The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  My mother followed these innovations reluctantly. It is true that the long-dreamed-of moment arrived when she was in a position to open her house to a glittering social life—or at least to the backwoods notion of what this would be: shimmering candlelight on the bare shoulders of glamorous ladies, melodic laughter and the tinkling of champagne glasses, and what have you—without having my father appear, to the horror of the assembled guests, surrounded by a pack of baying hounds and dragging behind him through the festive crowd a freshly shot wild boar, all the while repeating an apologetic “Not to mind me, please!” on his way to his room, where, much pleased, he would throw the piece of game out the window. She was now in fact the respected mistress of a house, though a more modest one, and open it she did, though only to learn soon enough how right my father had been not to lend his own house to such diversions.

  Her sense of social duties drove her in the direction in which her emancipated sisters in Vienna pointed her. A lady from the German circles in Czernowitz was an active promulgator of women’s rights, and my mother joined her in these strivings. The activities of these johnny-come-lately suffragettes hardly went beyond some inspiring speeches and various meetings with feminist pioneers from abroad over tea with thin slices of lemon, rum in crystal decanters and petits fours. My mother was given the honor of leading a delegation of ladies from Czernowitz to a congress in Reps, an idyllic small town in Transylvania. She took the opportunity to pick me up in Kronstadt on the way and take me along for the three days of meetings; as a result, I owe to these feminists one of the most enchanting memories of my early life.

  While the amazons worked, a playmate was assigned to me, the son of a physician, if memory serves: I no longer remember his name, although I count him among the best of the hardly numerous friends from my youth. It was one of those fortuitous encounters between two boys that represent love at first sight in its purest form and last not long enough to be destroyed by the usual puerile quarrels. He led me to the ruin of a castle on a hilltop near the town, from where we had a fine view of the magnificent countryside all around: a landscape richer and better cultivated (so to say, more German) than my native Bukovina but of equal spaciousness under the deep blue of the Romanian summer skies. Swarms of pigeons circled around the gabled roofs of the town at our feet, and above our heads falcons hovered in the wind that drove the sailing clouds and bent the high grass on the slopes. We chewed on juicy stalks while we lay stretched out next to each other, our arms crossed under our heads, looking up into the clouds, chatting of this and that; then we would jump up and run until our cheeks were aflame, climb over the remains of the castle walls and fill our fantasy with images of a militant past.... I tasted a freedom never known before. As a farewell gift my new friend presented me with a collection of bird eggs, from the magpie to the sparrow hawk, from all the species of finch and titmouse to those of the cuckoo, from the quail to the brown owl—an inexhaustible delight in its wondrous completeness. Blown out, weightless and brittle, they reposed, speckled sky-blue and greenish-gray, doe-brown and ivory-colored, in the fine sand of three neatly carpentered, stacked wooden boxes which I lovingly preserved through many years until, together with untold other things, they fell into the hands of the Russians during the Second World War.

  My mother repeatedly apologized that, because of its fragility, she could not include them in her relocation baggage in 1940. No utterance could have been more revealing: it expressed her fundamental guilt feelings as much as her capacity for a lyrically loving empathy. But something else also showed itself in her in those days in Reps, to wit, her egocentrism. Women’s emancipation was not a cause that recommended itself to her because of her own experience and conviction; rather, its impulse was bred in the disappointment of her first and—soon—her second marriage and was too intimately related to the offending husbands to allow her to draw any valid ideological points. For her, women’s rights meant maternal rights, and since no one spoke of these in Reps, she didn’t open her mouth. With a lady’s drawing room smile, she clutched and shook hands, nodded acknowledgment to the sororal militants when they were introduced, replied politely and listened with glazed eyes to speeches and lectures. The congress took place in the auditorium of some public building—I no longer remember which—and during its closing session, I, together with my beloved newfound friend, managed to sneak in. My mother sat with the other delegation heads on the rostrum facing the audience. Under their hats laden with bird wings and fruit clusters, the ladies were of defiant mien, while my mother under her fashionably sober “pot” looked paradoxically frivolous among the others. A lady lecturer pilloried the despotic rule of men—a scrawny person, in type resembling the charmless piano teachers who had instructed my sister without much success; when reaching key dramatic points in her delivery, her voice would break into descant. Some solid male notables of the town were seated alongside us in the last row, and since they did not know to whom we belonged, they neither suppressed their amusement nor minced their words about the pioneer feminists. Of my mother, one of them said: “Picture that one in a motorcar and furs arriving at some peasant hut and preaching rebellion against the peasant husbands! At least she looks as if she had her mind on other things—by the end of her crusade she’d probably have forgotten why she came.” Admirably sharp! Reps marked the term of my mother’s role as a feminist and, at the same time, put an end to her social activities.

  From her second husband’s relatives my mother held herself icily distant. Friends from her youth who had remained faithful to her despite my father’s derision toward them now seemed to her as trite as he had claimed. Soon she lived as isolated a life as ever, no longer as a romantic prisoner but merely as someone known to be difficult, haughty and moody.

