The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori

  This death put a sudden end to my career as a commercial artist. It also nipped in the bud another potential career as stage designer. The parents of the girl in whose house I had met Bunchy were giving a party for their daughter in their villa in Döbling, a garden district of Vienna, and they entrusted me with the decorations. One of the guests, the writer Sil Vara, much celebrated in the Vienna of that time for his play The Girlhood of a Queen, was so impressed with my decorations that he had me design the setting for a party in his apartment. Among those at the party were Luise Rainer, with whom I forthwith fell hopelessly in love, and the most famous stage designer of those days, Professor Strnad, who was as successful at the Vienna Opera as at the Metropolitan in New York. He asked me to become one of his assistants. Bunchy was exultant. “When I saw your sister for the last time,” she told me, “she talked about you. She hardly could speak anymore but said very clearly and slowly, ‘I always knew he would turn out all right.’’’

  My mother would not be misled by such auspicious constellations. She had staged her bereavement over my sister’s death so dramatically that everyone feared for her health. She could not be left alone in Czernowitz; her life with Philip had become intolerable; the quarrel over the Odaya was festering; and her sisters, who theoretically at least were its co-owners, made themselves parties to the dispute. Her almost daily letters demanded with ever greater urgency and with increasingly energetic force that I come to join her. She wrote that the thought of Christmas was driving her out of her mind; we should not be surprised if she were to do herself some harm. This time it sounded convincing. My aunts escorted me to the station in order to ascertain that I really took the train to Czernowitz. As I was taking leave of Bunchy, she gave me as a Christmas present for my mother Franz Werfel’s Barbara. “It is not meant to comfort her,” she commented, “and even if it were,” she added — and for the first time I detected sharpness in her voice — “it wouldn’t help her. For she belongs to those whom the hard words of the Bible are meant for: For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Don’t worry. It’s merely for Christmas. You’ll be back right after.” It was not merely for Christmas. It took me a full five years to get back to Vienna.

  This had been in December 1932, when I was almost nineteen. At twenty, I was to do my military service, and the Romanian authorities, who suspected any member of an ethnic minority of readiness to commit subversive acts, particularly desertion by those liable to serve in the armed forces, refused to extend my passport before I had done that service. I was trapped in Czernowitz. Moreover, I was told that my Austrian high school diploma would not assure me of the status of volunteer officer candidate, who served only one year. As a drafted recruit I would have to serve a full three years; the only way to avoid that was to return to the school bench and get a Romanian diploma. What I then learned of Romanian history was a rightfully earned gift from the Odaya: I had legitimate roots in the country. But this was a gift like the one in Cassandra’s fairy tale in which the beauteous king’s daughter requests from the enamored shepherd, “Give me something that you fail to give me.” He obeys the order by giving her a swallow that flies away as soon as he opens his hand.

  Soon after my homecoming, my mother showed me an apricot tree she had planted years before, which had forked and grown into two strong trunks. Its health was close to her heart, for she had symbolically transferred it to the well-being of her two children. One of the trunks had now withered but the other one was all the stronger in its sprouting greenery. I was somewhat leery of this parable, for nothing could make me believe that I was anywhere near thriving. Bunchy wrote that Professor Strnad had unexpectedly died. The news left me cold; I had given up my ambitions and no longer drew. To learn Romanian as well and as quickly as possible, and to have as much fun as possible at the same time, I had surrounded myself with Romanians of my own age with whom I carried on, with wanton lack of inhibition as I had prior to the happy, salutary interlude at Dopler’s studio, pub-crawling and chasing girls I also lost myself in pseudo-religious speculations and practices.

  My family had been struck by death — not in the abstract but concretely and in shocking immediacy, and my mother saw to it that I would not repress this experience. Her mute despair continued to scream for the dead child; she would have liked nothing better than — as the phrase had it — to scratch the departed from the earth with her fingernails. I did my best to keep her company in this fruitless rattling at the irrevocable. The no-longer-being-of-this-life was for me as inconceivable as the not-yet-being-of-this-world had once been. In vain I tried to reawaken that dark terror which, in the remote days of my childhood and with Cassandra’s gruff warning (“One day you too will be dead’’), had made me realize the significance of death. It was a weightless knowledge, and lacked the stony heaviness with which earlier it had sunk into my heart. Soon the thought of my sister’s death left my soul as empty as it did my brain; I neither felt anything nor thought of anything in this connection. Mother’s attitudinizing like a latter-day Niobe irked me, and I suspected that she was casting a sidelong glance at her audience, while at the same time I was troubled that with my notorious coldness of heart I might be doing her an injustice. I accused myself of insensitivity and could never have dared admit that my sister’s death had brought her closer to me than she had ever been in life — a thought that to anyone would have seemed absurdly perverse.

  In those days I would look endlessly into the mirror until my face was no longer my own but some strange living organism entirely surrendered to the passage of time — a mechanical toy, the driving motor of which whirred relentlessly while I remained timeless in another dimension of my being and beyond the image in the mirror’s depth. There my emotions were no longer my own, nor did I miss the heart I lacked.

