The hunting rights that went with Father’s (professionally legitimate) assignments extended all over the Bukovina and deep into Moldavia; my father took them as his self-evident due and privilege. This gave me a feeling of unrestricted freedom: wherever we went, we were honored guests. But I was at home truly only in that part of the Bukovina which he had deliberately selected, with thorough knowledge of the local topography, as his very own, right in the heart of the Bukovinan Carpathians, between such world-remote hamlets as Cîrlibaba and Rusmoldavita, twenty miles west of the Bargău Pass. Long before I was born, my father built there for himself a hunting lodge made of wood that over the years turned silky gray. It stood in a clearing that sloped down to the swift flow of an ice-cold mountain brook. In the deep water-holes downstream from its innumerable cascades, the trout hung perfectly still; only the gentle fanning of their gills betrayed that they were alive. Otters fashioned their slide chutes in embankments overhung by dense bushes. With the exception of two or three huts of some Huzules who grazed their sheep on the mountain slopes, no human habitation was within miles. The village of Cîrlibaba was an hour away on horseback. The woods all around had hardly ever been touched by human hand and only rarely were visited by some stray shepherd or by a Huzule poacher. To spot and scout stags, we sometimes lived for weeks in the open.
One might have believed that in these circumstances my father would be just as happy as I. Yet a shadow of melancholy often darkened the grave serenity of his comportment while hunting. He saw that such idyllically primeval conditions would soon be over. One day he told me: “Remember this day. It will soon be impossible to spot within the span of a few hours a pair of ravens, two imperial eagles, a golden eagle and a peregrine falcon.” He was right. Nor was I ever again granted the pleasure of luring hazel hens all the way to my feet, though we frequently did this right behind the lodge whenever we fancied them for our cooking; or of lying in an old cutting, looking up to the starlit sky through the flying sparks of a short-lived campfire, while the bellows of stags could be heard echoing back from the surrounding hills. On such a night beside a campfire—I was not quite seventeen, and proud as a peacock because I had spotted the herd with the bull stag that had been more elusive in the grease than any other, far and wide—as we sat in silence and listened in the night, I suddenly felt my father’s hand pressing something into my own. It was his seal ring, which four generations had worn before him.
A similar recognition came my way only once again, many years later, and not from him. I was with friends in Transylvania in order to study the rugs that the Turks, on the occasion of their generally bloodless capture of the localities, had presented to the peace-loving town elders—rugs now kept in the fortress churches of the small market towns; you can see the dedicatory inscriptions on their so-called appendages (the unknotted endpieces of the underlying fabric). It was spring, at the time of the cherry blossoms. We had stopped at a little town with miniature gabled houses, and all around the snowy globes of cherry trees crowded up the slopes of the hill on the crest of which stood the fortified church. The surrounding fields shone with newly sprouting green, and pale foliage shimmered on the black-and-white-flecked birches. The baroque convolutions of a huge white cloud stood motionless in a sky of immaculate blue. We sat on the market square in an old pub—we should have been wearing wigs and buckled shoes in such a place—and drank the sweet heavy wine of the region; our mood became cheerful and animated, as the innkeeper proudly brought us ever more select vintages from his cellar. In a corner of the room sat an old Romanian cioban—a mountain shepherd—who watched our doings with a benign smile. He wore traditional garb—the garb of the old Dacians as it can be seen on the Trajan Column in Rome: a roughly woven linen shirt over close-fitting cotton trousers, girded by a red sash; a sleeveless sheepskin jacket, heavily embroidered in many colors; and high-laced buskins. On his hair, falling to his shoulders in straggly silver-gray strands, towered the cioban’s high black lambskin bonnet. His stubbly face shone with guileless sympathy. We invited him to join us for a glass. He accepted. Upon hearing that we had come from Bucharest, the capital, he nodded in acknowledgment, but then pointed at me and said, “But you, you’re from the woods. I can tell. You’re dressed like someone from the city, but that doesn’t deceive me. You grew up in the woods.” We all laughed and my friends said they had always known I had come straight down from the trees. But from him, the recognition had been like a patent of nobility. I bowed, grateful and proud, and thought that my father would have been pleased to hear it.
