I often thought that his all-consuming passion for hunting was in reality an escape to and a shelter from the reminder of a truer and unrealized vocation. This seemed plausible when I observed the passivity with which he let venery overrun his entire existence untrammeled. One had the impression that, fundamentally, he had no thoughts other than those related to hunting, that he hardly spoke of anything else, and that it determined all his moods. Without any doubt, his decision to forsake a more rewarding career in the civil service in favor of remaining in the Bukovina and entering the service of the Romanian Orthodox Church had been influenced by the outstanding hunting possibilities of that region. Venery, taking full possession of his many-faceted being, pervaded all his other interests and hobbies. Ever more frequently, the scenes he would draw and paint were of wildlife, though he lacked talent for drawing; his mathematical knowledge served only his understanding of ballistics, and his chemical skills were used only in the mixing of various gunpowders. He was untiring in his correspondence with renowned hunters and writers on hunting, with zoologists and ornithologists, as well as with botanists on questions of game feeding. He wrote articles on game for specialized journals like Wild und Hund (Game and Hound), Der deutsche Jäger (The German Hunter) and Chasse et pêche (Hunting and Fishing) in Luxembourg, and he hardly wore anything but hunting clothes. By nature cyclical and determined by seasonal changes, and by tradition severely ritualized in form, hunting became for him a cult to which he dedicated himself with an almost religious fervor. One was led to think that at some point he realized that the diversity of his talents would lead to a frittering away unless they were made to serve one overriding creative impulse, so he decided to bundle them all together in a single passionate avocation. A gesture of defiance stood at the very origin of his fixation — indeed, obstinate defiance was the determining trait in his character.
This defiance runs like a red thread through what little I know of his childhood, adolescence and young manhood (and how little we know generally of those who have helped make us what we are!). One of my aunts, his younger, undauntingly cheerful and courageous sister, Bettina, told me something typical from their shared youth: she and he, together with his other sister, Sophie, were enrolled in a dancing school in Graz, where my grandparents lived before the turn of the century. The two girls were very beautiful and spoiled by their mother. For the dancing lessons, which were held in winter, the girls were given pretty overcoats trimmed with mink, while he, as the son for whom such luxury would be in poor taste, was measured for something of sober military cut. He hated his coat so much that in protest he behaved badly during the dancing lessons, so badly that he was sent home. He never again danced a single step and all his life avoided balls and other functions involving dancing. That his bride would indulge in the lifelong illusion that her fate had been decided on the dance floor he would have considered a very poor joke of destiny indeed, had he ever learned of it.
His obstinacy destroyed his relationship with his mother. He responded to her strict commands and punishments with an intractability that drove her to even more draconian pedagogic measures. She also thwarted his chemical studies. Because of her he sought a professional field in the vast expanse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy that on the one hand would not be too close to the Ministry of the Interior, where his father labored, and on the other was as far removed as possible from her vicinity. When she died, he was in far-off Bosnia. He shed no tears for her, nor did he ever mention her—not so much as a single word—to me or my sister, though he liked telling us about his father.
Of my paternal great-great-grandfather I own a miniature and of his son, my great-grandfather, a daguerreotype, but of my grandfather I have only a single photographic portrait, which I cut out of a magazine from the turn of the century, where it appeared on the occasion of the opening of a building he had designed. In the correctness of his frock coat he shows an almost fraternal resemblance with my maternal grandfather; although lacking the latter’s short-trimmed beard and overbearing self-importance, he shares the same manly solemnity, stiffened by ascot and starched shirt as if by armor, typical of the period and of Western Europe’s last empires, both Victorian and Habsburg. The amused shrewdness in the corners of his eyes—a roguish hint?—is barely cloaked by the discipline of the functionary; he managed to climb the hierarchic ladder from government architect, by way of privy councillor and department head, all the way to ministerial councillor.
My grandfather hoped for a similar or even more glittering career for his son, but my father’s rebellious disposition ran counter to such hopes. Some of his youthful pranks (painting a moustache on himself with silver nitrate, which took months to wash off) seem to express the fashion of the time rather than individual singularity: the turn of the century has a whole literature testifying to the likes of it. More serious were the conflicts that developed between father and son in my father’s last years as a student.
