The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  My unexpected appearance occasioned some scared surprises and occasional scoldings from those windows. But once it became known that I was not a burglar but simply the harmlessly venturesome child of well-known parents, everybody got used to the strange roof-roaming tomcat. I did my best not to seem indiscreet. I would creep over the hot tin roofs to some shadowed corner against a chimney pot or a high wall, glance through the mildly titillating magazines I had secretly obtained, which were safe from my mother’s methodical searches only up here, or simply crouch in my nook and watch and listen.

  The dwellers in those rear buildings were almost exclusively lower-class Jews, and what I saw and heard was the very core of their lives. I watched as the women cooked and laundered and sewed—women who almost always had a cheerful word for me or implored me to be mindful of the dangers of my mountaineering expeditions; I heard them scold their children and joke with their men; I saw them air their bedding and feed their cats; I heard their fathers pray and cough; I looked into the sickbeds of witchlike old grannies. Weekdays, when there was no dancing in the backyards, the old trumpet phonographs would tootle Yiddish pop music—’’Yiddl mit san fiddle” and “Iach bin der Doktor Eisenbart” or “Du bist schain in maine oigen” and the like.

  One of the windows—they were, incidentally, open day and night, for the summers in the Bukovina were warm—was of special fascination to me. A lad of about sixteen sat and read there day in, day out. I don’t know whether he was sick, but he certainly looked it, with a highly sensitive, pale face under smooth black hair. He didn’t wear the usual payes—the curly side-locks—of Orthodox Jews, but he was always clad in dark clothes like a rabbinical student and usually had a blanket wrapped around his knees. He would sit immobile and read, turning pages with a sparse motion of his thin hand.

  He took no notice of me, barely looking up when I first appeared before him. The roof I crawled on was more or less at the same level as his window: only a narrow light shaft, four stories deep, separated us. The arrogance with which the lad ignored me was a challenge. I reacted very childishly: I brought my own books to the tin roof, sat down facing him and read in imitation of him.

  As I have mentioned already, I was no great reader—probably in protest against my sister, who devoured whole cartfuls of books. What I had read up to then had been simple fare: Cooper, Kipling and—secretly—King Ping Meh, in addition to any amount of hunting literature. Occasionally I borrowed books from my mother’s library: Thornton Wilder’s The Woman of Andros (which bored me and which I found incomprehensible), Claude Anet’s Ariane, jeune fille russe, or books of my sister’s — H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and The Shape of Things to Come (my sister, by then sixteen and intellectually and politically “engaged,” had long before switched to the diaries of Lily Braun).

  So I dragged these books to my aerie on the roof, where I read against the young Jewish scholar, so to say, in mute competition; a duel in which, however, he refused to participate. Only once did he raise his head—eerily, on the very day I dared to get a volume of Dostoevsky from my mother’s books.

  “What’s he reading?” he asked without so much as looking at me and with only a trace of a somewhat contemptuous smile.

  “Dostoevsky,” I replied casually.

  “A step forward, I’d say,” he commented with cutting irony.

  That was all. Nothing more; no word, no further sign of noticing me.

  Soon my roof expeditions were found out and placed under strict interdiction. I never again saw my reading companion, but our encounter prompted me to read all of Dostoevsky.

  My mother would have been much too proud to admit that she felt hopelessly exiled in the middle of Czernowitz, in a place cut off from possibility, unable ever again to participate in what elsewhere appeared to be the “real” life: a life of ineffable fulfillment, for which the slowly fading memories of Montreux and Luxor and the pictorial reports in the magazines’ society columns were only vicarious evocations, feeble aids to an inadequate imagination that had to make do with atmospheric inducements of what, more or less, young Hans Castorp’s snowbound dream in Mann’s Magic Mountain was: a mixture of an Art Nouveau version of exalted human existence, clad in Isadora Duncan’s Greek tunics, and the bourgeois idea of courtly society in now vanished principalities, with its puffed-up, chest-swelling German self-confidence. A mundane surrogate for this could have been reproduced, after a fashion, even in Czernowitz; but she was too disappointed and too fatalist to transform these wishful images into a living “as if” reality, as those who dance at New Year’s celebrations, amidst colored balloons and paper streamers snaking through champagne giggles, like sleepwalkers waltzing to the choreography of the “grand life.” She did not follow the fashion. She became plump, neglected her good posture and let herself sag into a housewifely pelvic slouch. Her preoccupation with her children’s physical well-being began to impart to her entire bearing and behavior a prosaic obsession with the tangible everyday, a manic concern with triviality.

