The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  The relocation brought her first to a camp in Upper Silesia. Being of “high-grade race,” she was scheduled to become a “defense farmer in the German east,” specifically in the province of Warta, as the southeast part of Poland had been renamed. (Her Polish housekeeper Valerka, who suddenly discovered her German origins but was nevertheless racially of somewhat lower grade, was sent to Nuremberg, where she died shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, nothing could be done for Cassandra, for the ethnic mishmash of her component parts was as variegated as her language; it allowed neither racial classification nor, as its consequence, relocation.) In the camp, my mother shared a tiny cubbyhole with Philip. They never spoke to each other and she left Philip for good when I succeeded in freeing her from the camp and sparing her the fate of becoming a defense farmer. But this was possible only on condition that she contribute in some other capacity to Germany’s ultimate victory. In an air force office in Vienna she managed to advance to the rank of civil disbursement officer. She saw Philip once more, by sheer coincidence, at a post office. With a satisfied mien—a mingled expression of both her resentment and her guilty feeling of inadequacy—she told me that while standing in line at a stamp window, she suddenly felt that someone was staring at her; the sensation was so strong that she turned around and there was Philip, transfixed in shy veneration. I told her I hoped she had taken him in her arms, to wipe out once and for all the bitterness between them, but she vehemently shook her head. It did not matter that by then the Odaya, the bone of contention between them, was as far out of reach as the moon. He had been her enemy and he still was. She turned away from him.

  Nor did she forgive her relatives for the fact that her return to the lap of the family did not lead to the permanent bliss that during her years of separation and unhappy marriage she had dreamed of as the outcome of such a reunion, however improbable it seemed. Two of her sisters were still living with her widowed mother—one also widowed, the other a spinster. They were all too dissimilar in character and similar in irascible temperament to get along for any length of time, but soon this was all obliterated by the rush of historical events. Vienna was bombed—much against the expectations of those Austrians who (after the event) considered the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich a blunder that the Western powers not only had tolerated but had even encouraged and for which Austria was therefore in no way ever to be held responsible. The office in which my mother labored for the ultimate victory was relocated to Bohemia; as a conscript employee, she had to go along. Soon backward-fleeing elements of the defeated German armies in the East swept over her. The Czechs rebelled. Her office was plundered, and she herself was almost shot. She fled to the West. A former receptionist at the Hotel Pupp in Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary), who knew her as a young girl when she had stayed there with her parents, picked her up in the street and gave her shelter for a few days. When he and his family were also driven out, she set out on foot. During the night, she was overtaken by an American army vehicle full of black soldiers. One of them lifted her up by her backpack—“like a puppy being lifted by the skin of its back,” as she later told the story. “Come on, old girl,” he said, “we’re all the same underdog.” Thus she too, although to the Germans racially more valuable than Valerka, landed in Nuremberg—or more accurately, in the expanse of rubble that remained of that city.

  It borders on the miraculous that in the chaotic period between 1945 and 1946 she managed to find out whither the war had driven me: from Silesia to Hamburg by way of Berlin and finally to the Lüneburg Heath. In the bombed-out landscapes of cratered and flattened cities, where telegraph wires hung like whips from slanting masts and rails were tangled in knots, the German postal service continued to function. On a winter day in 1946 the news reached me that she too had survived the war. We exchanged letters with reports of what we had experienced. I had married and was the father of two children; a third was on the way. Forthwith she considered this a call on her maternal duties. I hesitated to grant her free play for her pedagogic ideas and methods with my own children, but my wife welcomed some help at home. After years of separation, we faced each other again. The elapsed time had left its mark on us, but that was not what stood between us as a deep estrangement. Rather it was a drifting apart of the most basic kind.

  Nothing can explain the end—and generally also the beginning—of a love affair. In our case it was indeed a love affair: her maternal love for me and my child’s love for her in all their volatile passion had been much closer to an amorous relationship than to a natural growing-together of mother and child. From the very beginning, Cassandra had stood between us, Cassandra who—at a clear remove from my mother—had let me taste the animal delights of brood-warm love and had thus transposed my mother from the realm of a primeval mother to that of an intellectual experience in which her magic charm and seductiveness, her pride and her vulnerability, her obsessions and her whims had joined together to form for me the allure—and possibly also the travesty—of the quintessential feminine. I was on guard against her long before I watched out for any other women. Even in our happiest hours, when she visited me in Kronstadt, I loved her at a distance, with reservations about a possible sudden sobering, in the twilight of fundamental otherness: that never-entirely-to-be-understood being that woman represented for me. I think too that she had perceived in the love object “child,” assigned to her as “mother,” the man into whom the little boy—Baldur-like — would grow under her maternal nurturing, and had believed he would also embody the qualities she most hated in men. All too often her demonstrations of maternity had had the earmarks of rape.

