The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  His stay in Zabola was short. He had a falling-out with the count, who wanted to sell shoots of stags that my father considered not sufficiently reconnoitered, let alone securely positioned. They separated in anger. My disputatious father immediately wrote an article, triumphantly printed in a German hunting periodical, in which he warned against misleading promotions of capital game shoots in Romania. The matter was brought before a kind of court of honor of the hunters’ collectives in Romania. Its decision overwhelmingly found in favor of my father on all points, praised the manly courage with which he had uncovered a disgraceful blotch on the national honor and committed it to extirpation. He was presented with a ceremonial hunting knife, which he put away in a corner of his gun cabinet with the comment: “Those arseholes would like nothing better than to stick it in my back.’’

  He moved to Hermannstadt (now Sibiu), in the heart of Transylvania. Never for a moment did he grieve for the house of my childhood on the outskirts of Czernowitz. From it he took with him only his guns, his painting gear and his spaniel, Trixy. Even easier to him came his leave-taking from the “Jew city” and the fake “black-red-and-gold Bukoviniensers,” the “frocked vultures” and “Russnyaks and Polacks.” He loved the Saxonians of Transylvania, who for eight hundred years, as he conceived it, in defiance of the wrongs inflicted on them throughout the history of Eastern Europe, wedged in between Hungarians, Romanians, Turks, Wallachians and Poles, had nevertheless managed to preserve a German heritage to his own liking: pre-Bismarck, even pre—Frederick the Great, also pre—Maria Theresa and, in fact, anti-Austrian. He capped the Wartburg pathos of his youthful Sturm und Drang period with this Meistersinger version of the idea of the Reich. That it wasn’t so very different from the Bukoviniensers’ “phony black-red-and-gold Germanistic to-do,” which he despised, need hardly be stressed. But he believed that the evidence supported his assertion that the Germanophilic attitudinizing of the Bukovina Swabians was nothing but presumptuous affectation: they deformed spoken German when they opened their mouths—in truth, it was an ugly dialect—and, generally, got along well with Jews.

  Such wrongheadedness in an otherwise intelligent and highly educated person of superior character is less surprising when one remembers the spiritual situation of the period. In those days, the nebulous romanticism that conjured a mystic aura around the idea of a Greater German Reich was an infection spreading like an epidemic among German-speakers in Central Europe, a disease to which not even the Transylvanian Saxonians were immune, even though they were absolutely sure of their unequivocally defined identity. They were first of all Transylvanians, German in origin and language but completely independent and themselves almost aboriginal to the region: deeply rooted in a country they had inhabited for almost a thousand years, with a self-assured culture they had created themselves (and, incidentally, a culture that conferred much of value to the people between whom they lived, the Hungarians and the Romanians). They were connected to the German world of their origin, but no more emotionally tied to it than, for instance, the German Swiss. But when they forgot all this to follow the mythic call to greater national unity trumpeted in its most depraved form, that of the Third Reich, they lost everything: their country, their culture and their identity.

  There was, however, quite some time left before reaching that point, though it was only half a decade—time appears short only in retrospect. My father blossomed in Transylvania. The world of the Saxonians seemed to give reliable support for all his psychic needs. Here he no longer had to play the thankless and tiresome role of the leftover colonial master. Though Romanians were Transylvania’s sovereigns, in this region they comported themselves with discretion. The problems of living together and of getting along had been fought over and settled long before. Hermannstadt, a thoroughly German city, prettily centered around its cathedral, was a world apart from Czernowitz, a “town of the steppes” and devoid of tradition. The burghers’ houses were strung together along streets and perspectives of venerable dignity. The gables left over from the late German Renaissance evoked, indeed, an atmosphere reminiscent of the Meistersingers; the baroque and classical façades were of old Austrian vintage. The Saxonians themselves were a solid, upright sort of people, and their broad dialect resembled that of the Baltic with which my father felt affinities. In like manner he was fond of Hungarians; having served in a regiment of Hussars, he spoke Hungarian better than Romanian. The countryside was magnificent, large forests were close by, and the trophies of the bucks were several degrees better than elsewhere. What more could he ask for?

