The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  My father no longer saw her during the last year of her life, which she spent partly in Vienna, her spirit unbroken despite the futile and tormenting efforts of the doctors to check her inexorable decay, and partly in a sanatorium near Hall in the Tyrol. She loved the Tyrolean Alps, but there was another reason for this choice. Of the separation from him, she spoke only once, when I saw her for the last time. She said: “If he were here, he would give me something to save me from this death-in-life.” It was as if she and he, in perfect understanding of their psychic accord, wordlessly had agreed to spare each other the sight of their dying. He did not visit her during her last months in the Tyrol, respecting her discipline in dying, the same discipline he himself displayed at his own end. It was based on the sober conviction that dying is a strictly private matter that cannot be shared with anyone, and that the pain is only sharpened if one allows this ultimate and most revealing manifestation of one’s innate archsolitude to be witnessed by the one person whose love enabled one, fleetingly, to deceive oneself as to its inescapability.

  Despite my love for him, which never for an instant was diminished by the usual and allegedly unavoidable father-son conflict, I could never deceive him on this point. With the exception of the mutually shared hours of hunting pleasures, which each of us might have experienced just as well with some other congenial intimate, we left each other alone. Neither of us was given the blissful ability to communicate our emotions. True, on many occasions he gave me touching proof of his affection. We were not estranged or at a distance from each other; on the contrary, we were close—yet noncommittally so. There was never between us the same degree of intimacy as between him and my sister. Various experiences I have had with my own brood lead me to surmise that the much vaunted parent-child love is closely linked with the nurturing an infant receives between the stage of his helplessness and his first expressions of independent development. Without doubt, a father’s soul is touched more deeply when he observes in the eyes of his newborn daughter how he is beginning to glow for her like a star on which, with each passing day and with growing consciousness, she bestows her smile, than when, upon meeting his almost five-year-old son for the first time, he sees how the boy stares at him as at a stranger, turns around and speedily takes refuge in the arms of his nurse. To this must also be added “chemistry.” Psychologists of all schools will have to relegate many of their pet theories to the wastebasket once the cross-reactions and interplay of purely physical emanations are elucidated more fully.

  It need be said, however, that my father showed me affectionate understanding even in my early childhood. I was in the habit, as soon as I was put to bed, of crawling entirely under the bed covers. Embryonally curled up in that uterine cave, I made up all kinds of stories—or more accurately, situations that were as eloquent as stories. These were surely proto-erotic: I can still feel the intimate passion with which, as I fantasized tender episodes, I would press the back of my left hand with the right hand against my cheek, as if it were a loved one asking to be caressed. Whenever the blanket was torn away by some adult wanting to find out what the devil I was doing, I was always found in that same innocent position—which should have allayed suspicion that I was masturbating in the dark. But this failed to convince my concerned mother. Cassandra was given strict orders to prevent my holing up under the covers. There was mention of strapping me down to prevent any possible movement: the transformation of a child’s cot into a straitjacket. My father forbade such nonsense. Instead, he came in and sat on the edge of my bed one evening and asked me in passing what I liked to do under the covers. “Undercover games,” I answered ingeniously. For instance? I said one was called “Naked and Sword.” Oh, and others? Another was called “The Golden Rose,” and still another “The Wreath.” Quite satisfied, my father told anyone interested that my childish fantasy was animated by images of knightly symbolism of the early Middle Ages; this was no reason to think of metempsychosis, since everyone carried elements of humanity’s age-old heritage in his innermost self, usually buried at the bottom of the soul and hardly noticed, let alone recognized when they fleetingly floated to the surface in dreams or visions; instruction was given not to disturb me in this storing of psychic flotsam. At that time, the theories of C. G. Jung had not yet reached Czernowitz. My mother opined that my father’s follies had now come to the point that it was time to place him under guardianship.

  He was less perceptive in the matter of my schooling. The constantly changing governesses—in addition to Bunchy, there were five others during the four years my sister and I were at home: two misses, one of them from Gibraltar, who my father steadfastly maintained wasn’t English at all but Jewish; and three French mademoiselles, all of them, to my father’s great disappointment, rather homely and each one staying only a few months—unhappy creatures who hated and feared him and his cutting sarcasms, and all of whom he dismissed with a shrug. The nursery was my mother’s domain, into which he intruded only to take my sister off on long walks, during which he instructed her lovingly in botanic lore, or to provide her with books—boys’ books, really: Viktor von Scheffel’s Ekkehard and The Cat Hidigeigei; all of Scott, Kipling and Twain, but also Brentano, Storm and Fontane; and earlier, children’s books like Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio. He didn’t bother with books for me, apart from occasionally expressing his dismay at the fact that I was so late in learning how to read and write. After my first year at the Gymnasium in Kronstadt, he addressed me in Latin, which he spoke fluently and colloquially, and was outraged when I couldn’t answer him. “You dullard, how will you make yourself understood if you ever go to China?” he asked. “You don’t speak a word of Chinese. The only way out is to talk in Latin to a Catholic priest.’’

