The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Bunchy remained quiet a few moments. It is carved in my memory that she then unexpectedly asked, “Do you still draw much?’’

  “Not at all,” I had to admit. “I lost out on the years when I could have been trained.’’

  She didn’t say “A pity!” as did everyone else to whom I gave the same answer to the same question. After another short pause she asked: “How old are you now?’’

  “Twenty-three,” I replied resignedly, “almost twenty-four.’’

  She nodded earnestly, if ironically, and said, “Well then, you can have a glass of sherry with me.’’

  That was in November 1937, and we were speaking of a time that seemed to me very far removed in the past, as generally happens with a twenty-three-year-old remembering his childhood—that is, much further removed than is the case for me today at seventy-five. The intervening years held their own disappointments and lost illusions, and Bunchy’s question whether I still drew touched a sore spot. When she had been with us, she had supported my passion for drawing, and that too had been beneficial to my developing self-reliance. That I had talent — more important still, an insatiable passion that displaced and superseded all my other occupations — was commonly accepted; everyone thought of it as something I was born with and therefore as nothing special; no one considered that it also threw me back on myself; and no one encouraged me. It was also accepted that I was in another world whenever I had a crayon in my hand and thus was well out of the way, bothered no one and knew no other conflicts than those resulting from the discrepancy between my insufficient technical skill and the notion I had in my mind of the perceived subject. The household was not spared my temper, my accesses of crabbiness and susceptibility, my occasional outbursts of anger, but when these were occasioned by my playing with crayon and sketch pad, they were smiled at. No one seemed to understand that this avocation was part of my nature, indeed its very foundation, through which my personality and life could have developed. Bunchy was able to lay the first stones toward such a development, but there was no follow-up. She was the first — and only — person who understood my needs, who had helped and corrected me, and who had drawn the attention of others to my capabilities. Incomprehensibly, not even my own father, despite all his own joy in his pictorial creations, showed any interest in my talent; I suspect that it irritated him that I could create, with three or four strokes and more spontaneously, something that he could reproduce only painstakingly, with laborious concentration and careful constraint. He could not teach me anything in draftsmanship, and I lacked the inclination for water-colors or oils. I watched his own efforts with indifference, and regrettably, this was to remain the limit of our relations in the artistic realm. But under Bunchy’s inspiration I blossomed. With a stroke of genius she had given me a toy with which I could experience all the bliss of self-forgetting, time-oblivious fulfillment: she taught me to adapt my little printing press (which in time lost many of its letters) into a linocut press. Secretly I copied Masereel and thus earned my first laurels.

  All too soon these gathered dust. Away from home, in Kronstadt and later in Austrian boarding schools, different skills were demanded of me, which I managed to master, albeit reluctantly and with only a modicum of success. I had only enough time to draw malicious caricatures of our teachers, which amused my classmates. Soon any fun I took in this palled. Other and more banal passions supplanted what once had been truly a gift from heaven.