I know—I always knew, intuitively—what the woods meant to my father. He who seeks solitude is a solitary. And he was a solitary to the point of melancholia. Only his defiant contrariness, the innate rebellion in his nature, the stubborn persistence in any decisions or judgments once formulated forbade him to yield to spleen and, at the same time, lent him his air of eternal boyishness. Yet they mutually generated each other: defiance was born of melancholia and melancholia of defiance. At times it seemed incomprehensible that someone of such clearheaded intelligence could be so set in absurd prejudices and outlandish fixed ideas. His view of the world was that of a medieval woodcut. Humanity was divided into those to be taken at full value (huntsmen) and those he called perioecians: the multitude who lived marginally, a motley agglomeration from which he sometimes would pick the odd, queer specimen worthy of passing interest—apothecaries, for instance, because they knew how to mix poisons. He respected conventional painters such as Rudolf von Alt or the portraitist Ferdinand von Raissky and of course painters of animals (all presumed to be hunters) such as Ernst von Dombrowski, in addition to Rubens (because of all that alluring female flesh). He detested music, notwithstanding his zestful morning vocalizing—with the exception of Richard Wagner, ideologue of the Greater Germany movement. All this was proof of a disarming mediocrity in matters of taste. But his lack of cultural sophistication was compensated by a decisiveness in choice that was the mark of both his intelligence and his obsessions. Anything connected with the military was distasteful to him ever since he had lost his commission as reserve lieutenant. Though he rose to the rank of cavalry captain in the First World War, anything to do with soldiering was repugnant to him. Socially unacceptable were all those in trade, and totally despicable was anyone dealing in money.
This judgmental hierarchy—which, incidentally, did not assist him in his own handling of money—produced some deplorable effects. Before I was old enough to serve as his hunting apprentice and companion, he took a liking to a young man who, although the son of a former captain in the imperial medical corps—that is, an academic renegade who had deserted into the military—at least answered to the Germanic name Ingolf and, more important still, distinguished himself by a feverish passion for hunting. For a time he was my father’s favorite and accompanied him on all his shoots; he was, to my intense resentment, presented with the gift of some rifles and was praised to the skies. However, the young man also had to think of his future and therefore entered the service of a bank. From then on, my father no longer knew him and barely reciprocated his greeting when they met.
While such attitudes were already close to mental derangement, my father’s anti-Semitism was outright pathological. This aberration even crept into the articles he wrote for hunting magazines. What the chosen people can possibly have to do with the observation that longbills tend to skim along forest lanes and drift toward smoke remains totally unfathomable, but he managed to find the association—as, for instance, that no lure is of any use if one happens to encounter a Jew in the morning before the hunt, or that Jews nowadays even have the impudence to participate in snipe shoots. Such idiotic derogations were eagerly printed in German periodicals of the 1930s, though this did not mean that my father was a friend of National Socialism. Much as the nationalist element in the Greater Germany concept appealed to him, he was repelled by its socialist component, on sociological rather than ideological grounds. Together with Lord Russell he shared the
view that one had to be a very great gentleman to be a good socialist. Who was not a gentleman had better keep out of politics if he did not wish to be placed under police supervision as a club-swinging anarchist. He showed me some illustrated magazines on whose title pages could be seen pictures of the new Führer of what soon was to become the Greater German Reich. “It’s all very fine and well,” my father commented, “Germany rises once more. But have a look at this fellow: I wouldn’t hire him as a stable boy!’’