  While my sister was wasting away, one of my aunts, who headed a number of spiritualistic circles, had arranged several séances for her salvation in which I was allowed to participate. Although no medical help materialized from the beyond, there had been some manifestations that were astounding because of their inexplicability: voices spoke of circumstances that could not possibly be known to anyone unfamiliar with intimate details; admonitions and warnings made themselves heard concerning potentially wrong decisions that, indeed, did have calamitous consequences later on; but most of all, there were jubilant descriptions of the euphoria of all those who had shaken off the burden of earthly existence and now resided in the beyond, where, while not enjoying all the blissful delights of heaven, they were at least spared the tribulations of purgatory or, worse, of hell, finding themselves between reincarnations in an ecstatically timeless, weightless waiting condition, at the end of which stood that most longed-for of all goals, the promised nirvana.

  Attempts were made to comfort my poor mother. Residual Catholic doctrines allowing that since my sister had died a virgin (as my mother proudly maintained) and therefore was more likely to reside in heaven than hell were inadequate to reassure her; she required certainty and, consequently, inquired in Vienna whether proof of her child’s well-being could not be obtained from the unknown realm of the defunct; the spiritualistic circle headed by my aunt was fortunately able to fulfill her wish. Since it would have been onerous to travel from Vienna to Czernowitz with the whole staff of the circle, including its leader and mediums, the otherworldly committees that purportedly were in charge of determining how the over-there was to make contact with the here decided to empower my aunt with the required medial qualifications to establish a transcendental communication between mother and child.

  My aunt arrived. She belonged to the dark and rather thickset type of my mother’s sisters, my mother being one of the long-limbed, reddish daughters of my ethnically checkered grandparents. In accordance with her pyknic constitution, my aunt was robust, cheery and full of joie de vivre, so it was hard to imagine that she had such intimate relations with the dep
arted that they selected her as their mouthpiece for communications from the realm of the shadows. Yet this was apparently the case. Since I was allowed to witness her mediatory services only from a discreet distance, I cannot tell whether it actually was my sister’s voice that spoke through her or whether it was her own in substitution for those who had conversed with the deceased. I preferred to believe the latter, for when I had seen mediums fall into a trance (so as to lend the empty shell of their body to an astral spirit) it had been anything but an edifying sight; it was bound to frighten my mother, were she to see her sister fainting away unconscious, her eyes rolling upward until only the whites showed, raising herself up after tormented moanings and stammerings, foam on her lips, like a corpse emerging from a coffin, the glance now rigidly directed into nowhere and hands groping as if blinded. Whether my aunt had also been empowered with the ability to transcend into the astral zones, I am unable to say. My mother remained mum on the subject, as well as on the essential portent of the messages she received.

  To hold these private séances, we drove to the woody hills outside Czernowitz, which in times past had been the scene for our childish games of hoops and diabolo. I now squatted on the edge of a blossomy green meadow, in the midst of which the two sisters sat down; I soon saw them in close embrace, the dark-haired one, her face lifted to heaven, apparently speaking in tongues, and the red-haired one helplessly sobbing her heart out on the former’s shoulder. After they broke away from each other and we returned to the car, my mother’s eyes, reddened by tears, reflected total emptiness; my aunt, on the other hand, showed her everyday cheery mien, as if nothing at all had happened. I had seen lovers returning in a similar way after indulging in clandestine copulation.

  Soon my aunt returned to Vienna. Her presence seemed to have had a beneficial effect on my mother — she calmed down, but after her departure fell into an apathy of dull despair. I myself was as if boneless. I idled the days away and rampaged through the nights with my newfound friends, Romanian students with the typical characteristics of their species: proud and touchy, romantic and foolish, glowing with chauvinism. The tensions between my mother and Philip made staying in the house unbearable. I hardly ever saw my father; he came only rarely from Transylvania and tormented me with suggestions for studies I had no intention of undertaking. I was besotted with a girl whose mind and soul had been bleached to a pale blue cloudiness by Armenian clerics; I quarreled with her constantly about religious questions and she deeply resented my blasphemies. As a means of quelling my cynicism, I looked for some charitable mission and hit upon the crazy idea of replacing my aunt in her transcendental role with my mother: if my will to help her were only pure enough, why shouldn’t I too be granted the privilege of being the messenger between her and her dead daughter, particularly since my sister was surely eager to provide solace from the beyond?

  I sat in front of a mirror and stared fixedly into my eyes, intent in utmost concentration on emptying myself of my own being so as to be nothing but a vessel for another spirit. And then something truly uncanny happened: I felt an icy flow rising through my nostrils and into my brain ... and I was suddenly terrified and too weakhearted to take the next step — whatever it was. I stood once again as an ordinary self, my heart pounding in my chest, abashed by my craven withdrawal from the threshold of an unimaginable adventure that might have cost me my life or my mind but probably would have enriched me by a new and unknown dimension. Yet I knew it had been my sister’s wish that I should not go further. It would have established an intimacy much more indiscreet than the one I sought by kissing her at our encounter after our first separation. A short time later I broke away to Bucharest, and for the next few years all my passion was centered on horses.