  He followed my schooling with utmost skepticism. As a consequence of the constant struggle between his views and my mother’s, I was removed from Kronstadt and sent to the German Gymnasium in Czernowitz, from which I was expelled almost immediately as a result of some misdeed. For one happy year I was then instructed privately, shunted from one tutor to another; during this time I learned more than in my entire formal school education. It had long since been decided that I was to conclude my schooling in Austria, and at this juncture my father’s interest in me was reawakened. The Theresian Academy in Vienna he considered too elitist, infected with affectations stickily preserved in Austrian high society, the nasally drawling snobbism reminiscent of a monarchical gentry. For the Scotch Fathers, also in Vienna, he considered me too stupid. (I believe this view was strongly endorsed by my sister.) In Kalksburg, masturbation was rampant; buggery was prevalent in the Stella Matutina in Feld-kirch. Waidhofen on the Ybbs and Waidhofen on the Thaya were not quite right either. But in his assiduous correspondence with school principals, he found one who turned out to be the son of a man he admired above all others: Professor Valentinitsch, the author of the definitive work, six hundred pages long, on the partridge. Thus, I was placed finally in a kind of reform school in Fürstenfeld, in eastern Styria. My stay there was also of short duration. When, after further years of torture, I was actually graduated and obtained my high school diploma, my father wired me a single word: “Ahi!’’—an exclamation current in the Bukovina to express utter amazement.

  My great passion at the time was to draw, for which I had an undeniable talent. However, he insisted that first I was to finish some academic work regardless, before devoting my time to graphics. In my various attempts to conform to this request—at the Mining Academy in Leoben, in architecture at the Technical Academy in Vienna and by short digressions into medicine and stage design—I lost those years that truly could have been fruitful for an artistic formation. And then I had to return to Romania to do military service. At that point it turned out that my Austrian high school diploma was not recognized in Romania—with good reason, in my case: I was as ignorant as a carp. So I could become an officer candidate and not have to play soldier for three years, I obtained a supplemental Romanian baccalaureate. Only then
, at the age of twenty, did I finally learn something of the history of the country in which I had been born and whose citizen I was, and discover the treasures of Romanian language and literature. I did not hesitate to express my enthusiasm for all this in every way I knew, assailing my father with questions regarding the monasteries he knew so intimately. I met with a strangely cool reaction. He understood my sudden thirst for knowledge of Romania as a sign of my defection from the values of Western Europe, perhaps even as my betrayal of himself: with the newfound pride in my Phanariot forebears, I professed, in his eyes, a shift to my mother’s family and thereby also to my Romanian origin. I was strictly forbidden to show myself in Romanian uniform. When I later moved to Bucharest to work there, he wrote me off completely.

  But I’m jumping ahead of my story. I still shuttled between confused stays in Vienna, filled with all kinds of other activities and pastimes rather than studies, and vacations in Czernowitz and the Carpathians that were pleasurably eventful with respect to both erotic and hunting experiences. My head was buzzing more generously with tie patterns and lecherous crushes than with useful knowledge, a fastidiously barbered, sleekly slick lounge lizard in pearl-gray chalk-striped double-breasted suits and suede shoes, blindly absorbed in the trivial doings of bars and nightclubs, in the boudoirs of demimondaines and the beds of dubious hotels. For the latter, my father showed tolerant understanding. When I then declared that I wanted to give up my studies for good, he made one last, lame attempt to persuade me to study what he himself had missed out on: chemistry. After which he gave up. It was too late to make an educated man out of me in accordance with his own standards. From then on he considered me an ignoramus, a mere consumer of illustrated periodicals, a harbinger of the barbarians who, he foresaw, would soon engulf all of Europe.

  He perceived this barbaric invasion as advancing from two sides: from Bolshevik Russia as much as from an America dancing in worship around the Golden Calf. “To fashion present-day Americans from the Pilgrim Fathers, we sent them our human dregs,” he was wont to say. “Jefferson’s America was drowned in the flood of human riffraff flushed in from Ellis Island. With the conquest of the West by the immigrant rabble, the greed for possession has become epidemic. Any act of violence, any fraud, any whopping lie is all right as long as it serves the pursuit of money, success and power. And it infects us all.” These were controversial words at a time when America was regarded as the rising star of all future hopes. My mother dismissed them with a shake of the head, as she did with all his oddities.

  As for the Russians, no comment was necessary. They were the murderers of the tsar’s family, butchers of the flower of their nation. The rabble of the entire world found in them not only a horrible model but a political objective, more bestial, more inimical to life and more alien to reality in its utopianism than the calamitous French Revolution. Moreover, the Russians were threateningly close. The border of Soviet Russia was only a few dozen miles to the east, on the other side of the Dniester, a stone’s throw for a motorized army. Sooner or later a little excursion to a neighboring country would be made—that he foresaw with certainty. A chain of events in his personal life made it easier for him to draw his own conclusions. The first of these and the most personal affected him grievously.

