The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Only one little episode in all that time reminds me that we were chips off the same block. Once, after a Sunday lunch at Grandmother’s house (and the inevitable laughing fit), my sister invited me to a movie. Still in our naughty mood, we sat in the dark and giggled about the screen ongoings, making iconoclastic remarks, among them that a particularly silly scene could have happened only in Czernowitz. The voice of a gentleman next to us said, “So you are the offspring of my old friend Rezzori?” He said it could not have been otherwise: nobody else in Czernowitz would make such irreverent remarks in such good German.

  Thus we came to the summer of 1930. My sister was graduated with flying colors from the Consular Academy, well versed in political and economic sciences and constitutional law, with a diploma as an interpreter in English, French and Italian; she was closely followed in achievement by her classmate Fritz, whom she now intended to show off to our parents in the Bukovina as her future husband. I have reported earlier on the unhappy outcome of that meeting with my father. My mother showed herself of greater understanding. All of us proceeded to Jacobeni, the site of my mother’s putative sanatorium, to enjoy the benefits of the piney scents and the sulphur mud baths. No clients had arrived as yet. In the hope that they might, a medical director and partner in the enterprise, Dr. Z., together with his wife, and an estate manager, Mr. von L., a decrepit gentleman who was almost blind, and blessed, moreover, with a scrofulous son who was supposed to serve as bookkeeper (both soon left the venture, presumably without ever having been paid), meanwhile took up residence and lived on credit. We—my sister, Fritz and I—were lodged in a peasant house, which Mother had fixed up and furnished on the model of that folkloric gingerbread cottage where she had spent the interim period before her second marriage. I still can see my sister standing in front of it, amidst the luxuriant greenery of mountain meadows, her arms full of cornflowers, birdgrass and daisies, happily smiling up at Fritz; he wears a gentle, solemn and somewhat owlish look and is clad in leather shorts and white half-stockings, foolhardily exposing his spindly aristocratic legs to the potential bites of vipers, which happened to be plentiful in the region. Together they are—as the saying goes—but one soul and mind. I am totally left out.

  That, shortly before, my school in Vienna had granted me a diploma, I owed solely to my inspired idea of declaring that I would study at the Mining Academy in Leoben, in Styria. This venerable institution, housed in a building that my grandfather had designed, was about to be closed for lack of students, so that even such scholastically deficient pupils as myself were encouraged to matriculate there. To demonstrate how serious I was, I decided to undergo some practical training in mining. I didn’t have to look far for such an opportunity, as Jacobeni is (or rather, was, since Comrade Ceaşescu has since seen to it that Romania is cleansed of most minorities) a settlement of German miners from the Zips region. Not far from it, an ancient manganese-ore mine was still in operation, and it did not prove difficult to place me there as a volunteer.

  In this heartland of the Bukovinian Carpathians I was destined to feel my Germanic sympathies reach their apogee. The woods I crossed each morning, climbing to the mine entrance long before sunrise, epitomized the dark coniferous forests described by Stifter, with morning winds rushing through the fir trees under turquoise skies breaking in sharp suddenness from the darkness of the night; it was Caspar David Friedrich’s spruce forest, its mad lighting clouded in white fog, its stillness pregnant with the purling of hidden sources and the silence gently scanned by the falling of dew. The blood drops of wild strawberries shimmered among the rich greenery of their earth-hugging leaves, the moldy and mushroom-scented thickets half concealing an entrance to the gruesome stronghold of Siegfried’s dragon; at any moment the scaly monster might emerge, snorting fire, clawed fangs raised in awesome threat, exposing its yellow-ringed belly as it writhed over mounds of whitened bones and staring death’s-heads, of fallen knights’ swords and broken lances, of the treacherously murdered eremite’s cowl and cross.