  After our separation from Bunchy, my sister remained in constant touch with her in Vienna. Our beloved governess established herself as a private tutor but maintained close relation with my grandmother’s household. I, for my part, found myself propelled out of the family orbit and lived an emotional double life. Between the heavy, vine-encrusted walls of the old rectory in the shadows of the monumental Black Church in Kronstadt, supervised and strictly disciplined by the taciturn and ascetic high apostle of health, Court Counselor Meyer, I pined away in homesickness. Even the bluest summer day was steeped in melancholy despondency. No game, no breathless romping, no adventurous discovery in the adult world (for instance, that a bordello, which we secretly spied on, operated in one of the city-wall towers) could still my longing for Cassandra’s brood-warmth, redolent with the smell of peasant bread, or for the delicate scenting of my mother’s wardrobe — I even missed my sister as an irrevocable loss. The countryside around Kronstadt was heavy with golden corn in the dark embrace of the forests; the town, comfortably embedded in a hollow between low hills, was smiling and friendly; but the high blueness of the sky above, where swallows tumbled, seemed lined in black by reason of the all-pervading bleakness of the Lutheran spirit; it was a firmly grounded world but I had not been born in it, and it was different from mine, different by its greater specific gravity, a higher degree of ethical hardness in comparison with which my world appeared frivolous and flimsy. It was a Protestant world of elders, edifyingly reminded of its own strength by regular and finely wrought sermons, mightily thunderous with pious chorales pacifying the soul — a world in which I felt futile, and as weightless as a pigeon feather tumbling down from the nowhere high above the church steeple, down to the cobblestones of the marketplace. I was of another faith (if any at all), one that in these parts was coolly rejected and one that I betrayed myself: each Sunday I lent my voice to the choir of young voices filling the majestic nave of the Black Church — never my own church — with the praises of God; I could not free myself of the obscure fear that in doing so I burdened myself with a sin. I was never quite free of other guilt feelings, tainted as I was by the ambiguous aura surrounding a child from a broken marriage, which in those days was rare and morally impugnable and which therefore made me precociously and somewhat disreputably up-to-date, a quality that in Kronstadt was repudiated on principle. I missed my sister as a companion in this misfortune and as living proof that ours was a special fate and that I was not alone in daring to be different. When I went home, after the torments of another school year, I forthwith was caught up once again in the inescapable grid of my mother’s anxiety-obsessed injunctions and prohibitions, a net that smothered every expression of vitality and every initiative, numbed all pleasures and, like a Nessus shirt woven of manic precautions, instead of protecting us — as intended — from the wrongs and perils of life, irritated and burned our skin. I would have given anything to be allowed to stay with my father in the woods, but this my mother prevented by taking us to the Carinthian lakes and the Black Sea. The days on which it was granted me to accompany the Great White Hunter on his game stalks were numbered.

  Time in Kronstadt then also became a thing of the past — leaving me with another kind of homesickness for its self-assured order, though this one gentler and more readily arranged. Bunchy was far away and had lost her reality, become once more a mythic figure. She belonged in equal measure to the painfully missed nesting warmth of home and, in some way hard to explain, to the firm, quietly confident texture of time in Kronstadt. Where did I stand in all this?

  Naturally, I was not perceptive enough to realize that so-called reality encompasses too many aspects ever to be unambiguously that which it professes to be; reality was for me always changeable according to the belief of the moment, and thus dubious in its ultimate effect. Henceforth I looked outside my own existence for the essential. I read adventure stories, as was but fitting at my age. And I came upon Mark Twain. In the wondrous perils and experiences of Huckleberry Finn, I (together with millions of other dream-haunted boys) found everything I longed for, all the freedom I lacked.

  I attempted to share this enthusiasm with my sister. (She was reading H.G. Wells then and when I asked her about it, rejected my curiosity with a cold, “You couldn’t understand it,” which led me to read The Shape of Things to Come behind her back; I failed to understand what it was that supposedly I could not comprehend — a frustrating experience.) As to Twain, she commented dryly: “If his own printing press had its letters cast like the ones in your press, no wonder he went ba
nkrupt.’’

  I didn’t understand what she was talking about. She explained it to me but not without that subtle malice which took the wind out of my sails and at the same time kept me from — as she liked to term it — “putting one over on the rest of the world.” The miniature printing press that Bunchy had given to Uncle Rudolf and then had passed on to me had come to her originally from Mark Twain: Bunchy had been his lady companion before she came to our mother’s family — it must have been in the years between 1891 and 1897, when Twain indeed had engaged in a failed speculation with a printing operation.

  The term “lady companion” allowed for implications that in my eyes gave Bunchy a new dimension. Not that Bunchy was actually Mark Twain’s mistress, even though she remained his companion after his wife’s death. But this chapter in her biography, regarding which she left us in the dark, held a definite romantic allure. Though it was proof of her discretion that she never spoke of it, this rankled in me: we had not become as close as I had fancied. Even my sister heard of the matter only later in Vienna from one of our aunts (the socialist one, I imagine).

