The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Much later, when the truth had dawned on me about many things that I had once considered self-evident but that were, on the contrary, incomprehensible, I wondered how, in a world that suffered day in and day out the most cataclysmic changes, we could have remained stuck for so long in our narrow, blindered complacency—not only our conceits regarding our social position, our assessment of our fellow beings and ourselves, but the overall situation of the world around us. Czernowitz, for us, was the center of the universe and our home was its very core. It was but natural that as growing children we existed in a state of cultural pupation, from which we freed ourselves only gradually, through increasing our knowledge and deepening our insights, shedding layer after layer of childhood’s dream condition and the stereotypes that indiscernibly were part of it, the wrappings that had protected us. And it goes without saying that this process was not a gentle, gradual one, let alone painless or unopposed; it happened rather by sudden jolts and shoves, in insidious evolutions which we perceived only long after they had taken effect.

  When we had come to know Bunchy, it astounded us that our mother had been reared by her. Obviously she had assimilated all the rules of proper comportment, the knowledge of languages and art history befitting a “daughter from a good house,” but she had failed to acquire any of Bunchy’s sense of humor or her sound common sense (which she shared with our father, although neither he nor she would have liked to acknowledge this), nor the openness to the world, the lack of prejudice and the intellectual independence of this exceptional woman, not to speak of the generous respect Bunchy showed for other people’s peculiarities. Nor could much of this be detected in our aunts, who also had been Bunchy’s pupils; what little there was, was buried under moronic class prejudices or, worse, collective ideas and opinions. We concluded that one could teach and learn only so long as teacher and pupil shared more or less the same physiological disposition—“chemical concordance,” as our father called it. Slowly it dawned on us that the oddities in our household were in some way effectively the marks of a social class, one belonging to a dying and largely already superannuated caste, and that the only remaining salvation consisted in renouncing all of it. That this did not happen violently and destructively, as was the case with later generations, we owed to Bunchy’s perceptive and considerate guidance.

  She never indicated with a single word, an inadvertent gesture, a glance or even a twitch of the eye that she might be disappointed with what had become of her former pupil. She treated my mother with the same even-handed, loving and tolerant care she must have shown to her when she was a young girl, her attitude now heightened by the polite respect granted to the mistress of the house. A more civil tone entered our home, where hitherto emotions had been expressed in fairly unbridled fashion. Even Cassandra straightened up with a pride that had been awarded her at long last and that no longer could be denied her by some miss from Smyrna or some vaguely whorish mademoiselle from Marseilles. Bunchy’s dignity stood watch over our own; withal, we were freer in our manners, we laughed more frequently and less maliciously, and we took whatever still pained us—such as my mother’s regrettable and frequent accesses of temper and manic vagaries—in a spirit of greater tolerance. When a certain pettiness of outlook degenerated into stubborn narrow-mindedness, Bunchy’s determined intervention drew our attention to basic discrepancies between the conception of life held by normal civilized people and that held by us. We then made haste to follow her implicit injunctions.