  I believe I now know what prompted me so eerily to Germanize that arch-Romanian forest in the Carpathians where I felt more at home than anywhere else in the world: it was the carefully barbered, smooth-haired adolescent in Styrian summer garb, down in the valley, who sought to abduct my sister and take her with him back to his country, our own parents’ land of origin, home to the mythical, mystic fairy-tale Holy Roman Empire of German Nations (or the sorry shambles of its remains); and it was the careless lightheartedness with which my sister bade farewell to our own Romanian homeland (which she probably had already repudiated when she lost the house of her childhood) to become once again the daughter of the Occidental world toward which our father had always steered us. I had to admit I was jealous. Not merely of the gently arrogant wearer of hornrimmed glasses and leather shorts, under the codpiece of which garment successive generations already lay in wait, who would bear another name and would split my sister forever from our clan. I was also jealous of the advance she had once again gained over me: the legitimacy of an Austrian affiliation to which I too aspired, even though I knew my true roots were right here in this country which, notwithstanding its variegated historical fortunes and constantly changing national flags, official languages and custom tariffs, had imprinted on the medley of races that lived on its soil an unmistakable, undeniable stamp. Despite which it pleased the rulers of that country at the time to consider me an alien interloper, while for my Austrian schoolmates I was but a Balkanic gypsy from the remotest southeastern backwoods. The untainted Germanness extolled by Hauff and Schnorr von Carolsfeld was denied me forever.

  I strove down to the Mothers. When I descended into the mine pit, it was as if I penetrated deep into the womb of the earth that had borne me. Cassandra’s nourishing maternal milk aside, only one-eighth of my blood had its origin in this earth. And yet it was my own soil, and the bond with it was stronger than the Wagnerian sounds that my father had implanted in me, stronger than the All-German aggressiveness with which every schoolchild was inoculated by the politically assiduous German Scholastic Association, stronger too than the German Romantics’ seductive world of fairy tales and legends, which were no match for the mystic appeal of Cassandra’s earthy sagas. The mine in which I lent a hand here and there was old and dilapidated, a labyrinth of shafts and drifts, where manganese ore was still being mined in only a few adits. Most of the old faces were decayed and had been abandoned. Here too I roamed and ventured to descend to dangerous depths, into precipitous shafts and tunnels that long ago had become insecure through random pillaging. My miner’s lamp darted spookily over a subterranean forest of posts and cappers sunk centuries before, barely able to withstand the mass of ceiling weighing on them, over walls hung with old men’s beards of arctically bleached lichen, glittering with moisture dripping from above, apocalyptically snowy and pointing downward to fathomless abysses as in a delirious vision of Edgar Allan Poe. The smell of the rock intermingled with that of the carbide fueling my lamp, a clammy smell of mineral ore pervaded by the sinterings from sulphurous veins in the rock. These could have been the antechambers of King Laurin’s ruby-shimmering empire of dwarfs or the bottom of the dream lake, the Mummel Lake, to which Simplicius Simplicissimus descended. In my innermost self I felt the arch-German poetics, the deep mythical truth that all of this encompassed. Yet it was also my direct and immediate existence into which I penetrated here, my true homeland, irrespective of the language and the emotional world, the circle of myths and legends and fairy tales I had been raised in. I felt so closely linked to this earth that I thought of my sister, now happily ready to desert all of this, as a renegade, even worse, as a traitor.

  For she too was a daughter of our mother—even though she seemed so exclusively her father’s daughter that no one would have thought of counting her with the distaff side of the family. Among us blue-eyed family members, she was distinguished by the greenness of her iris—a lightish green which, strangely enough, was also to be found in all
her dogs (all of whom too, except Troll, her childhood playmate, died young). Irish eyes, it was said, from my mother’s side; or Turkish bird-of-prey eyes from the Phanariots who had come to Romania from the Sublime Porte, though it was also maintained that in that green the dark eyes of my father’s Italian ancestors mingled with the blue Irish ones. Who can say what Normans or Spanish Goths in remote times, in far-off Sicily, haunted the coloring of the autochthons’ eyes? In any case, the olive smoothness of my sister’s skin seemed to have had its origins there, though it was of almost translucent delicacy and without the leathery full-bloodedness of the Mediterraneans. Anyhow, the resemblance of her character to our maternal grandmother, her cool sobriety and—someone finally had the courage to call it by its true name—selfishness I noticed only after her death.