  This was how things stood when, finally, back in Vienna in the early winter of 1937–1938, I met Bunchy once more. Those were turbulent days when politics impinged on life everywhere in the world. But since hardly anyone I knew took any of this seriously and since grumbling about prevailing conditions was part of the everyday Viennese atmosphere, I did not grant the events any more scope than that which they occupied on the front pages of the dailies I didn’t read, or in the hurly-burly of the rabble screaming slogans in the streets. I was repelled by all of it. Fortunately, this turbulence had its own tide, and so there were hours, especially in the evenings and during the night, when one was not molested by it. Bars and nightclubs thrived. The ranks of Bunchy’s Jewish pupils and friends were swelled by emigrants from the German Reich, who told of horrible things happening there. One could only hope fervently that these would not occur also in Austria.

  The new year began: 1938. I took Bunchy to the theater. After seeing Molnár’s Liliom we were in such a fine mood on the way home that I linked arms with her in the fashion of Liliom, swinging her to and fro and singing: “Come, Louise, my love, come on my swing, there’s lots of pleasure to be had, of our everlasting love we’ll si-hi-hing!” and she almost collapsed with laughter. When we arrived at the door of her house, she coquettishly slipped behind the grille and drew it closed. For the sheer fun of it, I rattled the grille as if I wanted to be taken in — and to my incredulous surprise saw that she took me seriously, that this woman well over seventy actually assumed that I, her pupil of twenty-three, had the intention of bedding her. It amused me to no end, filled me with shame and, at the same time, much affection. I would have liked to tell her that I loved her all the more for this disclosure of the archfemale and all too human bondage to the flesh. So I pretended that I really wanted nothing more than to join her; she laughed until the tears ran down her cheeks, but saw to it that the grille was well closed, threw me a last kiss and then also closed the gate, winking at me through a gap, giggling madly, excited and flattered. Only then did the lock click shut.

  Then came March 12, 1938, and Germany’s annexation of Austria. A few days later Bunchy disappeared to parts unknown. It was said that she had moved to the house of friends in the country. Her benefactor in Vienna had been Baron Frankenstein, Austria’s last ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, who refused to serve Hitler and had sought political asylum in England. Bunchy was no longer safe in his house in Vienna, with all her circle of Jewish friends.

  She remained in the country all through the war, and I had no contact with her until 1946. Then a long letter reached me that told of her circumstances and also contained the confession to a “failing.” The manor house in which she had survived the war was now in the British zone of Austria. The owners, who would have been unable to produce proof of their unblemished Aryan origin, had escaped before the war, just in time. Bunchy represented their interests and continued to do so. With the end of the war, swarms of refugees arrived to whom she provided shelter and care. She was assisted in this by the British occupying forces, who supplied her with essentials. They had great respect for the old lady speaking fluent English, who now received testimonials of love and gratitude from all her friends and pupils around the world who had been able to save themselves (unfortunately not all of them, by any means). One day the British regional commander ordered all the inhabitants to assemble in the manor yard. In front of the intimidated assembly, he disclosed that among them an SS leader was hiding who was being sought for having committed major crimes. Of course he was using another name, but Bunchy was presumed to know who it was. If she were to refuse to identify him, all the subsidies would be canceled and the improvised refugee camp would be dissolved. She wrote to me that she had been left with no choice. The fate of too many unfortunates depended on her. Her conscience had to be relegated to a back place and she had to reveal whom she suspected of being the person sought. She didn’t forgive herself for this denunciation and could not sleep.

  A year later, came another letter: “... In the matter that has so heavily burdened my soul, I have finally found relief. It has come to me now how I should have behaved. I should not have denounced the man, but I should have appealed to his honor: Mr. So-and-so, step forth! That I now reali
ze this does not absolve me of my failing at the time. But it reestablishes an ethical order: I have learned from it.’’

  Another year later, I received the news of her death.

  Of Bunchy too I have kept this weird instrument that technology has placed in our hands with which to conjure the dead back to life: a photograph. I cannot look at it without remembering something she told me about long ago on the occasion of our visit to the Odaya, her account of a recollection by my sister from the childhood days she spent there: It is a morning in early winter with no snow on the ground yet, but biting cold has settled in overnight and the world is choking in dense fog. A thin sun fights against the fog and slowly manages to consume it, so that it condenses as hoarfrost on everything; each branchlet of each bough of each tree and shrub, each bush, each blade of grass still standing, each thistle at the wayside wears a white fur that glitters under the sky, which meanwhile has become immaculately clear. My father fetches some skates and drives with my sister down to the river. The river is frozen stone-hard and black, since no snow has dulled the ice. It is transparent down to the bottom of the river, and one can count every pebble lying there. My sister is not much more than four years old; it is the first pair of skates she has ever worn, but guided by her father’s gentle hand, she skates with him down the river, an endless trail, bordered by shores scintillating with rime, the reeds furry and the birches as if spun of glass, and above it all a sky of deepest blue, like the one that soon spread for her over the Adriatic.