  The only ones with whom she could thus comport herself with impunity were her children. We bore the brunt of her exhausted and jittery inner emptiness—at times in resignation but more often with the helpless laughter that alone made life bearable. We still accepted her behavior as inspired by our alleged needs and endured it with the submissiveness that in those days was regarded as a matter of course toward one’s parents. With acute envy we occasionally noticed how the mothers of our coevals understood their adolescent wishes, dreams and anxieties and made themselves into well-meaning helpmates, instead of acting merely as the taskmasters of a nutritional and pedagogic program. But we overlooked the essential fact: her exclusion from the world around her. Nothing connected her to Philip, her second husband, whose adoration she accepted only as long as her resentment against my father was unassuaged and until she was accustomed to it, after which her irritability once more regained the upper hand. Her maternal militancy allowed him no place in her emotional life. His professional existence did not concern her. According to her concept of how life’s roles were assigned—a concept in no way shaken by new emancipatory ideas—women had no business getting involved in men’s affairs. For her, it was enough to know that his work would ensure a comfortable support for her and for us. (In her eyes, my father was a penniless and irresponsible spendthrift with whom she had always feared impoverishment.) Philip appeared not to have any so-called spiritual interests, and if he had, he would in any case have expected her to take the initiative in fostering them, since he looked up to her in all cultural matters. But to set up a literary salon or offer musical events (thanks to paternal severity, she played the piano well), of that she was incapable. More and more she withdrew into the rusting shell of her unapproachability.

  Soon there was no room left for the exercise of her maternal role either. Most of the year now, my sister and I lived away from home. After some youthful misdeeds which prompted the aging Court Counselor Meyer to suggest to my parents that I should better be placed in the hands of a more energetic tutor, I was removed from Kronstadt and placed in a boarding school in Austria. The happy hours spent with my mother in the discreetly lush comfort of the Hotel At the Crown—almost like two lovers—were over. (Whenever we went to th
e coffeehouse for a hot chocolate, which I enjoyed with an eleven-year-old’s greedy delight, the first violin of the gypsy orchestra that entertained there in the afternoons would play for us, an obsequiously effusive smile on his purple lips, the tearjerker tune “Ay, ay, ay,” supposedly a South American lullaby; in the dining room we were served personally by the maître d’, who in return would ask for one of my caricatures, for I constantly doodled; the lobby boys, with their little kepis held by chin straps and worn on a slant on slicked-down hair, their white gloves stuck military-fashion under their shoulder tabs, dared not respond to my banter, and only when my mother feigned not to notice did they drop their sternly stylized self-restraint and show natural collusion—after all, we were almost the same age.) All this now lay in the past. My sister would soon be sixteen, almost grown-up. When we came home for vacation, we shuttled between the houses of our separated parents; my mother arranged the summer sojourns at the Carinthian lakes so as to have us alone, at least for a while—but we escaped her even more irrevocably there. School had broken the fetters that had bound us. Now we had friends with whom we were on much more intimate terms than with her. With them we could prove how absurdly exaggerated both her anxious solicitude and her ensuing claims for absolute obedience really were. Increasingly helpless, she could do nothing but watch us take flight.

  She did not give up easily, however. When we were apart, she attempted—sadly and unilaterally—to keep in close epistolary contact by bombarding us with admonitions, sartorial instructions and hygienic advice, requesting full information on everything we did, even mobilizing supervisors, spies and informers from afar. This abstract and vicarious sharing was as futile and tormenting as her helpless attempts at the Black Sea to control us from the remoteness of the shore.

  The more independent we became, the more nimbly we eluded her remote-control guardianship. Now she was reduced to imagination, which had always fostered panicky alarms. The perils to which she presumed we were now exposed greatly increased. Permanganate and Formamint alone no longer sufficed. It was no longer a matter of guarding against scarlet fever or against polio. Much worse now threatened: syphilis! The danger was not so acute for my sister as for me. In theory, young ladies educated at Sacré-Coeur were chaste and shielded from the pernicious insinuations of free spirits like the Russian ophthalmologist. Moreover, the danger of infection from drinking glasses or toilet seats was small. I, however, had reached the difficult stage of puberty and had entered the zone of immediate sexual temptation. More and more often I would find sex-education material in the mail or on my bedside table, strongly recommending total abstinence as the only safe protection against lethal venereal diseases and the loss of sight as a result of masturbation. (“Young men, rejoice in your full testicles!’’) However, it was possible that I had been infected long before without knowing it; after all, primary symptoms are easily overlooked at the pimply age. To determine whether I had dallied in more than innocent play with one of the maids, my mother alleged that she had had to fire the girl because she had been found to be contaminated. I gave no sign of blanching terror at this news and condemned Mother to continued uncertainty. She was equally helpless with regard to bronchi, flat feet, the people we associated with and the abominations with which we were threatened by professional perverters of youth. Half a continent away, she hotly fussed about our woolen underwear, while her own life trickled away.