In accordance with his rank and position, my grandfather was unconditionally loyal to Emperor Francis Joseph I. This was not in contradiction to the Italian origins of the family, which he proudly acknowledged, but rather was strengthened by these ultramontane traditions. The Rezzori name derives from a fief in Sicily which, until the Bourbons, had belonged to the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations. Thus, Rezzoris had always been loyal subjects of the Habsburg monarchy. After an offspring of the family by the name of Ambrogio, as ambitious as he was poor, migrated to Vienna in 1750 by way of Lombardy (an Austrian possession at the time), the Austrianization of the family proceeded with all due speed: Ambrogio’s son still was called Giovanni Battista, but his son bore the name Johann Nepomuk. And Johann Nepomuk’s son was none other than my grandfather Wilhelm. Though he liked being called Guglielmo and spent every moment he could spare from his official duties on the Adriatic, he was a Habsburg subject through and through. Quite in contrast to my father, Hugo, who was swept along by the Sturm und Drang zest of the Greater Germany movement.
This was a secondhand Storm and Stress, fomented by the murkiest impulses of the time. When in later years my father, having become at least as conservative in spirit as his progenitor, ranted against the calamitous consequences of the French Revolution, he overlooked the fact that one freakish revolutionary offshoot was surely the Napoleonic Wars, which in turn helped to produce the disastrous German nationalism to which he had fallen prey so blindly in his youth (including its raging anti-Semitism). The strange reciprocity between spirituality and daimon inherent in any enthusiasm—enthusiasm that often deteriorates into fanaticism and corrupts the original purity of great ideas (and, inversely, filters pure intentions and aspirations from what is foul, placing them in the service of the devil)—seems to emerge quite regularly with each new generation. And nothing seems more difficult for the young than to elude the currents of their time. My grandfather’s cast-iron monarchical loyalty had no argument strong enough to muster against the collective folly of youth; on the contrary, it served only to inflame his son’s pigheaded stubbornness.
This led to unpleasant scenes. That he was sent from the family dinner table because, with an irony anticipating that of Musil’s, he asserted in the presence of guests that the Emperor Francis Joseph I was certainly not the model for all of Austro-Hungary’s full-bearded janitors but, rather, that it was he, first servant of the state, who assiduously emulated the janitors, this is to be counted among the more harmless conflicts. Much worse was that he adhered to the Break with Rome movement and left the Catholic Church. A final rupture became unavoidable when he participated in the Badeni riots. Count Badeni, minister of the Interior at that time, provoked the German nationalists by favoring the Czechs in a school reform. The students took to the streets, my father was arrested and, as an ardent admirer of Georg von Schönerer, challenged a high police official to a duel in which shots were exchanged. As a result, he was stripped of his newly acquired commission as an officer in the reserves, which meant the end of the many hopes his father ha
d entertained for his future.
He hesitated at the university between chemistry and mathematics but finally decided in favor of structural and civil engineering. What determined his choice was not so much that conforming with the career notions his father still held for him was more promising than the uncertain future of a so-called free profession: rather, he was swayed mainly by the chance to get as far away as possible from his mother, as well as from the bureaucratic environment, which struck him as stuffy and confining. The Austrian monarchy in those days stretched all the way to the southeastern corners of Europe: a colonial empire whose colonies happened to be located contiguously on the same continent. And there was room in it to realize adventurous pioneer aspirations. He joined a railway construction project in the recently acquired province of Herzegovina, which at the time seemed as remote from civilization as Karl May’s wildernesses of Kurdistan. When he had earned his first spurs in that service and after some grass had grown over his rebellious aberrations, my grandfather used some pull. Together with a new chief provincial administrator, my father was assigned to the Bukovina: the position was a sinecure.