  It never entered his mind to think of himself as impoverished. Curiously enough, his painting earned him some rather substantial pocket money, though the pictures no longer consisted exclusively of mate-calling capercaillies and bellowing stags. He produced pleasing watercolors of the churches, which he knew better than anyone else: his impressions of Voroneţ, Dragomirna, Suceviţa and all the others found buyers in friends with a taste for folkloristically accented art. In fact, a series of these paintings of monasteries, done for the Bishop of Hotin, is now shown with great pride in the Museum of Arts and Crafts in today’s Chernovtsy. And he did have friends. He no longer scorned contact with the locals as he had in the Bukovina. A friend of old was the Saxonian bishop Dr. Viktor Glondys. Another was the royal Romanian hunt marshal of that time, Colonel von Spiess, a Ganghofer type in folksy flowing pelerine, eagle wings adorning his Lettow-Vorbeck hat, and an open Schiller collar worn with a jacket that, thanks to an abundance of stag horn and oak leaves, combined the glamour of a marshal’s uniform with the woodsiness of a forestry apprentice’s jacket, and that, in its modishness, might have incited the envy of Emperor William II or Hermann Göring. Colonel von Spiess had a bevy of charming daughters, with whom my father surrounded himself as with a garland of flowers. These beloved friends stood as assurance that he could feel welcome in his new surroundings.

  He lived modestly in a small house with a housekeeper, Mrs. Agnete, who—as was to become apparent later—knew how to feather her own nest. There wasn’t much to be had. Occasional remaining artifacts of his once expensive life-style showed his insistence on quality even in reduced circumstances. He had always lived rather abstemiously: he liked good wine but drank only moderately, and smoked each day four or five cigarettes which he rolled himself. One pocket in each of his jackets was lined in doeskin: in it he kept long-fibered blond Macedonian tobacco and some very thin cigarette paper. I never overcame my envious impatience as I watched him lower one hand into that pocket, listening almost pensively to its hidden manipulations, and come up a few moments later with a perfectly rolled cigarette, the paper of which he merely had to moisten with the tip of his tongue to close it before lighting up. My efforts to emulate this sleight of hand led only to a disgusting mixture of crumpled paper and tobacco crumbs that could not be brushed from the pocket seams. When I asked him how on earth he managed to accomplish it, I got as answer, with the same astonished shaking of his head that my and others’ inadequacies elicited from him: “How else can you do it when you’re on horseback holding the reins in one hand and have only one hand free?” It was left to me to ponder whether some Catholic priest in China might give me a more illuminating explanation in Latin. His hands, incidentally, were like rough paws, coarse and red from sunburn and frostbite, but his nails were regularly cared for by a very pretty manicurist.

  Whether it was because he relished the idyllic and easygoing yet by no means narrow-minded town of Hermannstadt, or because his mellowing sunset years mitigated his harsher traits, he seemed to me more amiable and relaxed and less aggressively eccentric. His figure soon became an integral part of the town-scape of Hermannstadt, for he was set in his habits and these led him, day after day, through the same streets—he called them his “runs’’: easily recognized from afar by his height, his rural clothing and his old hunting hat, he walked with deliberate steps, his feet pointing slightly outward (a dandy’s affectation from the turn of the century, w
hich one can see in the caricatures of Caran d’Ache) in his mirror-polished, rakishly narrow custom-made shoes, one of the expensive relics from better days, his black-and-white cocker spaniel, Trixy, following at his heels like a shadow. That he now wore a short-trimmed ice-gray beard did not diminish the hardy freshness of his cheeks. His blue eyes flashed above cheekbones that a fine web of small red veins transformed into rubicund apples. Whenever he lifted his hat in greeting—which he always did with an ironically wide flourish—his shining head would appear like a dark ivory billiard ball. He always looked as if he had just emerged from his bath, the blood circulation still invigorated by the ice-cold shower, scrubbed dry with rough towels, and the skin freshened by sharp lotions. His fragrance was not ostentatious but unmistakably individual: a highly masculine, acidulous scent, composed of good soap, leather and fresh linen from a closet in which he also kept heron feathers, an ermine skin, a little box with medications (some of them highly poisonous) and pistols emitting a faint whiff of gun oil and gunpowder. He no longer practiced pistol shooting in the first light of dawn; his present dwelling was too confined for that. But it was now his pleasure to let a visitor select a green nut on a tree in a neighboring garden that he then would shoot off its stalk with unfailing accuracy.