He would not even concede to the new regime its hatred of Jews, which in his eyes was a privilege reserved to him and his peers. “To be sure,” he would say, “Jews are blood-suckers, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to steal from them.” That much worse was done to them he preferred to deny. “Admittedly, in Russia pogroms were possible—and might even happen in our day. But the Germans are a cultured nation.” (After all, they produced Nietzsche and Wagner.) When the followers of the Romanian anti-Semitic leader A. C. Cuza started to beat up Jews, he closed his eyes: it happened, he said, because the Jews in the countryside exploited the peasants. His moral condemnation was directed at anything having to do with or motivated by money; and as everyone knew, money was the main concern of the Jews.
On one occasion his prejudice caused me such intense embarrassment that I began to doubt all his notions. It was prior to the great depression of 1929; I was barely fifteen years old but was considered an equal by my father, while my mother still treated me as a petted child. I saw myself somewhere in the middle of those two contrasting attitudes, each of which probably held some truth. As a boy, I played at cowboys and Indians; as a moony adolescent, I saw myself playing the role of future worldling and ladies’ man. The movies provided the models for those dreams in the persons of Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks or Lionel Barrymore, according to one’s mood. The female dream goddesses were Lia de Putti, Louise Brooks and, ultimately, Greta Garbo. Out of sight of my father, I brushed brilliantine in my hair and wore white-and-brown co-respondent shoes with baggy white Oxford trousers. Among the young ladies of whom I was enamored, one was the local tennis champion. In those days, one did not yet play in bathing suits. The headband and white skirts ending above the knee featured by Suzanne Lenglen lent even to young girls a feminine allure that compelled us, their young male partners, to observe a gentlemanly comportment all the more pronounced in its punctilious correctness for being precocious.
The president of the tennis club was a Jewish banker, the fashionable man in town. He had known my mother’s family for decades and treated me with the most engaging courtesy. That he was also a hunter goes without saying: there hardly was a sport in which he did not participate. That to my father hunting was not a sport but a sacral act was another matter. In any case, the two Nimrods had never met. It so happened that a big drive shoot was arranged on which I was allowed to accompany my father. When we arrived at the meet and got out of the car, my father froze in his tracks. Among the guests who had arrived before us was the Jewish banker. My father turned to me and said cuttingly, “I’m afraid we’re in the wrong place. We were supposed to come for a shoot, not to the stock exchange.” He turned on his heel and went back to the car. Before I could follow him, the banker came up to me, shook my hand most politely and said, “I trust we’ll see each other soon for tennis.” I bowed in agony and hurried after my father. He spoke not one word to me on the way home or for the next few days.
It need hardly be said that such eccentricities did not make him friends. But the prevailing tolerance in a region distinguished by so motley a mixture of ethnicities, where everyone accepted the others with all their peculiarities, with either a sardonic smile or an indifferent shrug, conferred a kind of fool’s license on mavericks like my father. Few had much esteem for him. He made no bones about the fact that he counted Romanians (after Czechs and Poles) among the body-strippers of the corpse of the defunct Dual Monarchy. Russians, Poles and Ruthenians were mere colonial populations. He saw himself as a leftover functionary of a liquidated empire. “We have been left here as a kind of cultural fertilizer,” was one of his favorite sayings. With violent abhorrence he rejected any identification with the local ethnic Germans of the Bukovina, whose black-red-and-gold Teutonic affectations, elastically adapted to Romanian conditions, seemed to him as presumptuous as the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich philistines. Aryan zealotry and hatred of Jews were not hallmarks of the aristocracy: quite the contrary; in those days they were the characteristics of the newly risen bourgeoisie. Withal, he had an inkling of the dangers inherent in such pettifogging fanaticism. “Such people always tend to exaggerate,” he would say.
At that time, however, he could still count on many people approving of his peculiar ideas—though not my mother. His thoughtless excesses and oddities she would counter with the terse comment: “One’s mind is well rested when one has so little in it’’—one of her few ironic remarks. On the whole, she thought of him as literally insane and of his insanity as directed maliciously against her. That there were other women who found his traits amusing enraged her. She hated him too much to be jealous, but she felt ridiculed by the pleased complicity with which these other women laughed and carried on in a lightheartedly cheerful manner with him. During their life together she suspected him, probably with good reason, of extending his frequent professional assignments not merely to hunt but also to spend part of his time at various estates where he was on equally—if not more—intimate terms with the lady of the house as with his host. That he never even suggested taking my mother along was a social affront that she held as much against the innocent hosts as against him.