  As she had kept us prisoners in our garden in the past, she now exiled herself to the enclave between the fire walls of the Jewish tenements, in which roses and dahlias granted her the illusion that the outside world, replete with unfulfillable promises and unnamable perils, could be shut out and a kind of retreat be established here for herself, in which Czernowitz was banished from view, sparing her any direct contact. She hardly ever ventured into the street beyond the garden’s enclosure. All the more reverentially was she regarded by her neighbors. Out of duty but also out of kindness she had always an open—albeit stern—heart for the needy, who, as a result, habitually crowded around her. Beggars or handicapped petitioners never left her empty-handed; that she never discriminated against any ethnic group or religious affiliation in her charities—a virtue rare in a town in which the conflicts among these were sharpening—was greatly appreciated, especially by the Jews in her neighborhood. I still can see those white-bearded heads under their fiery-red rabbinical hats trimmed with fox pelts, telling me with approval, their eyes half closed and swaying from side to side: “The lady your mamma, emmes, she is an exceedingly kindhearted lady, may God protect her.” It did not matter that her benevolence was of the institutional, Salvation Army type: warm soup and bread for old rummies, who would rather have had a few pennies to buy themselves a shot of booze and a few moments of bliss; old clothes for camouflaged rag women, who would make her believe that they had half a dozen children to clothe; handing out of alms only on fixed days and never without admonitions to turn to more honorable occupations than begging. In the Fieles Court she was considered a saint. The one who benefited most from all this was her French bulldog, Bonzo, who took every opportunity to slip through the garden gate and yap after the hundreds of roaming cats, to be spoiled with kosher tidbits and to help out every randy bitch in the neighborhood, much to the delight of the respective owner. (“Oy, what a cute little doggy, pretty as gold!” “The young gentleman won’t know me, but through my little Fifi I am, in a manner of speaking, the father-in-law of the khelev of the lady your mother.’’)

  The turn from the 1920s to the 1930s, turbulently marked by the crash on Wall Street that led to a world economic crisis and by political events in Western Europe (among which Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany was the one with the most far-reaching importance and the one that most radically separated people), went by without diverting my mother’s attention from the immediate obligations to watch over the physical well-being of her children and her needy charges (for us wool caps for sudden cold snaps, superfluous arch supports, repeated written and verbal prohibitions against visits to the public baths where skin diseases were allegedly rampant; and for the beggars the distribution of pearl barley, bacon rinds and sausage ends — insofar as these did not contravene religious nutritional proscriptions). In this tightly woven, prosaic web of perversely conceived maternal obligations and miserly charity she lived as isolated as a spider under water, snared in her notions of duty
, her worries and anxieties. And there she also experienced her greatest personal tragedy. What she had always feared with the greatest anguish — and thus expected—occurred in 1931: my sister fell sick with lymphogranulomatosis and died after a year of suffering. All the means at the disposal of medicine at the time were applied to save her life. Through the mediation of our theosophically and spiritistically active aunts (the Wiener Werkstätte and socialist ideas meanwhile had expanded into the transcendental), every kind of arcane force was also mobilized and proved equally unavailing. Death came to my poor sister as a welcome release.

  My mother went about as if blinded. In arduous self-devotion, she had never left her sick child alone for a moment. All her physical and spiritual forces, but unfortunately also her intellectual powers, were exhausted. She became oddly and totally cantankerous. Each evening she held a kind of devotional service in front of a picture of my sister during which she was not to be disturbed by anyone. She was not burdened by remorse that she had made her daughter feel she was not her favorite child, for she had expiated that wrong in a year of almost medievally devoted nursing care. Instead, a kind of transfiguration of her daughter into an angel took place, and simultaneously the image of the mother-daughter relation was retouched.

