The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  My sister now suddenly repudiated all this. She dissociated herself from me; she had no need of me; she stood more secure alone and on her own feet. Henceforth we were brother and sister in name only, though in our world names stood for a whole program. As “the older sister of a teenage boy” she was granted authority over me that exceeded the actual age difference; my behavior, however, supported such prejudicial assessment. Her educational progress advanced smoothly and successfully; the model child grew into a model student; her cheeky precociousness dissolved into reserved, forthright, appropriate comportment; she managed to gain a firm foothold in the adult world. Meanwhile I showed myself obstreperous and intractable, in a word, puerile. I had to change schools (just as at home my mother’s perennial nervous dissatisfaction led to the constant changing of servants). In so doing, a miracle happened and I caught up with my sister by two years, but this was hardly noticed by the family. Nor did it attract special attention when she chose a curriculum that I—not being allowed to attend the Academy of Fine Arts, my first choice—had selected for myself: the Consular Academy in Vienna. This already had been an early fancy of mine, for its original name, Academy of Oriental Languages, had appealed to me; I saw myself as dragoman of the Sublime Porte at the court of the Peacock Emperor, or on the trail of Stanley and Livingstone at the sources of the White Nile. But these romantic notions were squelched by the sober reflection that as a member of a minority I had little chance to advance in the Romanian diplomatic service. My sister, however, could submit a clear-cut plan for her future: she aspired to become a secretary with an international commission, if at all possible the League of Nations in Geneva. There is no doubt that she would have reached this objective had she not been stricken by that pernicious disease. She had already taken the first step: as the best graduate of her class by far, she got a job with the International Danube River Control Commission in Galatz.

  While she was still in Vienna, I played hooky from a catchall institute for school dropouts. I skipped so many classes that I had to allege illness: appendicitis pains are symptoms easy to simulate, and these I reproduced so convincingly that the institute thought it necessary to advise my family. Our parents were in faraway Romania and the nearest available relative was my sister. She seemed so self-assured that no one dared doubt her competence in making the right decisions. She didn’t even consult me before issuing her verdict: “I give you until tomorrow morning to think it over. If then you are still sick, you will be operated on.” I would rather have had both my legs amputated than admit to her that I had been malingering. The next morning I was in the hospital and was soon caught up in the wheels of the medical process. A few hours later, I awoke from anesthesia, feeling terrible. The doctor declared that my appendix had been chronically inflamed and had been removed just in time, and though this assuaged my conscience and even gave me a certain creepy satisfaction, it also laid the foundation of my lifelong skepticism about the infallibility of medical science. Nor was my sister greatly impressed by this vindication, which was as unexpected as it was miraculous. With the terse observation that I would be bedridden for the next few days and would have no use for my pocket money, she took it from the bed table where it had been lying among the thermometer, the pill cup, my wristwatch and the bed pan, and pocketed it.

  She met the “man of her life” at the Consular Academy. Tall and gangly, delicate of limb, with dark straight hair, expressive brown eyes enlarged by horn-rimmed glasses, a sensitive youthful mouth that was scarcely rendered more resolute or manly by the short-cropped moustache favored by Austrian aristocrats, he was far removed from the type I had imagined as my sister’s suitor. Even though I credited her with enough taste not to lose her heart to some Rudolph Valentino—Douglas Fairbanks combination I nevertheless had expected her to choose someone as superior to her as I thought she was to me. But this well-brought-up adolescent struck me as merely a somewhat older schoolmate of mine, and I couldn’t understand why she considered him more than that—indeed, as a man in her life. At first, he seemed just that: a colleague as ambitious and serious, as diligent and conscientious as she.

  I did not see her often in those days. When we didn’t meet on holidays at Grandmother’s house on Wickenburg Street, I would find her in a small coffee shop near the Salesian church, always with her chosen one—they were cramming for their exams. I felt like an intruder, and after exchanging a few laconic trifles, I would leave them to themselves and to their work.

  Only the luncheons on Sundays and holidays at Grandmother’s house brought us together in the old mutual understanding, punctuated by malicious winks. We loved my mother’s relatives, though with reservations: my sister’s unquestioning partiality for her father had automatically ranged us on his side, and we bore his name with a clearly distancing pride which, in their eyes, made us liable to the same criticism that they always leveled at him. My mother’s siblings were not so much older than we that we could accept their authority over us without demur, yet they sometimes arrogated this authority to themselves, though less so over my sister. But in doing so they failed to take into account the acute perceptiveness with which young people discern foibles, scurrilous traits and idiosyncrasies, absurd situations and comical attributes displayed by those who presume to be their educators. Our Viennese relatives now provided more than ample fuel for our uninhibited paroxysms of laughter, the explosions of mirth which were our way of resolving nervous tensions. Aunt Paula’s hopeless singing lessons, which had been going on for decades and resulted only in a monstrous development of her bosom, from which mighty breastwork her voice emerged with ever reedier thinness; the brainless fanaticism of Aunt Martha, who had dedicated herself to the cause of the radical left; the spiritualism, worn with a supernaturally knowing smile, of Her-mine, in whose presence furniture actually creaked, chandeliers tinkled and the family’s cocker spaniel would bark angrily into the empty corners of rooms; Helene’s hackneyed folk-artsy hobbies; and last but not least the awesome stupidity of our insufferably handsome Uncle Rudolf—all this sweetened our duty in attending Grandmother’s communal table. The smallest incident, charged with the accumulated comical effects of countless precedents, would trigger our mirth. Then we separated without the slightest sentimental feelings, I to return, after an afternoon of aimless roaming through a city empty of crowds, to the bleak severity of my institute, and she presumably to the little coffeehouse near the Salesian church, where her beloved Fritz awaited her over tomes of constitutional law, the trade balances of small and large nations, or comparative analyses of the diplomatic methods of Talleyrand and Metternich.