  It goes without saying that he was not entirely free of his old crotchets, oddities and paradoxes. Any talk with him might be diverted toward a dead end by his pedantry. All too often he would interrupt a general conversation to leave the room and return with a pile of lexica and encyclopedias, so as to ascertain a disputed word or an ambiguously defined concept, or correct a wrongly spoken name. His lack of self-criticism in the matter of his painting was disarming, but it seemed inexcusable and irksome that he also stuck to the most incomprehensible prejudices and fixed ideas. Among these were several that he himself breached in practice, especially those involving women. In his world order and following Nietzsche (and his favorite author, Péladan) in an interpretation rather more naive than philologically accurate, he classified the weaker sex as belonging to a species predestined for bondage and submission. But when actually confronting a woman, he would suddenly emerge as a compliant knight, extolling the virtues of his chosen one to the heavens. His tendency scornfully to dismiss whatever did not conform to his expectations in no way contradicted his basic inclination to faithful devotion. I was not surprised that he asked me to propose to my mother that she might return to him should the discord between her and Philip become unbearable.

  She took it with a hint of a sarcastic smile around her slightly compressed lips, which at the same time drew down at the corners in bitter disdain, and there was even the beginning of a contemptuous nasal snigger, as if she understood only too well the true motive for this belated contrition: past middle age, impoverished and deserted by his “other females,” he would try to come back to her in repentance. Nothing could illustrate more clearly how deeply she had misunderstood him all her life. To be sure, he had not always been considerate of her, he had failed to behave well, scarcely mindful that he had married not a mature, experienced woman but a dream-besotted child, rigidly educated according to prevalent doctrines that she then followed meekly as a lamb, in both thought and deed. In all their life together, she had never understood that he too thirsted to be redeemed. And though he would have liked nothing better than to show her this, he would have done so with deplorable awkwardness. His lovable traits—his limpid lightheartedness and playfulness—drummed down on her as something frightening. Everything about him was a size too large for her, too impetuous. Significant for this was the moral indignation with which she complained, even decades later, that he had not understood her loathing of his physical advances. (She did not speak of this often, but at one time or another everyone she considered an intimate—an ally—learned of it.) She spoke with the tight-lipped restraint she considered appropriate to so delicate a subject, summed up in the verdict: “In a word, a man of uncontrolled animal instincts.” Had she not had to witness how her husband, his amorous approaches rebuffed by her, disappeared for hours into the darkroom with one of her cousins, whom allegedly he instructed in the art of photography? She shared the opinion of him that presumably she was accepted in Czernowitz: cold, arrogant, vain and mad, but mostly mad—an opinion that probably is held all over concerning those who tend to react to stupidity, provincialism and philistine narrowness of mind with acts of jocular rebellion à la Till Eulenspiegel.