  The significance of the disparaging undertone that could not be missed in my sister’s disclosures dawned on me only gradually. It referred by no means to Mark Twain, to whom my fifteen-year-old sister generously granted high rank as a writer, and even less did it refer to Bunchy’s role, whatever its intimacy, in his life. On the contrary: what she sought to express was that these personalities and events were entirely outside my ken. In any connection with them, I was conceded a barely marginal and subaltern part, and under no circumstances was I to derive pride from the fact that I happened to own a memento of Mark Twain; it would have been worse than presumptuous for me to imagine that Bunchy thought me worthy enough to be connected, through her gift, to that part of her past. In particular, I was to keep myself strictly outside the legendary period when Bunchy had been Mr. Twain’s companion in Florence. This was preeminent cultural territory, forbidden to Cassandra’s nursling. That Bunchy had felt enough affection for me to give me the miniature printing press that possibly had been a model of the one that had led to Twain’s financial demise meant nothing at all; being given a token, even one so meaningful in its allusions, was far from the same as having access to the Florentine part of her life, spent at the side of the author of Huckleberry Finn. In contrast, Bunchy, long before, had given my sister the poems Michelangelo had written to Vittoria Colonna, and had told her a great deal about Florence, and the connection was deepened additionally by her recent art-historical studies in Vienna.... To all of this I had no rejoinder: every word was true, and thus I was dismissed and could go to continue my little adventures with Huckleberry Finn.

  This sobering reminder had its effect when next I met Bunchy. This was after some scholastic misadventures, ingloriously at variance with Huckleberry Finn’s, and after the boarding school in Fürstenfeld, in eastern Styria. There too I had not remained long. Irrespective of the fact that as the admiring son of my father the huntsman, I was expected to show appropriate submissiveness to the offspring of the author of the six-hundred-page definitive work on the partridge, I had shown myself a rebel and been expelled. Back in Vienna at the school for failed students, I caused my relatives serious worries as to whether I was not headed for outright criminality. At least that is how they behaved. In a way, I acted as if I were already wearing a convict’s garb. Thus did I appear one day at Bunchy’s, supposing that she too was outraged at the depth of the evilness with which I had disappointed her expectations.

  Six years had gone by since we had seen each other, almost half of my own life. Bunchy — by now endowed for me with the fame of a remarkable biography, which had taken her overseas and had reached unheard-of heights, what with a circumnavigation of the world and an instructive sojourn of several years in Florence, mecca of Western cultural aspirations, now seemed even more legendary than before — and that first apparition of her belonged to the never-never land of a past that had lost credibility. So it was no longer a kindhearted lady in summery white whom I now confronted after so long a separation, but — if this were possible — an even more imposing matron in severe black. She seemed a head shorter, but I had grown by precisely that amount. I bowed, bashful and reticent.

  “What’s this?” she said. “Don’t I get a kiss?’’

  I forced myself to relax and found myself all the more constrained. “Forgive me! It’s been so long — I’m simply embarrassed.’’

  “Embarrassed?” said Bunchy, lingering on the word and arching her eyebrows in disapproval. “Don’t be so full of your own importance.’’

  That was like the lash of a whip, particularly since it had been said in front of a witness — without having announced myself, I had burst in on one of her tutorials: an elegant young man with glasses and smooth black hair, quite obviously from one of Vienna’s best Jewish families, was sitting on the sofa behind the round table at which Bunchy generally faced her pupils. At his back, reproductions of drawings by Michelangelo of Vittoria Colonna hung on the wall. I froze. The young man showed a smiling understanding that only worsened the situation. Of course, he knew my sister, appreciated her intelligence, her charm and wit....