  I was lonely in those last years of the 1920s and the early 1930s. My radical avoidance of scholastic discipline placed me apart from my schoolmates. I had no friend—even less a girl— with whom I could achieve a measure of contentment and self-satisfaction in a coffeehouse or wherever, in the shared pursuit of my current life tasks. I roamed the streets not merely on Sunday afternoons. These were still years of promise, after all, not only the promise of my own future, which still some day might spread butterflylike into varicolored fulfillment, but the promise of a fairer future for all mankind. Despite the threats that hung over the world, people lived with faith in the future, whether in a chiliastic or apocalyptic spirit, in a critical or fatalistically hopeful mood. Sharp-eyed pessimism and starry-eyed optimism went hand in hand—but both were looking ahead. One foresaw the horrors of a second world war in the near future—the first one had ended only a decade earlier—and could depict them vividly, but at the same time one expected the ultimate deliverance of the children of Adam from the curse of labor through the benefits of technology and the establishment of an earthly paradise thanks to socialism. A whole peacock’s fan of glowing ideologies new and old, hundreds of reform proposals, from novel footwear for the prevention of flat feet to mystically ecstatic meditations supposed to raise the quality of life—all promised a new and better world and a grander life for everyone. Utopian dreamers designed
cities such as Metropolis for a future in which the submerged masses would be freed from the yoke of proletarian slavery. One shed prejudices and one’s clothes and, naked, engaged in calisthenics on mountain meadows. The uncle of one of my schoolmates in Kronstadt, son of a dentist by the name of Oberth, experimented with rocket vehicles and planned a trip to the moon, like the one that Jules Verne had anticipated half a century earlier. I was sixteen going on seventeen, and all of this filled me with a nameless anguish. But I did not live it; it was I who was being lived by it.

  And I also was lived by the anguish of sexuality. This is not the place to confess when and how I lost my so-called innocence—I lost the innocence spiritually long before losing it in the disappointing physical act. To keep this innocence for any time, I would have had not to be raised in Czernowitz; it may well be that the cynical—or more accurately, incorruptible—sense of reality which is one of the boons derived from such East European schools of life, made my approach to the subject “man and woman” even more prosaic than it would have been, given my natural disposition. Nor did it require my father’s sharp aphorisms, barely lightened by humor, on related themes. From Cassandra’s earthy closeness to nature, through Mother’s shifting, flickering professions of tenderness alternating with explosions of rage and cruel punishments, all the way to my sister’s icy distancing from me, my childhood held nothing that would have promoted a gushing romanticism. Nevertheless, and as a docile son of the West, I did whatever possible—though perhaps not my best—to conform to the accepted norms. Love was a myth to which everyone clung all the more intensely the more reason there was to render it suspect. The reality was as the pop song lyrics had it: “Alas, love is but a fairy tale....” Whoever has offered me the apple of knowledge, I have chewed on it contentedly in the gratified realization that the lost paradise was nothing but a cloud-cuckoo-land peopled by mischievous goblins.

  Apart from the time I spent in the festering atmosphere of my spartan schools, with their hard benches and besmirched bed sheets, I lived as a teenager surrounded by women, in an ambience of women’s dresses and perfumes and toiletries, to which my father’s guns, dog collars and spring-traps provided only a somewhat inadequate counterweight. My fantasies were feverish. I was spared—thank God!—such early traumatic experiences as those of the Wolfman, while my anguish at not knowing how Cassandra and her cavalryman managed to “crap on the ground together” without leaving any visible traces lay buried deep in the past. But the needs of the flesh remained unassuaged, after the Fall just as much as before it. And it wasn’t flesh alone that tempted and troubled, attracted or repelled; behind that lay something mysterious that required, through enactment, deciphering. This has nothing to do with love. While my sister was cramming with her Fritz for her brilliant final exam in the little coffeehouse near the Salesian church, I roamed through Vienna seeking to get to the bottom of the mystery of the flesh. Certain experiences should have taught me that this search would be in vain. One of those occurred much earlier.