  Now, faced by a grown man who himself had raised sons, she was helpless. And I was not perceptive enough to forgive her for never having been a true mother. She took possession of our sorry household and my children with all her tough energy, now concealed by a newly acquired submissiveness. We lived in much straitened circumstances; in those days, hardship was general in Germany and we might well have ended up with hunger edema like so many others had we not received some help from abroad through one of her sisters (the socialist who had married a Jew and who, repudiated by the family, had emigrated to America, whence she helped us keep body and soul together by sending us CARE packages). Mother gave us her all. She assumed the lowliest chores, as if she had to atone for being tolerated by us and by the world. Yet her presence was not always a blessing. Her fidgety absentmindedness, her overwrought anxieties and her occasional outbursts, her sporadic forlorn musings and woolgatherings, from which she would rouse herself as if sternly called to order, could hardly calm our already exacerbated nerves. She lived as if constantly rushed and hunted; she stinted herself on every mouthful of food, sewed children’s coats from her last warm blanket, managed at the cost of indescribable abasement to get hold of black-market goods and procured ration coupons from unfathomable sources; she would hand these benefits to us with the hectic sacrificial eagerness of someone in full flight who rids himself of excess baggage to appease his pursuers. But she meant us to come along on this flight: a demonically driven flight in which guilt pushed her into self-annihilation. Her solicitude, her kindness and her self-devotion were as imperious as they were obsequiously degrading, and the angry servility that accompanied them, ever more exhibitionistic, turned into a formidable blackmailing weapon.

  To protect my children from it, I told them the fable of Sindbad’s rider: the old man dying of thirst on an island, asking the sailor who had been cast off on its shores to carry him to the well on his shoulders and who, once astride, took him so firmly between his iron thighs that he almost rode him to death. The allegory was not quite accurate, since it was my mother who had saddled us with her fate and who now was carried by us to her own death, yet the parable illustrated well the two-edged nature of despotic altruism.

  I left the end of the tale untold: to wit, Sindbad manages to rid himself of his tormentor only by racing under the low branches of a tree, against which the head of the old man is finally smas
hed to death. This was a much more pertinent pictorial simile for my comportment toward her, though I could not be proud of it. The jumble of world events covered the torment of our private history only inadequately. Nor did the past offer consolation. The loss of her home and fortune pained my mother much less than the numberless small wounds inflicted to her pride in happier times. Hardly ever did an image arise from the magic formula “Do you still remember ...?” that wasn’t marred by bitterness or corroded by irony. Only memories that were ludicrous and typical of absurd circumstances were acceptable; one feared to evoke hidden sufferings. She told us of the first peaceable occupation of the Bukovina by the Russians in 1940: the colonel who was quartered in her house showed exemplary manners. He spared the bed linen in fear “it might get dirty,” and she found it each morning neatly folded next to the bed. After a few weeks, he was joined by his family: a hefty wife and an equally generously proportioned nineteen-year-old daughter. The two ladies, summer-clad in cotton shirts through which saucer-sized nipples were darkly visible, went on a shopping spree for whatever had not yet disappeared from the shops of occupied Czernowitz. They came home with strange-looking bonnets made of light netting with puffy pink paddings, held by two ribbons knotted under the chin. They turned out to be sanitary napkins, whose true purpose was unknown to the ladies.

  But even in these merry reminiscences of the terminal phase of the great shoveling-under of the old world, preparing the soil for a new one, my mother’s jagged edginess made itself felt. Thus she told us that one day a young man called on her who showed an astounding resemblance to my father. He introduced himself as the offspring of a little love interlude between my father and some local maiden, a pleasurable by play during a hunting expedition, with its imprudent but foreseeable consequences. The mother had been a Ruthenian. Because he himself was married and the father of small children whom he wanted to grow up in Germany rather than Soviet Russia, he asked my mother to testify to his racial high-grade value and thus to enable him and his family to be relocated. She did so, “for the sake of the children, of course,” she explained in a brittle aside. I can well imagine the icy disdain with which she comported herself on that occasion. The man and his family were indeed relocated, but she stubbornly refused to divulge where or under what name, so that I know nothing more of him and of my nephews and nieces. Nor was it of any avail when I explained to her that I felt guilty toward this half-brother: in a way, I had cheated him of primogeniture, as I had done to Cassandra’s son, from whom I had stolen the mother’s milk rightfully belonging to him.

  Her life together with us—myself and my wife and the children—was not to last long. My marriage soon broke up. It was as if my mother forgot that I was her son and not her irresponsible husband; she began to address me by his name and blamed his escapades for the failings in our family life. She identified wholly with my wife of the time and, with a fervor she had lacked at the meetings of the feminists in Reps, lectured her on her right to emancipation from the bondage of marriage and from housewifely and maternal duties. These sermons did not fall on deaf ears. My wife emigrated to Africa and I too left Germany; the children were sent to boarding school. My mother remained alone in wretched circumstances, which I could have alleviated somewhat. I did not do so. She probably derived some consolation and a few happy moments from her love for my youngest son. In her relation with him all her lyrical capacity for love, freed of trivial obsessions, blossomed once more, and he kept as affectionate an image of her as I in the days of my childhood.