He played excellent tennis, which led to his introduction to my mother and to their subsequent engagement. She was what is called a good catch—and not only as a tennis partner. So everything now seemed to follow a track toward orderly, normal circumstances. However, long before the First World War eradicated an era of European history and disrupted the old order, it became apparent that this no longer young gentleman hardly fitted the unsettled conditions of the times. He was an anachronism, though in an entirely different way from my mother: she had been molded entirely by an obsolete past, but he belonged to a type whose time had not yet come; to a high degree, he was the “artistic human” Nietzsche anticipated—his nonconformism, his rebellion against the bourgeois social framework, his manifold talents and minitalents, his urge for independence. But he saw himself rather as a representative of the world of the Baroque who had landed in the wrong century.
He attended to his hunting with scientific thoroughness and at the same time with an almost cultic observance of its traditions, all the age-old lore that invests the hunt with solemn poetry. He intended to train me in the medieval rigor of venery’s three disciplinary phases: “houndsgroom” to “small-game apprentice” to “stag maturity’’; unfortunately, as in all his other pedagogic endeavors, he had only moderate success. Nevertheless, our relationship changed fundamentally as soon as I was able to handle a gun. As a child, I had feared rather than loved him. When he punished in anger, he wasn’t choosy as to the means he used: the closest dog whip came in handy. He seemed much fonder of my sister than of me, but she belonged to the female category of the species and as such was the opposite of everything manly that was connected to hunting. That the divine protectress of the hunt in antiquity was a goddess, Diana (or, as he preferred to call her in humanistic pedantry, Artemis), was not a contradiction. He was fond of expatiating on this subject: Artemis was not truly a woman but a virago—a male spirit in a female body, beyond all sexuality, in a higher kind of virginity. A mortal was among her retinue of nymphs: Atalanta, forsaken child of King Oinoïs of Arcadia, a great hunter who had wanted a son and rejected his daughter. Abandoned Atalanta was nursed and nurtured by a she-bear and accepted by the goddess in her cortege of hunting companions. When she became nubile, she was compelled to leave and return to the world of mortals, cast out from divine purity back into the gloom of the sexual. It wasn’t as if my father disdained this domain of human nature; he experienced the carnal with full-blooded vitality. But he chose to believe his own daughter immune to its enticements. He would have wished her to be a virginal nymph like Atalanta who, upon her homecoming, had become the perfect hunting companion for her father. Because my sister was nothing of the sort—she showed no disposition at all for the hunt—he sought the ideal hunting buddy in me, one to whom he would pass on all he knew and loved.
From that moment on, I was no longer a child to him (he hated children). Even though I was still a boy, he considered me a small man and as such possessor of an honor that was not to be violated; he no longer punished me corporeally—the disgrace of a blow could be expiated only in blood, and he expected me to appreciate this. He castigated any carelessness in the handling of arms and the slightest misuse of hunting terms. I was not yet a dozen years old when I was no longer forgiven for errors when I confused antlers with attire or hornings; rutting with mating; singles with brushes; or when speaking of fowl, of fangs or clutches (in the case of birds of prey), of webs (of swimmer birds) or, exceptionally, of simple feet (in the case of the Tetraonidae: capercaillie, woodcock and hazel hen). In comparison to this rigidly esoteric terminology, Cassandra’s linguistic patchwork was moronic babble, and I wisely took good care not to let any of her distortions enter my speech with my father.
In anything concerning hunting, he was of unrelenting sternness. In the forest, playful jocularity was replaced by watchfulness in all senses, more concentrated than any enjoined discipline, and resulting in the most stringent control. Nor would he tolerate negligence in attire; even on the hottest summer days an open shirt-collar was taboo. The slightest complaint about heat, cold, hunger, thirst or weariness drew harsh reprimand. Thanks to him, I learned to sleep on the bare ground as in a feather bed, even when soaked by rain or, in spring during the shooting of the capercaillie and in late autumn after the stag season, when I awoke on occasion covered by snow. When I went with my mother in August to the Carinthian lakes, I was embarrassed to show my bare legs while bathing, because they were covered with stings and scabby with scratches from the swarms of mosquitoes during the buck-shooting season in late May. I had to watch greedy insects gorging themselves in my blood without being allowed to chase them off (one has to remain absolutely still when sitting in wait for game), and ever since, a mosquito bite has been of no concern to me. In winter, upon returning home from long treks in the forest, my feet would swell up the moment I took off my shoes so that they wouldn’t even fit into slippers. But when once my father caught me asleep on a clattering rack wagon, on which a peasant had given me a lift partway home, I got such a dressing down that my ears rang: this, after all, was hardly proper form for a huntsman.