  From an ethical standpoint, this put me at a severe disadvantage. It was not I, the predestined problem child, who had transformed her factually into a mater dolorosa; rather, the angelic being whose picture she now caressed nightly as if this might alleviate her sufferings had sacrificed herself and taken my place. Whenever my mother glanced at me through her tears, I felt that my healthy sturdiness mocked her solicitude, was sardonic proof of the purely random efficiency of her lifelong care and all her precautionary measures for our protection. I embodied the injustice of fate and its cynical remove from influence; against this her rage was sublimated into gnawing, persistent demands of me—verbally expressed in the behest not to wreck her “ruined life” even more by my insubordination and, at a deeper level, shielding her subliminal wish that I would crown her even more definitively as Our Lady of Sorrows.

  Meanwhile her second marriage fell apart. Even though Philip dealt with her most solicitously, she had begun to foster an animosity against him that burst into open ugliness at the first plausible excuse. It erupted after one of her spontaneous initiatives, which my father acknowledged only with an uncomprehending shaking of his head, even though he himself was involved, albeit involuntarily.

  This had to do with someone’s scheme to establish a sanatorium in the Carpathian Mountains. My father had been approached with the suggestion that he provide the capital—a ludicrous idea, for he didn’t have any money and if he had he would have known at best how to spend but not how to invest it. There were many other reasons why he refused. Meanwhile, however, my mother also had heard of the project—possibly via me and my sister—and threw herself into it with the keen fervor that the almost irresistible spirit of the time dictated to her, she who had been so unpardonably late in her economic emancipation. At first Philip cautiously advised against the project, but soon and as usual he yielded to her will and contributed the lion’s share of her investment—which represented all the money she had. The enterprise not only ended catastrophically as a business venture but also led spectacularly to a murder. I shall tell more of it in connection with my sister, since it was one of the reasons she hated what she called “our Balkan origins,” and it contributed, if I’m not mistaken, to her early death. While alive she was tormented by the violent quarrels between my mother and Philip that were the most deplorable consequence of this wretched undertaking, and after her death the dispute continued with ever sharper acrimony, of which I am ashamed for all of us to this day.

  The question at the heart of the matter was whether the Odaya could be sold to make up for the loss they had suffered. This old rattletrap, set where the Prut’s murky waters flowed most sluggishly through scruffy stands of trees, spookily denuded and whitened by the guano of thousands of herons that bred in the endless marshes, impassable because of the shoulder-high nettles—this place suddenly gained an importance, as if it were the ancestral seat of some historic dynasty. Its sale would have been complicated in any case, since consent of all members of the family would have been required, with the unforeseeably awkward discussions as to how and to what extent each would be compensated. I, as the sole male descendant at the time, was called upon to defend this common inheritance against Philip.

  My efforts were lame. All my life my ties to property have been very loose, and Philip made it hard for me to develop stronger ones at this juncture. He could not have acted more generously, particularly when I found that I could not defend my mother’s cause with any true conviction, though loyalty prevented me from taking his side openly. He showed an understanding so delicate for my dilemma that I count it among the most edifying experiences of my life: the revelation of a humane, considerate magnanimity that hitherto I had not encountered or to which perhaps I had been blind. My mother was not receptive to it. I, now her only child, was no longer her ally. She regarded me as her enemy. The insidious tragedy of our alienation had begun.