  I avoided visiting Bunchy for several years. But in the interim, her admonition bore fruit. Whenever insecurity befell me, I would take her sharp reminder to heart — yes, even today. She helped me gain a good portion of disdain for this world.

  Nor did I see much of my sister in those years. As long as we were at boarding school, we saw each other only on Sundays for lunch at Grandmother’s. Later, she attended the Consular Academy and spent every free moment with her subsequent betrothed, Fritz. As for me, there followed a confusing succession of diverse studies, listlessly begun and ingloriously broken off: three semesters of mining in Leoben, two semesters of snipping away at corpses at the medical faculty in Vienna, two semesters of architectural studies at the Technical Academy, also in Vienna. Then one evening, at the house of a girl whom I was courting, I met Bunchy by sheer coincidence. No one there even had any inkling that we knew each other. The fact that I had been brought up by Bunchy considerably raised my standing in the eyes of both the wooed girl and her parents. Here too Bunchy enjoyed the love and devotion that all her former and present pupils and charges gave her, and something of this also reflected on me; my documented antecedents so to speak ennobled me. Bunchy told of my grandparents, of my mother and her siblings, of my sister and me and our father, of the Odaya and Cassandra; it was a tale rich in anecdote, and everybody listened with all the more interest as Bunchy knew how to place me in the foreground of general attention time and again. I was allowed to pander to my weakness — as my sister would have termed it — for dramatizing Bunchy’s story graphically. Once more Cassandra’s linguistic blossoms shone forth in all their glory and entertained an audience who knew how to appreciate them: well-educated Jews seem to me to have a remarkable feel for language.

  I took Bunchy home. In front of her door, the open wings of which were secured by a heavy cast-iron grille, we bid each other an affectionate good-bye. From then on I never let a free day pass by without visiting her, taking her out or driving her into the Vienna Woods or to the nearby hills, or going with her to the theater or concerts. She knew, of course, of the worries my family had about me. “Do you have any conception of what you really want to do in life?” she asked me one day.

  “You know it as well as I and everyone else. I’ve been saying it forever and to anyone who wants to listen. I want to draw, and nothing else.’’

  Bunchy had no telephone in the two rooms she occupied in her benefactor’s house, and she was reluctant to use his. “Get me to the next public phone,” she ordered. Once there, she dialed a number and explained my case to a person unknown to me. In silence she listened and then noted down a number and an address.

  “Present yourself tomorrow morning at eight o’clock at this address,” she said to me. “It is an advertising studio. The gen
tleman I talked to is one of the managers of Siemens-Schuckert [a large industrial concern]. The owner of the advertising studio is indebted to him as a major client, so much so that he will not hesitate to take you on as an apprentice. He is being advised of your coming this very day. Woe to you if you disgrace me!’’

  I did not disgrace her. The owner of the advertising studio, Karl Dopler, and his wife, a concert pianist, became my intimate friends. Day in, day out, I drew and daubed for twelve self-forgetting hours; we shared our evening meals, our personal and professional joys and woes, the worries for the success of the agency, the pleasure over newly obtained orders and the hope of additional ones, as well as the disappointments over those that eluded us; we praised each other for work well done and consoled each other over work we happened to have botched. Karl Dopler was not a great artist but a solid craftsman from whom I learned a great deal and who gave me the down-to-earth encouragement that had been missing from the rapturous praises heretofore thoughtlessly heaped on my natural gifts. Dopler too appreciated my talents, which he acknowledged ungrudgingly as superior to his own, and he promoted them in every way he could. All this was a double blessing. Not only did it put an end to the awkward period of my disorientation — the dawdling away of my time in trivial pursuits, nightclub-hopping and whoring around — and give my whole life a happy foundation; at the same time it relieved my family of the nagging worry about my dubious fate, while delivering me from their aggravating supervision. However, a much more serious calamity entered all our lives: my sister took ill and, inexorably, followed the agonizing path to her death.