  When she came to us from Vienna in the summer of 1921, I was so confused by her apparition that I had to be fetched with almost brute force from Cassandra’s room, where I had taken refuge, to be presented to her. We had heard of her for as long as we could remember; she was spoken of within the family as a temporarily absent relative, all the more dear because of her absence; she appeared in most accounts of my mother’s youth, that mythic time, even more remote and splendiferous than the period in which I was not yet and my sister already was “of this world.” I would have considered her as a pure fairy-tale figure had we not received from her regular congratulatory postcards, usually reproductions of paintings by old masters, especially those of the Tuscan school (it was said that she had lived for years in Florence), on the occasion of our birthdays, Christmas and Easter; the golden background of those Annunciations lined the place in my psyche where her name was embedded. She had been a living presence in my inner being long before there was any talk of her joining us, and when one fine day this was announced as imminent, it seemed a barely believable miracle, almost a profanation. This witness to the lost glory of our house, a glory in which I had not been allowed to share, this guardian of the irrevocable, whose existence in this world reached back into the secrets of time even further than my sister did, was now to face me in person; she was to become flesh and blood. She had been a participant in the reality that no longer was real but was perhaps only an assertion by those who had lived before me, a reality that was documented solely in a few surviving artifacts and graspable in these only in some moments, in shadowy singular aspects—as in the wrought-iron backrest of that rowboat rotting in the pond at the Odaya.... It was she I was to face and to whom I now was to introduce myself, as so often in the past years and with growing rebelliousness I had done with the misses and mademoiselles flashing by like transient comets. Cassandra washed my hands, brushed my hair and nudged me through the door of the study into the drawing room. There, majestically towering next to Mother, stood the mythic figure of Mother’s family, Miss Lina Strauss, arrived that very moment. My sister already stood confidently close to her and looked expectantly at me—in malicious amusement, so it seemed.

  It was a bright summer day and, to my pleasant surprise, Miss Strauss was wearing, not as I had expected, a severely black turn-of-the-century dress, like a child murderess in a wax cabinet, but a white traveling dress; the skirt reached to her ankles, and the short jacket, old-fashioned in cut, was buttoned all the way to the neck. It seemed a garment fitting the resplendent wearer and the radiance filling the room. “So there he is,” she said, as if greeting someone she had known forever, and stretched out to me both her black-gloved hands, one of which I grasped and kissed, as I had been taught was the polite thing to do when being introduced to a lady—though at that instant I realized it was hardly proper to be kissing the hand of a governess, particularly one in a black glove. It would never have occurred to me to do this with Miss Knowles or Mademoiselle Derain (she actually had the painter’s name). Involuntarily I glanced at my sister, but the imposing figure in white had interposed herself between us. Miss Strauss knelt down to me, took me in her arms and kissed me, saying, “He is too polite. We shall settle between ourselves to whom he is to show such courtesy and where this is a bit too much.” When she stood up, she kept my hand in hers, placed the other on my sister’s shoulder and said, “Now show me where I shall be staying. I have to recover from my journey. I’ve been traveling almost two days.” I saw that my mother had been watching this encounter as an engaging spectacle in which her well-bred children showed themselves to best advantage—and in a better light, certainly, than at those costumed affairs she had been arranging for us. We were finally behaving with the grace and poise she expected of us, as in a genre Biedermeier painting, and she basked in the moment. Maternal satisfaction—all too infrequent—brought her a rare instant of true relaxation, and it triggered a mood wholly different from the nervously imperious harshness we were used to. This was a foretaste of Bunchy’s blissful influence on the atmosphere of the household.

  I watched eagerly to see whether her imposing appearance would also induce my father to kiss her hand. Quite apart from the fact that it was pretty hard to get my father to kiss anyone’s hand, excepting that of his beloved of the moment, he and Miss Strauss already knew each other. After having greeted her with a formal “Good day,” he contented himself with a dry comment: “Well, this one hasn’t gotten any younger either.’’

  She was then—i
n the summer of 1921—probably about sixty, though we were never able to ascertain her exact age; in any case, she was older than my father, who had been born in 1876. She had come to our then eight-year-old mother in 1898 and stayed with her until shortly before her marriage in 1909. So she would have met my father as bridegroom, wearing his woolen ski cap, in the midsummer of 1908. Magical dates! They troubled me because they were preludes to my sister’s birth—that is, preludes to that special world experience which was her handicap over me. Now, before me stood the Keeper of the Great Seal of this treasure, and I began to watch jealously to see whether my sister, on the strength of her advance in time over me, would try to establish a secret and deeper intimacy with Bunchy, our new and in so many ways meaningful housemate.... But then something miraculous happened: a few weeks later Bunchy went alone with me to the Odaya.