  In those days, however, dramatic events took place also outside the private sphere. Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany— an occurrence that occasioned many ardent though tragically futile prayers at the Fieles Court. We ourselves did not share in these at the time. From our viewpoint, the developments in Germany were welcome: a profusion of optimistic images of youth bursting with health and energy, promising to build a sunny new future—this corresponded to our own political mood. We were irked by the disdain with which we as the German-speaking minority were treated, as if the former Austrian dominion in Romania had been one of Teutonic barbarism over the ancient and highly cultured Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks and Wallachians, as if these had freed themselves from their oppressive bondage in the name of civilizing morality. The bitterness of the defeat suffered with Germany rankled in us, and we felt good when we saw that in Germany, a new self-reliance refused to accept that a people vanquished was a people despised. At the same time, the threatening, even criminal aspects of socialism seemed to be averted; socialism confronted us at all times in the frightening mask of close-by Communism. “Reds” were the enemy per se, throughout the world, and the Germany of the valiant Brownshirts stood as our protection against them. Nor were we alarmed by the adjective socialist in the name of the National Socialist German Workers Party. The commonweal objectives of the National Socialist movement did not fade into abstract ideologies, we thought, which in international Marxism ended up in a general disintegration of values, but instead bound the nation together on behalf of the people’s welfare. This could be equated with the welfare of the individual, and instead of the disastrous leveling of materialism, varied individualities could join in a common ideal. As to the anti-Semitism of the upward-striving Third Reich, it was the generally accepted wisdom among non-Jews in the Bukovina at that time that, irrespective of all tolerance and even close personal relations with Jews, it could be only salutary if a damper were placed on the “overbearing arrogance of Jewry.” That this “damper” would bring about the murder of six million Jews no one could foresee.

  In a nutshell: The ascent of Nazi Germany, with its thunderous marching columns and wheat-blond maidens, concerned us infinitely less than the abdication of the recently crowned King of England in order to marry Mrs. Simpson. And in this act no one could have recognized that not merely was it symbolic of the decay of venerable traditions and values but it signaled the final decline of the Occident as we had known it, a decline that was eventually sealed by another marital bond: to wit, the one between Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun in the air-raid shelter of the Reich chancellery in a dying Berlin.

  Almost without anyone noticing, the years of illusory peace between 1919 and 1939 were suddenly gone; they turned out to have been but a truce between two phases of the European suicide. When the Second World War started, Romania at first remai
ned neutral, but it was only a question of time before it too was drawn into the conflict: as a reward for the Russo-German nonaggression pact, the northern parts of the Bukovina and Bessarabia were ceded to Russia, but the Romanians harbored hopes of regaining these two rich provinces—paradoxically, by fighting on the side of the covenant-breaking Germans to whom they owed their loss in the first place. In great times the paradoxical becomes the usual.

  I learned of the occupation of the Bukovina when I was in a moviehouse in Vienna, where a latecomer in the row behind me whispered the news to her neighbor, accompanied by the cynical giggles reserved in those days for imparting reports of dire catastrophes. I did not yet know that it had been agreed to have the German-speaking populations in the ceded territories, the so-called ethnic Germans, repatriated to the German “homeland.” Nor did I see any reason why the Russians in 1940 would comport themselves differently toward the burshchuj, the bourgeois, than the Bolsheviks of 1917. I knew my father was safe. He had smelled a rat and had relocated himself in Transylvania three years before. But my mother was in Czernowitz. Only later did it become known that former Austrians (now also “ethnic Germans,” for the shrunken Austria in 1938 had become the Ostmark of the Third Reich) were also to be “repatriated.” For my mother that meant that—just as in 1914—she had to leave her house and her adopted homeland, this time forever.

  I tried to imagine her leave-taking, for she must have realized that it was the farewell to her entire past life, and though she considered it misspent, it had at least been comfortable. Henceforth it would be an existence in uncertainty and deprivation among strangers, a refugee life much worse than during the First World War. I could not feel what she must have felt, but an image took hold in my fantasy as if in a dream: she stands in front of one of the “house horrors” that my sister and I, during our teenage infatuation with anything novel, considered the worst kind of kitsch: a foot-high reproduction in white marble of the Nike of Samothrace on a tall column of red marble; in this version, my mother looks at it with the same stunned expression of past happiness lost with which she had once gazed at the picture of my dead sister. This idle fantasy seemed to me to have pertinent symbolic connotations: it was as if the mutely thunderous wing-beat of the Louvre’s goddess of victory epitomized all the dreams and aspirations of her youth, which now she had to give up forever.