew away and the minute hand snapped over to show a quarter past three. Barely a half-hour had elapsed; the sky was blue once more, and the swallows were once again black, like tiny fork prongs flitting to and fro. Once more their tweeting was intense and relentless and once again the sounds of the children could be heard from afar.

  My mother visited me at Christmas. She had given up her rural cottage and was vague as to where and how she lived. By means of a small Christmas tree made of green-enameled wire with glued-on green paper needles, which folded out like an umbrella and was decorated with innumerable small candles and lavish silver tinsel, and with her typically thoughtful gifts, she managed to arrange a true Christmas Eve in her hotel room, even though it served only to sharpen more painfully my longings for the festive atmosphere of Christmas celebrations at home. She promised to come back at Easter but in fact came much sooner, this time accompanied by a gentleman with neatly parted flaxen hair, of careful manners and impeccable attire, who attended to her with utmost, even adoring politeness. Upon my suspicious question of what role he was to play in our lives, she disclosed that she had remarried and that henceforth I was to consider him my stepfather.

  Then a strange thing happened. Whenever one spoke of family spirit and tribal solidarity, one referred only to my mother’s kin. My father became an outsider, personally related to and loved by no one but my sister and me. But now our solidarity with him manifested itself with an intensity that my mother may hardly have anticipated, at least in me; that my sister would take his side unconditionally was to be foreseen, but my own reaction was equally strong. I would rather have strangled the stranger escorting my mother than concede to him even the smallest of the rights over me belonging to my father. I refused to call him anything than by his family name, persistently addressed him ceremoniously with Sie, the formal third-person plural, deliberately ignored his requests though these were polite and never peremptory, and followed them only when my mother transmitted them as her own. I overlooked his acts of kindness, especially any demonstrations of his almost reverential love for my mother—in which, I assumed, I was included merely to please her. How much I wronged him I perceived only gradually and much later. It took years before I learned to like him truly and before I came to realize that no one could have been more patient, correct, tactful and kind than he showed himself throughout the time we were together. Once, while I was home on vacation, I flew into an uncontrollable rage when Cassandra told me, not without impishly malicious intent, that quite probably I would soon be granted the joy of getting a little brother or, better still, sister. My mother heard of this, and I’m afraid it did not have a salutary influence on her willingness to conform in her second marriage to the rightful expectations that my father’s successor may have placed in it.

  He was a well-to-do, highly respected man, in most of his character traits the exact opposite of my father: restrained and dry where the latter was expansive and blusteringly humorous, deliberate and composed where the latter was inconsiderate, spontaneous and gruff. He loved my mother with a shy devotion that never turned into bitterness but merely lost its light, became vesperal and eventually was extinguished as he came to perceive the inherent hardness that made her sweetly evanescent smile so brittle, the underlying violence that suddenly could break through her inner-directed dreaminess and the scornful arrogance that hid beneath her vulnerability. Yet at first she revived under the warmth of his devotion; to begin with, her second marriage seemed incomparably happier than her first. Even though I did not care to acknowledge it, she radiated a kind of nuptial transfiguration: the self-assurance, greatly enhancing her beauty, of a woman who knows herself to be loved and desired and—last but by no means least!—economically secure. It was to remain but a short afterbloom.

  We were still in the much vaunted 1920s. In our own Bukovina and in other similarly remote corners of the world, filled by the rustling of corn leaves and the shrieks of buzzards, the decade was dominated less by the art-historical developments of Dada, Expressionism and twelve-tone music than by the triumphal appearance in the Old World of the American life-style. It was the sounds of jazz and the vogue for pageboy hair rather than the Blaue Reiter that penetrated the melancholy spaciousness between the Siret, Prut and Dniester rivers. Movies served as the prime mediator of cultural
trends, and the fops of the jeunesse dorée in Czernowitz, Radautz, Suceava and Sadagura even then (when men’s fashions were not yet as parodistic as they are nowadays) liked to dress like silver-screen Chicago gangsters. With their fedoras worn low on the brow and their chalk-striped suits with square shoulders and bell-bottom trousers, their black shirts with candy-pink and pistachio-colored ties, they brought the true spirit of the twentieth century to the idyllic land of pipe-tooting mountain shepherds, perfumed and garlic-chewing operetta officers, and Hasidim sprung from the pictures of Chagall. The house my mother moved to with her second husband—it stood, surrounded by old cherry trees as gnarled as oaks, in one of the last large gardens in the center of Czernowitz—contained the first privately owned radio; its acquisition had required the authorization of the Romanian military authorities. There, amidst static whistles, chortlings and growls mingling viciously with syncopated rhythms, occurred my first love encounter with what, ten years later, was to be given the derogatory term “nigger music” and included in the category of “degenerate art’’: American jazz.

  The power of the media—foremost the motion pictures and illustrated periodicals—made itself felt in full force. Following the example of the Americans blithely ignoring their own Prohibition, people took to drinking cocktails; the men who mixed them wore with their dinner jackets small white boaters on their smoothly oiled-down hair. Dream cities in futuristic styles evoked the vision of a golden future in a world-spanning metropolis, enjoying freedom of religion, the equality of all races and social justice. The mood ran high in those years right after the first suicidal bloodletting, and the promise of an earthly paradise and the New Jerusalem arose once more as fresh winds of youthfulness blew across the Atlantic. The American life-style was as enticing as the American optimism it sprang from. Bare of scruples, people set out to make money and, without much regard for obsolete conventional hierarchies, blithely considered a fellow man either a “pardner” or a “sucker.” Girls cropped both their hair and their skirts. People who never would have done such things a few years before danced the Charleston to the tune “Knock on wood that in this life I still have a faithful wife,” speculated on the stock exchange and associated with Jews.