  First, however, I have to recount how she gained my confidence. In contrast to children today, we were not spoiled with a surfeit of toys. Christmas and birthday gifts from my mother were always selected with great empathy and were joyfully received, but they were anything but lavish. The legendary ship’s model that foundered in Constanţa belonged to a later period, when we no longer had a true home and my mother tried to compensate for the distance that separated her from me, at school in Kronstadt and desperate with homesickness. As long as the family lived together, we children had contented ourselves with a few stuffed animals from our infancy—and of course, our live pets: dogs, rabbits for a while, two or three broken-winged birds found in the garden, a magpie, a starlet, a robin—until our mother somehow got it into her head that they carried meningitis and tuberculosis. My sister’s dolls moldered at the Odaya; she didn’t want to see them ever again. My “German Brother” was in rags; shortly after the Romanian soldier had thrown him in the gutter, his belly split and a sad mixture of straw and sawdust dribbled out, leaving a slackly empty uniform—the felt it was made of suddenly seemed horribly shabby—crowned by the stupid blond head without its rookie’s cap. My ball with the multicolored circus pictures I had lost to the treacherous seducer from beyond our garden gate. Of my toy saber I had been relieved, after wounding a child of one of our country’s new masters with it, a deed that might have drawn on us down their vindictiveness unto the seventh generation; as to the handful of lead soldiers I had, Cassandra usually kept them hidden in a box, so as not to arouse the wrath of my father (though the real reason for secreting the soldiers was probably that they wore the uniform of Austrian dragoons and as such would be deeply distasteful to any Romanian). Miss Knowles, arriving and vanishing in our lives like a meteor, had introduced us to some indoor games, to be played at a table in sedentary gentility—such as tiddlywinks, which soon bored us after we almost split each other’s heads open over it. Even worse were games like merle or ludo; neither of us was what our bucktoothed Miss called, in her jolly British way, “a good loser.” I ardently wished for a miniature railway set and never got one, though the Christmas and birthday presents with which Mother bribed us became more opulent with the passage of years. From a remote and shadowy time (near Trieste? in Lower Austria?) I also seem to remember a cardboard with holes into which many-colored glass balls could be inserted to form a variety of patterns; all my life certain ornaments, some luminous advertisements and, more recently, photographs recomposed in computerized images have reawakened with almost electrifying intensity the early optical impression made on me by this toy. Any object that we could consider personal property held intense power for a while, a feeling heightened by fear of losing such a beloved object—which probably contributed, in fact, to our frequent losses; our often wounded susceptibility helped to develop a resigned, loose relationship with property. (It may well be that later this was also expressed in matters of the heart.)

  The most beautiful present I ever received in my childhood I received from Bunchy. She brought it with her from Vienna, and she took it out of a large cardboard box—the first one she opened after we took her to her room and her luggage was set down. “It belonged to your Uncle Rudolf,” she said as she carefully unwrapped two small wooden boxes from their layers of tissue paper; one was larger and lighter, the other one smaller and heavier. My anticipatory pleasure was so great that I didn’t even care what gift my sister was getting—and now I’ve forgotten what it was. Urged on by the unfamiliar white lady in her white traveling suit—still too overwhelming a presence to be called Bunchy—I carefully opened first one, then the other of the little boxes. The lid of the lighter one was opened and closed by screws that, with a gentle pressure, would squeeze down on some three dozen parallel slots as on a writing block. The heavier box had two compartments, one of which contained a small hand roller and several bottles of variously colored ink, the other one filled to the top with tiny, square-cut pieces of lead. Taking one of these in my hand, I found it showed on one of its surfaces, cut in relief, the letter F; a second one showed a lowercase a. They were the letters of a complete miniature printing press, adapted to my own diminutive size. Our new governess’s black-gloved fingers took the two pieces from me, placed them in one of the slots, selected some more letters from the compartment, rejected some and chose others until she composed, letter by letter, the words “Family Rezzori.” Only then did Bunchy take off her gloves, as after a task well done. “This little printing press comes from America,” she explained. “I shall tell you later how I got it. I gave it to your Uncle Rudolf.” She added offhandedly, “He hasn’t played with it very often.” (Miss Knowles would have said: “We are not surprised.’’) I looked at the line of type and said, “But if I now put a paper on it and draw it off, our name will appear in mirror writing.” Bunchy stopped short, thought for a moment, took another piece from the box and scrutinized it closely. “You are quite right,” she said. “The type has been wrongly cast. That’s probably the reason why your Uncle Rudolf didn’t much like this printing box. You’re a clever little boy to have noticed this so quickly.’’