  In a word, she was much more of the stamp of my mother’s family than I and therefore had her roots in the East as much as I. Nevertheless, she now strove “homeward’’—or more accurately, she willingly let herself be repatriated to the truly Germanic world. Not merely willingly but with a sigh of relief, as of one being liberated. I know that my emotions then were bred of wild imaginings—or perhaps inversely: my speculations were the monstrous offspring of tumultuous and highly ambivalent emotions. But today it seems to me that it was no mere chance that just at the onset of the calamitous Third Reich, the union of my sister—herself of old Austrian origin—with a legitimate Austrian suitor triggered my search for our genotypical heritages, their links in blood and soil, and their relations to mystic ideas of a unified nation. We did not live our own lives. Our lives were being lived by our period.

  Thus the summer of 1931 went by. Fritz went home to Styria and from there to the United States to complete his law studies. It was accepted that thereafter he would marry my sister. Meanwhile, she had gotten her job as secretary for the Danube Commission and had moved to Galatz. I enrolled at the Mining Academy in Leoben. My father was holed up in the woods. It was paradoxical: he who always had preached to us about the “return to the West” and our affiliations with Germany’s cultural world, he who never tired of deploring his exile to the Bukovina and the thanklessness of serving as “cultural fertilizer in the Balkans,” now balked violently and resentfully at his daughter’s projected repatriation to Austria and attributed absurd motivations to it so as to hide his jealousy. The break between him and my sister was accomplished. It would have been irreparable had she not become fatally ill.

  I revert stubbornly to the psychosomatic origins of her illness (even if, in truth, these are presumed by no one but myself): what happened after those summer days in Jacobeni was so grotesque as to border on the farcical—and more than once served as an occasion for one of our convulsive explosions of laughter; but the point is that it destroyed once and for all the fragile texture remaining of what we still then called our family. I am speaking of the so-called sanatorium in Jacobeni, which had its origin in one of our mother’s unfortunate bursts of entrepreneurial activity. It began with a friendship between our father and a certain Dr. Z., a physician who had his practice in Cîrlibaba, a dump of a place in the deepest Carpathian woods; he was the only doctor for hundreds of miles around. The Huzules—a Ruthenian-speaking tribe said to be the direct descendants of the Dacians, since whose times they barely had been touched by the hand of progress—hesitated for years before entrusting to him their bone fractures, wolf bites, the eelworm nests in their lungs and their syphilis-eroded noses, instead resorting to their own herb-brewing witches; but ultimately they came to him, since he was covered by the state health insurance plan, and they did not have to pay him anything besides occasional voluntary contributions in the form of cheese, wild berries, or trout and grouse hens from their poachings.

  Cîrlibaba was an enchanted place. It might have been created by Chagall or by a stage designer for a spaghetti western: in a green mountain hollow stood a handful of wooden huts and a minuscule timbered church roofed with wood shingles, a sawmill and three wood-framed Jewish stores in which could be bought whatever was needed in these remote backwoods—whips, axes, saws, hemp ropes, leather goods, multicolored kerchiefs, cart shafts and salt herring. The center of the hamlet was not the church but the log-framed kerchma, the village pub, where the men of the hamlet and, occasionally, some shepherds who had climbed down from their mountain slopes would get drunk. The wondrously luminous mountain air was saturated with the scent of freshly felled wood. A hundred feet below, in the valley, the ice-cold, lime-green waters of the Bistriţa River, rushing over white rocks, were dammed up by a wooden weir which, once enough logs had accumulated, was opened up to let the then wildly raging torrent carry the timber to the lowlands. Legs that from time to time were squashed by the playfully jumping and rolling logs were treated by Dr. Z.

  He was a man of glittering abilities, small and wiry, full of beans yet somewhat abstracted, brightly alert though appearing mentally absent, highly intelligent and surprisingly well-read and informed about everything. Together with his wife, Wanda, he lived a few hundred feet from the hamlet in a spacious wooden house, a haven for a multitude of much loved and spoiled pets: hens, geese, dogs, cats, a couple of otters in the garden pool, sheep and cows and some Huzule ponies, tame as lambs. The dark forest rose behind some fat grassy meadows, where capercaillies could be heard calling in spring; the roaring of stags resounded in autumn; and wolves howled in winter, when the pines towered like giant icicles from the deep snow all around.