  I was very fond of my grandmother. Not because she might have shown me much grandmotherly affection but—on the contrary—because she was less rhetorical, more sober and at the same time more frivolous than the other members of my maternal family, from its idolized head, my despotic grandfather, to his caricature, the youngest offspring—foolish, handsome, conceited Uncle Rudolf, whose nose had been bitten off by my father’s dog. My grandparents’ five daughters, all of them cantankerous, with cast-iron convictions and outlandish notions, formed a self-righteous and irascible clan that would not acknowledge anything that did not conform to the narrowest traditional concepts or currently accepted platitudes. Grandmother came from an airier environment; foreign blood had made hers flow more freely. Small and dainty, with exceptionally fine-chiseled features and beautiful hair, she had been all her life the object of rapturous admiration; as a consequence, she had little concern for the fate of her fellow human beings and all the more interest in her own.

  She had every reason to be satisfied with it. Except for the drastic curtailment of her means toward the end of her life, a curtailment that she took as total impoverishment, she could look back on an opulently well-provided existence. She had fulfilled all of her life’s duties in exemplary fashion; she had been an unconditionally devoted wife (concerned mainly with questions of proper appearance), mistress of a large household, the by no means exhausted bearer of eight children (two of whom died in infancy), and an adequate mother who appeared to her children as a model of evenly distributed maternal love and rigorously applied pedagogic supervision. Apart from that, her head was filled with little but fashion and, later on, solitaire. There survived something of the eighteenth century in her. I loved the canny cleverness with which, with no pretension and much deftness, she knew how to conceal her unabashed frivolity behind the façade of Perfect Family Mother. Her unsentimental comments, which in comparison with the rest of the family’s self-righteousness let in some fresh air, were balm to my heart. Her little vanities delighted me as much as her well-hidden petty barbs. I am certain that it was with some satisfaction that she declared she had handled her own life better than her eldest daughter had, even though at times she would add pointed remarks to the chorus of voices lamenting my mother’s hard lot, for which my father was unanimously blamed. Only much later did I realize how many of her character traits my sister inherited.

  My insight into the insidious ambiguity of her character was, as is usually the case, less the result of years of observation, of carefully collected and reviewed impressions, than the rich revelation of a single moment. Once—it must have been the year after our parents’ separation and my own separation from my sister—I burst into my grandmother’s dressing room in her house in Vienna without being announced. And there she stood in her underwear like an erotic vignette of the past century, her waist tightly cinched by a corset, puffy underpants tied under the knees with pink silk ribbons and, below their lace edging, elegantly shaped legs in black stockings and high-heeled strap shoes. She turned toward me in surprise but without the slightest embarrassment, her hair carefully coiffed, a full-bodied iron-gray hair which, held in a transparent bonnet, appeared as if still blond in the light slanting in through the angled louvers of the Venetian blinds. All kinds of morning noises reached us through the open windows: the melodious calls of street hawkers, the hoofbeats of fiacre horses and the rumblings of motorcars (in those days individually discernible), the jingling of streetcar bells and other signals of awakening urban bustle. Together, all this had an electrifying effect upon me. I had come from the rural Bukovina to the capital with high-strung expectations. Babylon’s pulchritude lay spread before me in all its wickedness and I was eager to savor it. So there I stood all the more perplexed; surely I was not mistaken when I thought I detected in my grandmother’s sharp question whether I had not learned to knock before entering a room a coquettish undertone that was already addressed to the future man in the grandson. The glance between us—I a malicious imp of barely ten, and she a sixty-year-old as frivolous as a drawing by Félicien Rops—was unmistakably one of shameless mutual recognition. Only too clearly did I see before me an inveterate seductress, ready to be seduced, and even the twin taboos of incest and the difference in age failed to inhibit her from acknowledging this: it struck me as equally comical and disturbing. Years after, a similar incident with Bunchy convinced me that the flesh never entirely renounces its domination nor completely reveals its secrets—but of that later, in its own place.

  This was but a small pebble in the mosaic of my erotic enlightenment that provided, as in a Klimt painting, the background for the drama (tragedy? comedy? penny-dreadful?) of my actual sexual experiences, which threw me into disarray and alienated me forever from my sister. With the cool gesture with which she had distanced herself from me after our first separation, she placed herself in an enclave of untouchability, not merely for me but for the world at large. I was unable to imagine her in any erotic constellation
whatever; she remained the personification of an asexual ladylike entity, a romantic ideal bereft of true reality. In the years that were to be the last of her life, the impression of irreality, even implausibility, in my own existence—and perhaps in that of all of us—led me to harbor extravagant notions. Among these was an almost magical obsession with matters sartorial— though I shared this aberration with many others; it was, one might say, a collective neurosis of the era. But hand in hand with this went a general propensity toward a make-believe attitude in the whole life-style, as if anything might happen merely for the sake of appearance. While I thus impersonated the ideal of the dandy, my sister presented herself—in all the youthful radiance of the promise of her life, perky, spirited, intelligent, ambitious and purposeful—a splendid specimen of a girl, in comparison with which my immature foppishness was bound to seem all the more fatuous.