  My sister had finished her studies and in the course of these— true to tradition—had found the “man of her life’’: in her case, unfortunately, quite literally the one and only. That this might be merely a harmless school flirtation can be ruled out; the young gentleman showed honorable and serious intentions, and she no less. Nothing could be said against him. He was the scion of a prominent Austrian family who would one day inherit lands in Styria and Galicia, and he had trained—like her—for the diplomatic service. They did not plan to marry right away; after graduating from the Consular Academy, he had to obtain a law degree and spend a year at an American university; his grandmother was American, a fact my father could not carp about, since she was a southerner and, in addition, wealthy. Nevertheless he behaved as if a Lebanese white-slaver were about to kidnap his daughter, and treated the presumptive suitor accordingly when he came to pay his respects and introduce himself.

  My sister was deeply wounded. She found it hard to accept that her beloved father could show so little perception, and she held it against me for a long time that, in his most childishly defiant manner, he dropped her forthwith and turned to me, by then a tolerable hunting companion. We spent an unpleasant summer, riven by dramatic tensions—partly in Jacobeni, my mother’s newly acquired property that was meant to be transformed into a sanatorium, and partly at the deserted Odaya. Before it was over, the second and third events occurred that were to ease greatly my father’s departure from the Bukovina.

  The supreme authority of the Orthodox Church in Romania issued a decree according to which administrative officials not belonging to the church hierarchy could be retired after thirty-five years of service instead of the customary forty. My father claimed that this totally arbitrary decree had been promulgated only to get rid of him, but he was not the only person whom the Church had taken over from the former Austrian civil service. He may not have been wholly wrong, however, in believing he was the main target of the decision to cleanse the Religious Fund of all foreign elements. Greater Romania, the product of the 1919 Treaty of Trianon, was at the peak of its vainglory and did not like to acknowledge that, together with its minorities, it had been bequeathed their cultural heritage. My father never let an opportunity pass to proclaim this loudly, and on one of these occasions he had precipitated a nasty dispute with Professor Jorga, pope of all Romanian historians, an effrontery equivalent to lèse majesté and defilement of the national flag.

  Be that as it may, he could only welcome the premature termination of his service, since he could now indulge his passion for hunting without restraint. Unfortunately, there was a snag: the “frocked vultures” argued that he had been in their service for merely eleven years, namely from 1919 to 1930, and that he was entitled to a pension for that period only. Pension for the remaining twenty-four years, from 1895 to 1919, he kindly should collect from the Austrians. This was clearly contrary to the provisions set forth in the state treaty regulating the takeover of former Austrian civil servants. But even if the Romanian government had agreed to pay him for that time, it would have meant a severe curtailing of his benefits: eleven years in the service of the church and twenty-four years in that of the state did not equal a full pension for thirty-five years of service, especially if these thirty-five years were to be counted for the customary forty. My father was ready to submit his case forthwith to the courts, where undoubtedly he would have prevailed if he had had the support of similarly affected colleagues. But of these, none was ready to make a move: they were all of shorter service and his juniors in rank, and trusted in some future compromise.

  While negotiations in this matter were pending, he was the victim of an additional misfortune. For years he had undertaken to collect and transfer the retirement benefits of colleagues who had been pensioned earlier and who had returned to Austria. By giving him power of attorney for these transactions, they saved themselves the time and the bother of coming back from God knows where to collect their monies. While at the bank collecting this large sum of money, the yearly remunerations of several high-ranking colleagues, he placed the entirety in a billfold next to him on the counter of the bank window and filled in the forms for the transactions; when he was finished, the billfold was gone. He had to make up the money from his own pocket. He always had lived well above his means and was heavily in the red at the bank. The bank proceeded as banks are apt to do: it granted him the credit and in return took everything he still had. The beautiful dream of living henceforth in the woods and only for hunting dissolved.

  He was not the sort to lament such strokes of fate. His mood was in a minor key only when he spoke of his diminishing chances for hunting because of the “damn continuous and forever growing depredation of God’s nature
by the ever greedier and more numerous human herd.” What then remained for a huntsman but to withdraw to the depths of the woods, where they were still relatively untouched, where one’s last shot and the dog’s barking in sorrow for a dead master would be lost in pristine remoteness ...? But he would wait a while longer before taking this step. For the time being, thanks be to God, the Carpathians were still rich enough in trees and game to make the heart of any true huntsman leap with joy at the mere thought of it. Even as he saw his dreams in the Bukovina evaporate into thin air, he began to realize their fulfillment by other means elsewhere. The virgin woods were his only true home and hunting was now his only profession. Count Mikes of Zabola, who owned immense tracts of forests in Transylvania, was looking for a manager to organize high-priced shoots for foreign hunters. My father applied for the position and was accepted.

  There, in Zabola, in 1932, he received the news of the death of my sister. He, who was in no way superstitious, reported a strange occurrence in this connection. He had spent the night in the forest under the skies and had been awakened by a something that most tenderly stroked his cheek. He had not doubted for a moment that it had been a message from his dying daughter, even though he tried to explain it away by the touch of a moth: but could there be a moth in early March in mountain woods? a bat? the wing of a wood owl? Whatever: he knew my sister had died, and went down to the village to collect the telegram with the news of her death. Countess Hanna Mikes later told me that he sat motionless on a bench in front of the castle, holding the telegram in his hands, while the tears ran down his cheeks. Then he got up and returned to the woods.