  Yet Dr. Z. was not content with this idyllic retreat, redolent with the scents of hay and resin. Each year he closed his practice when the snows melted and, together with his wife, traveled from March to May in the capitals of the West: Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London, and home again by way of Madrid and Rome. Money was no object, for he made more than enough and had no other way of spending it. He returned covered with the pollen dust of Occidental culture and once again labored for ten months as a country doctor in Cîrlibaba. From time to time I was given a chance to nibble at this cultural honey. It was in his house that I delighted for the first time, as if hypnotized, in art magazine reproductions of the paintings of Mondrian and Modigliani, of Braque, Picasso and the Italian Futurists, and discovered, through an osmotic absorption of the style of the era, a harmonious concordance between the violence and sarcasm of Majakovsky’s posters and the pioneering visions of Kupka. In the issues of Studio and Gazette du bon ton, available in my parents’ houses, such things could not as yet be found.

  My sister had not been in the Carpathians since her childhood—surprisingly, it seems to me in retrospect. It may be that my father considered life in the woods too rough for a girl, let alone a young lady. It may also be that he didn’t want her near, when her dislike for hunting was obvious and ever present. I, on the other hand, was a frequent guest at Dr. Z.’s house. When my father went hunting, he never missed calling on him, not only because of his pleasure in the company of the doctor’s attractive wife, but also because he enjoyed talking with Dr. Z. about all kinds of topics. In particular, they liked to discuss poisons, a subject stimulated by my father’s early love for chemistry (and alchemy), and in which Dr. Z. showed an astonishingly thorough knowledge. This shop talk always ended with the hypothetical quest for the perfect murder by a poison that could not be detected. I remember well one of these conversations. A fire burned in the chimney, the two men sat over glasses of wine while the doctor’s wife and I were busy with a large basket of huckle-berries, picking out unripe ones, when the talk turned to the question of whether it was possible to detect the presence of potassium cyanide in a corpse. The closeness to our hosts lulled us into a feeling of comfortable well-being, a belief in the immutability of this well-appointed and lavishly run house and in the contented happiness of its owners. But Dr. Z. surprisingly complained of the schizophrenic nature of their life, split between Cirlibaba and the great hotels of Europe. They had to come to a decision, he said. He wanted to change his life. But to do so he needed more money than he could ma
ke in a year and waste in three months. He had a plan, thought out in all details, as simple as it was foolproof. The valley of the Bistriţa River was rich in healthful springs, primarily sulphurous ones. He, Dr. Z.—and he alone—knew also of one that contained arsenic: it bubbled up, until now undiscovered, next to a former convalescent home for railway workers, a building going back to the days of the Austrian monarchy which had stood empty for decades and could be had for a pittance. How would it be, then, if my father were to purchase this building and place him, Dr. Z., as medical director of a sanatorium which, with the lure of sulphur and arsenic health baths, would soon attract crowds of patients, thus making both of them rich in no time at all?

  My father declined forthwith. Not only had he no intention of making a fortune by means of any enterprise at all—particularly one in which the customers could be expected to be mainly Jews—but also he was much too familiar with the actual situation. Even such old and well-established spas as Vatra Dornei attracted fewer and fewer customers during the brief summer months. For rich people, these spas were not fashionable enough—the “in” set went to Biarritz or Meran; and those with more modest incomes couldn’t afford Vatra Dornei. Moreover, the convalescent home referred to by Dr. Z. was a derelict rattletrap halfway between Jacobeni and Vatra Dornei, one-storied on the front side but with three stories at the back on a precipitous slope over the Bistriţa. The bathhouse was on the river, which was too shallow for bathing during the damming periods and so torrential during the logging season as to be not only a danger to life and limb but an outright playground for suicidal candidates. As far as the sulphur baths, these were available everywhere; and my father simply could not believe in the existence of arsenic spring water. He was right on all counts.