I don’t believe that his escapades were accompanied by much passion. He was sensual but unsentimental in his relations with women. Yet those who knew him well knew that he could be unreservedly affectionate. In this too his defiant contrariness was involved. He too had experienced a youthful infatuation he had not gotten over—with a highly musical young lady by the name of Olga, who all her life kept contact with my sister and me. This unfulfilled love—which in his case surely meant a love not killed by marriage—left him disappointed, with a scornful attitude toward women.
The admixture of self-irony could be misleading. He frequently advertised his crushes with such abandon, for all the world to see, that one could hardly deem them serious even when they were. He serenaded the lady of his heart of the given moment in his early-morning vocalizings, praised her beauty and virtues at the top of his voice, showered her with flowers and the disastrous products of his painterly zeal, and was offended if she did not decorate her rooms with his capercaillies bubble-plopping their mating calls in the rosy dawn or his stags bellowing in autumn mists. Not all women were willing to become his desired playmates; when one or the other obliged him, he soon carried the game to such lengths that she was forced to break it off if she did not wish to be hopelessly compromised. I recall a significant episode from my childhood: one of my mother’s sisters came from Vienna for a visit, my much beloved Aunt Paula. She, my mother, my sister escorted by her temporary English—or French?—governess and I holding on to the hand of Cassandra are taking a demure walk in the People’s Park. Along one of the avenues my father approaches from the opposite direction, in the company of a lady. The exchange of salutations between the grown-ups is icy. I can’t understand why and notice only that my father and the lady are dressed precisely in the same way: both are wearing traditional Austrian costume, which was beginning to be rare in the Bukovina but was nevertheless worn occasionally, especially by hunters. I am innocent enough to see in this harmony of attire—gray loden with green facings and side braidings, and stag-horn buttons—nothing more shadily significant than an entertaining masquerade, and I cheerfully crow my discovery that even their cuff links are identical: stag teeth set in gold. Without a word my mother tears us from our escorts, turns on her heel and majestically sweeps us away, followed by the crestfallen aunt, the deeply shocked governess and an incomprehending but amused Cas
sandra.
When my father observed greater discretion in later years, he did so mainly out of consideration for my adolescent sister. If one assumes that there really is such a thing as a “single great love in life,” then my sister was his. Surely he also loved my mother in his unromantic way and would have known how to invest his feelings with greater affection if only she had met him halfway. That he was not insensitive to her charm he revealed on many occasions: with the gifts he gave her, the books he sent her even after they had separated, such as, surprisingly—in some way as a counterweight to his mating capercaillies and bellowing stags—Sonnets to Ead by Anton Wildgans, and also, almost as antidote, the scandalous diaries of Franziska von Reventlow. Unfortunately, he could not dampen his humorous impulses; he had overpowered her with indomitable vitality from the very beginning of their marriage, provoking ruffled resistance, then stiffness and ultimately anger. Rarely can there have been a more unhappy combination of temperaments, and when he said, “It’s all chemical, anyway,” he spoke a heartrending truth. They were certainly not well matched.
In the case of my sister, the chemistry was right: she was blood of his blood, though quieted by the thinner blood of our mother, and curbed as well by a clear intelligence, similar to his own but more disciplined. Her love for him was as unconditional as it was luminous. She would sometimes shake her head at him but laughed as she did so. In amusement she would follow his scurrilous train of thought, and she always knew what was meant as a joke and what was to be taken seriously. Her attitude toward his escapades was one of maternal tolerance, and whenever he went too far, she found an outlet for her irritation in the convulsive laughter that shook both of us when we spoke of the vagaries of family life.
The Snows of Yesteryear Page 19