His softer side showed when he thought of rewarding me. Like any boy who grows up with air rifles and BB guns as soon as he can hold them, I shot with murderous accuracy. If you showed me a fly on a wall and asked me to nail it in its place with a shot, I would not consider this a great feat. When I was allowed to go with my father shooting ducks, quails or hares, he let me sometimes try a shot with his gun. Of course, I was much too excited to be able to hit anything with his large and heavy gun, and he understood this soon enough. Among the guns at home, there was one I admired ardently. Long before, it had been his gift to my mother, who, however, never went hunting with him; it stood, new and never used, in the gun cabinet—a French gun of the Second Empire from Lebrun in Paris, Lefaucheux .24 caliber, for cartridges with pin ignition. Even then it was a rarity; today it would be a museum piece. Its light weight and elegant design, the beautifully hand-wrought hammers and the damascened barrels were sheer delight. I was overjoyed when one day my father placed it in my hands and took me along to the fields. It was then that the long-dreamed-of miracle happened: I shot a hare, dead center; it rolled in exemplary fashion and lay like a stone; our dog retrieved it in fine order. My father went to the next oak, broke off a twig and presented it to me as my reward. Ordinarily, such a twig is given only for the shooting of nobler game, such as capercaillies, bucks or stags: a pine or oak twig is dipped symbolically in the blood of the bullet hole, the maw and the vent of the felled piece and presented to the huntsman, who then sticks it into his hatband as the day’s trophy. For small game one is not given such a trophy except as a special courtesy for the first piece shot by a young hunter. I was delighted, astounded. “It isn’t just your first hare,” said my father, “but the first piece of game you shot with yo
ur own gun.’’
The days I spent hunting with my father are among the truly happy days of my life—and there haven’t been that many. I remember images and episodes of incomparable splendor, brimming with life, in which the beauty of the Carpathian landscape contributed as much as the colorful population. I was allowed to go with my father on his visits to the monasteries, in the surrounds of which we would then hunt together. I preserve in my memory a whole sequence of images—but they are of which of these jewels: Putna, Dragomirna, Suceviţa, Voroneţ ...? We are guests of the abbot; with paternal kindliness the prior shows me fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts in bindings of chased silver; sunlight falls through the high windows, in broad stripes alive with dancing motes of dust, into the semidarkness of the library, and outside, jays are heard quarreling in the pines; my longing thoughts wander to the glories of the autumnal forest beyond the church walls blazing in picture-book colors. I am proud of my father, whose talk with the abbot gives proof of his profound and esoteric knowledge. With envy and sorrow I realize that I shall never get so far in any branch of science. Later we are joined by a half-crazed monk who seems to know more about game than the gamekeeper whom the forestry administration has assigned as our escort. We enter the forest. The monk, in his black cassock and his stovepipe hat on shaggy hair, knows that he is not quite right in the head, but he is a genius at tailoring priestly attires and vestments and is sent all over, to archimandrites and metropolitans, to clothe the princes of the Church. He chatters on as we walk, much to the annoyance of my father, who prefers to observe silence in the woods. Suddenly the monk stops in his tracks as if nailed to the spot: in the fork of the branches of a rust-red beech tree a golden shimmer appears, only to vanish in an instant. For a split second we are granted the sight of one of the forest’s most elusive dwellers: a lynx in the wild is very rare. An enigmatic simpleton’s smile plays around the monk’s mouth. Within minutes, he lures a buck into our sights by tweeting on a leaf of grass spanned between his thumbs. Then he resumes his chatter: he spends most of his time in the woods when he doesn’t happen to be busy making a new robe for one of the high priests. I ask him whether he doesn’t have a sister: he might be Cassandra’s brother.
The Snows of Yesteryear Page 18