  This remark was more than ample compensation for the disappointment that I would never be able to compose anything on the miraculous printing box that could be read properly and as it should, from left to right. Bunchy’s praise, expressed in front of my sister, was a triumph that initiated the slow recovery of my badly damaged self-reliance. From that moment on, I loved the lady in white and never called her anything but Bunchy. She reciprocated this love. She became a powerful helper during my entire adolescence, as Cassandra had been during my childhood.

  It is evidence of the permanence of the impression Bunchy left with me that she remains even more vivid in my aural memory than in my visual one—this in accordance with the former’s multidimensional impact in depth, which invests the sudden sounding of a long-forgotten musical motif with the power to bring forth the very essence of an entire period, and in a richer, emotionally more lasting way than any visually remembered object. There are some sounds that have moved my soul for a lifetime—and I don’t mean great music or cathedral bells but rather the intimate aural experiences of my sentimental biography. (I could make a long list of acoustic banalities that, precisely because they are commonplace, epitomize the components of that biography, for instance: the wintry sounds of sleigh bells, or the crack of gunshots coming from behind yellow birch leaves on a crystal-clear autumn day; the warbling of a merl on a city side street, or the moon-sick forlorn baying of a dog and the rattling, dying away in the distance, of a peasant cart making its way over a dirt road under a starlit sky somewhere in Eastern Europe; the rhythmic creaking of saddles, accompanied by the wetly metallic sounds of horses munching on their bits during a ride with someone, or on some empty Sunday afternoon, the repeatedly interrupted and then resumed tinkling of a child’s piano practice in a neighboring house, while the wind carries puffs of sound from the crowd roaring in some far-off soccer stadium....) Among such aural milestones, the evocation of Bunchy’s dark-colored voice and her guttural, good-humored laugh, reminiscent of pigeons cooing, brings her back to me
with all the fullness of her kind understanding and wise presence—and reminds me of the proud moments when she would appreciate one of my character traits, traits that before had elicited only Cassandra’s crude peasant cackle or the family’s sharp rebukes.

  Bunchy discovered and promoted my talent for observation and humorous description, and opened the eyes of others to it. Whether this was of unqualified benefit to me, I cannot be sure; among my shortcomings — albeit more readily pardonable than many — is my predilection for amusing others with comical exaggerations tending to the paradoxical and absurd (though not always obtaining the desired effect). But in any case, Bunchy’s encouragement was a balm in those difficult days of my final severance from the sheltering warmth of childhood, the age in which awakening consciousness urges one forward helter-skelter into life, however alarmed by clear-sighted foreboding and oppressed by puberty. With her acute sense for balanced measure, Bunchy did not encourage me in the monkeyshines I was wont to indulge in when not under her direct supervision. She limited herself — and me — to a cautious appreciation of the grotesque in life. This was achieved by nothing more than a rapid, almost clandestine glance exchanged between us whenever the situation threatened to tip over into the absurd, which in our household was not exactly a rarity. Her glance was swift and covert only in the first meeting of eyes, after which it resumed its steadiness, its studied indifference, as if the reciprocity of our silent concordance had been the result of mere chance. Thus it revealed nothing to the outside, least of all its intimacy. It was a glance denoting not complicity but, rather, acknowledgment of similar perceptions by two minds on the same wavelength.