  On a single memorable occasion I saw her emerge once more from the spell cast by her lifelong rancor. It must have been at some time in the early 1950s, when we lived in a village not far from Rothenburg ob der Tauber. She was waiting for us in this toy-box town at the top of a street sloping up to the city hall square, among turrets and gabled houses. Summery crowds were all about, as she stood looking for us over the heads of people around her ... and there she appeared to me for an instant, stretching her head, as remote from the world and astounded as a mermaid about to arise from the waters, peeking through reeds into the alien world of humans to see if she could not find one among them who would free her by saying the magic word.... She was wearing one of those cakelike hats, a fashion by which elderly ladies seem to demonstrate their loyalty toward erstwhile local sovereign princesses, foremost Queen Mary of England. For once her pale blue eyes under her high arched brows were not clouded by bewilderment and terror-bound panicky expectation of ever new catastrophes but instead expressed a determined distancing from the world around her: she knew she was different from the crowds; they were not of her kind. As soon as she had caught sight of us, she once more began to flicker in nervous anticipation, besieged again by claims to which she was unequal and by which she was burdened by unjust fate. Her head sagged, her movements became wooden, her speech fidgety. But for a fleeting moment she had echoed her former self: delicate and fair, in all the comeliness that had been hers before the bewitchment set in.

  Finally, after another two decades, at the age of eighty-six, she found her way back to her true self. I visited her in a home near Starnberg, where she led a vegetative existence. She was as fragile and bleached-white as a stranded piece of cuttlefish. A gentle smile nested in the web of hair-thin wrinkles spun over her face. I felt very guilty. With a ruthlessness that I may well have inherited from her, I had kept myself remote from her; now she enfolded me in her arms as her long-lost son. I took her to a restaurant close by, on the lakeshore. She was barely able to eat a mouthful of trout. She set her fork down, looked at me and said: “Why can’t I die finally? I can’t eat anything anymore, I can barely crawl, can’t sleep—and the worst of it: I’m getting dottier by the day!” With which she burst into the same relieving and redeeming laughter as on that day, some fifty years earlier, when we lost the beautiful ship’s model in Constanţa.

  A few weeks later she fell into a coma. Blue lights flashing and siren howling, an ambulance took her to the hospital’s intensive care unit, where she was kept alive for another six months, connected to a multitude of tubes and pipes, even though she was barely conscious. Under the still full hair, much finer and less vital than Cassandra’s—never had she shielded me protectively in its wealth, nor had I ever wished for her to do so—there no longer was any flesh on her face: the skin was stretched like crumpled paper over her head’s delicate bone structure. Around the thin lips, barely parted, there still floated a forlorn smile. When I took her hand—a fragile, almost desiccated hand, with blue veins bulging under the skin—her lids twitched as if she were trying to look at me. She could no longer manage this but her smile deepened: she had recognized me. “Thank you,” she whispered tonelessly, “thank you.’’

  The Father

  The windfall is so old that one can walk straight through the fallen trees: they crumble like tinder. Only the thick moss that has grown over their bark holds them together in the form of trunks. In between, primeval plants proliferate: ferns and horse willow; club moss, which takes decades to grow an inch, crawls yard-long all over the soil. From the giant pines still standing, pale gray lichen hang like the beards of old men. The eagles here are double-headed, but they are without aeries. Except for the ghostly drumming of woodpeckers near and far, a deadly silence reigns. The stealthy steps of the hunter are those of a murderer.

  If I am to say which of his traits was most characteristic of him, I would say his brightly luminous temperament. I speak of “brightness,” for his mood was not always cheerful and at times could be very bad indeed. But even when he was in a bad mood, cross, sullen, coldly vexed, prone to dramatize, sharply cutting or on occasion thoughtlessly destructive, it was like a rainstorm over Naples: over the massed clouds and their occasional discharges stretched a sky that soon again was certain to be as immaculate in its light blue expanse as before. When nothing untoward happened to annoy him, he would sing in the mornings, loudly and out of tune: a medley of arias from operas, folk songs, ditties and studen
t songs from his youth. His temperament was innately radiant. Given the decisive importance this kind of physiological predisposition holds in the alchemy of getting along together, I can understand my mother’s nagging resentment of him: what she really objected to in him, morally and psychologically, were his high spirits. It was the resentment of the supposedly ailing against the healthy, of the allegedly frail against the rudely robust. As he himself used to say repeatedly, “It’s all chemical anyway.’’

  At one time or another his early-morning singing triggered the rancor of helpless vexation in all of us. After he had separated from my mother and when I had taken over her former bedroom, which was connected to his own by a bathroom—between schools I spent a happy year at home together with him—I waited each morning burrowed under the pillows, in nervous anticipation of the beginning of his unfailing ritual as he cheerfully embraced the new day. This took place with clocklike regularity, with only a half-hour’s difference between winter and summer: in winter the bathroom door was flung open and his balled-up pajamas were flung at my head at half past five (five in the summer). Even though I expected it and knew how much pleasure the day would bring (woe betide the day when I might be awakened less boisterously!), I could not rid myself of a momentary and involuntary annoyance with this loud disruption.