  The halo of her martyrdom gained one more prismatic color ring. She disliked her new house; its confined middle-class setup gave her a feeling of social déclassement. She had brought with her most of her own furniture, including the blond galleon of the Second Empire bed, as well as the baroque chests of drawers and Art Nouveau chairs. But the rooms in which this recycled dowry was placed were too small. The tiny windows were positioned so low that on the garden side their lintels were at chest height. (“If you bend your knees,” said my sister, “you can stick your head right into the house.’’) Nor was it any consolation that there was so much greenery around that the house resembled one of those quaint ivy- and dog-rose—covered cottages in the English style, dear to us from the cocoa tins and puzzles of our childhood. Unfortunately, it was located not in the Cotswolds but in the very heart of Czernowitz, a remnant from the city’s founding period, less than a century before.

  All too rapidly Czernowitz, built in the time of the Emperor Joseph II, had grown into a provincial capital. Around the house, originally a farmstead, five- and six-story apartment buildings had mushroomed. The garden with its old fruit trees and mighty acacias was enclosed on three sides by forbidding gray fire walls; an oversize wooden fence separated it from a heavily frequented street, its boards covered with circus posters, announcements of meetings and soccer games, political manifestos, official decrees and proclamations, and the homemade ads of job tailors and matzoh bakeries. At the entrance to the garden stood a kiosklike gatehouse, through the perennially open door of which an old Ruthenian hag, Mrs. Daniljuk, watched over anyone who entered and left. Across from it stood Fieles Court, a complex of low buildings in which, in the days of the Austrian monarchy— nowadays it is hard to believe—a fashionable dance school had found its customers among the jeunesse dorée of Czernowitz. A passageway connected it to the city’s main thoroughfare, Transylvania Avenue. All these buildings, including the high-rises, were occupied by Jews, and one of them was a prayer house from which on Friday evenings a stream of bearded Orthodox clad in black caftans, with long side-locks under their broad-rimmed black hats, and black-bordered white prayer shawls around their scrawny or stocky shoulders, swarmed out in order to greet the first star on Friday evening, which initiated the Sabbath. During the week it was the playground of hordes of motley-colored cats, who bred in the nooks and crannies of the district, which they permeated with the biting reek of their urine. Commingled with it were many other odors—the fumes of the horse apples on the bumpy pavement, the smells of onions from kosher kitchens, odors of spices and herbs, the vapors of cow and sheep dung from the neighboring Hay Market—together forming a rich broth of miasma-laden vitality, to which audible expression was given by the twitterings of myriads of sparrows, lending a phonetic background to the soundless scrabbling of lice in the sheepskin coats of the peasants who came to town on market days.

  Even though all this was only a few hundred yards from the city center—the Ringplatz, with the city hall; the line of dozing hackneys in front of the Liberation Monument, on which an aurochs, heraldic animal of the Bukovina, thrust its forehooves into the breast of a fallen double-headed eagle, symbol of the vanquished Habsburg domination; the hotel that unconcernedly continued to be called At the Black Eagle; the Byzantine dome of the Great Synagogue; the half-dozen shops that brought to Czernowitz a whiff of Occidental luxury—it nevertheless had the slovenly, deeply backwoods, leadenly nostalgic character, heavy with empty longings, of the no-man’s-land between the cultures of West and East. My father, when speaking of my mother, never missed asking maliciously, “Well, is she comfortable in the Yiddish shtetl?” But for myself, I liked staying in that house when I came home from school.

  At that time, city noises had not yet fused into a single continuous and deafening shriek of machines and roar of engines. Urban noise still had a kind of human dimension, composed of voices and natural sounds, the rumble and rattle of peasant carts, the crack of whips and the warning calls of coachmen, the clip-clop of the horses’ hoofbeats, all of them ebbing away at eventide to make room for the great silence of the night, in which one could even hear chirping crickets and croaking frogs in the wide-open land all around.

  Almost as quiet were the long Sundays; only in the afternoon could one hear, at times, rising from one of the backyards beyond the walls, the tenor call of a trumpet signaling the startup of a band accompanying the heavy, hopping dances of soldiers with their girls, mostly maids in service dressed in their colorful rural garb. It was as if life’s melody penetrated the space of my solitude only from very far away; it
is probably the special elegiac magic of such hours that contributed to making me a melancholy choleric.

  I was still forbidden to leave the garden without a very good reason. I had no friends. I wasn’t bored—and I still don’t know what boredom is as long as I’m left alone—but I suffered a kind of poignant pining when I heard those Sunday hummings and fiddlings and poundings from the walled-in chasms beyond the roofs, so near and yet so far; time and again the voice of the trumpet would rise to carry, alone and undaunted, the simple melody into the empty afternoon.... I simply had to find out what these backyards were like, where the homesick boys and girls, cast off in the city, danced as if they were still back on the village threshing floor.

  In our garden, surrounded by a group of gnarled acacias, stood some old and now disused stables and carriage houses, adjacent to buildings that opened up to another street. It was not hard to climb the trees, reach the stable roof and then continue to the roofs of the neighboring buildings. From there I still did not have a view into the backyards, but I could see into the back apartments, their windows opening onto narrow light shafts.