  He lost none of his bright nature. Of his dead daughter he spoke without a trace of sentimentality and with a loving cheerfulness, as if she were still alive and he were merely reporting an engaging example of her graceful charm. Once he did this quite extensively. He had come back to the Bukovina on the matter of his unlawfully premature retirement from the Religious Fund. The dispute between my mother and Philip concerning the Odaya finally had resulted in my usurping the property, so that now I considered myself the proprietor of this forsaken piece of no-man’s-land. I found it amusing to invite my father to my shooting grounds for a change, though I didn’t have much to offer: a few ducks and hares in the wetlands of the Prut. But I knew that he would be pleased to see again the house in which my sister had been born and in which she had spent her first four years more under his own loving care than that of her repeatedly absent mother. We both were aware of my sister’s ambivalence about the Odaya, oscillating between mute and bitter resentment of the essentially Eastern, only marginally European nature of the Bukovina and, on the other hand, her love, repressed into a mythic past, for the land of her childhood: the grove of firs, beeches, birches and willow trees that lay behind the manor house like an oasis in the desolate landscape. A small pond and two or three benches on its winding paths, laid out God knows when, gave it the appearance of a park, even though this pretty stand of trees soon diminished into bordering scrub, lost in the wide spaces of maize fields and the Prut River marshes. Jays, magpies, rollers and songbirds took refuge in the crowns of those trees, and from their mystery-laden dusk could be heard the crepuscular hooting of wood owls and the ringing song of nightingales; woodpeckers, their wings stretched or retracted, flitted to an fro in whirring flights and accompanied their rising or descending loops with the corresponding scales of their laughter. Hedgehogs rustled in the leafage under the brushes; frogs croaked in the reed banks around the pond, in which an old rowboat with a seat made of curlicued cast iron lay rotting. My sister, conscious of my mother’s complicated feelings about the Odaya, balked at spending time there; she preferred to dream of the lost past while reading the fairy tales of Brentano and Fouquet’s Undine. But for a child who had been taken in hand by a loving father, to whom every chirping bird and every scurrying mouse, each crocus blossom sprouting from the spring-moist soil, and each hazelnut breaking free from the heart-shaped leaves of its stem had been shown, explained and given, a child who then had had abruptly to leave all this munificent glory—the place was bound to remain in the soul as a lifelong and lovingly preserved dreamland.

  On a blue-golden autumn day in the year 1937 I strolled with my father through those river marshes. We had shot a few ducks; my father, to his joy, also a late longbill. The dogs were working diligently with their tails straight up in the air when a hare abruptly jumped from the undergrowth and crossed my sight. I fired a shot after it—it was one of those shots whose success has something of the divinely ordained: the hare rolled over perfectly and lay stock-still, dead already when the next dog reached him for its recovery ... and in an instant of illumination I knew: this is a final point, the full stop at the end of an era. Never again would there be for us a repetition of such a day in this country.

  I took the hare from the dog, looked at my father and knew that he felt the same. He gave me a brief nod, we stopped our hunt and went home. My father continued to show signs of unrest. He declined the dinner I had ordered prepared for us and insisted on being brought back to town. During the drive, he spoke of my sister. Among the anecdotes that showed her in the i
deal transfiguration into which his loving memory transposed her, the one that amused him the most was the following: It was shortly before the onset of her disease; she had started working for the International Danube River Control Commission in Galatz, whence she sent him the following telegram: “Important discovery: Teskovina [a rough Romanian brandy] with soda almost as good as whiskey!” She could have given him no better proof that she was his true daughter. But for the first time he said this as of someone dead. It was the end of an epoch. Indeed, it was the last time we were to see each other.

  With the year 1938, political events began to overturn each other in frantic succession. In Vienna I experienced the annexation of Austria by what now had become the Greater German Third Reich, and was surprised when my father commented on it in rather restrained terms in a letter. Wasn’t this the final realization of his youthful political dreams? A German hunting companion who spent those March days in Hermannstadt told me of a rather strange occurrence: everyone of consequence had assembled around the radio in the house of Colonel von Spiess to listen to the news from Vienna. After the triumphal announcement of the consummation of the Ostmark’s “homecoming” to the Reich, the German national anthem was intoned—as is well known, the megalomaniac text by Hofmann von Fallersleben, “Germany, Germany Above All,” that was phonily adapted to Haydn’s melody for the Austrian anthem “God Save Our Emperor.” At the first of these notes, now no longer played in solemnly imperial cadences but blared in marching rhythms, my father made a rejecting gesture and shortly thereafter stood up to take his leave, nervously impatient. He went home. There was no need for an explanation in the house of a former Austrian imperial colonel.