Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

Had she said what surely I had heard before—“You too will have to die one day” —it would have remained in the abstract. When hearing such sentences, comprehension glanced off from the purely verbal, but “being dead” meant what was clearly manifest by the bird’s corpse on the garbage heap. I understood. Terror struck at me like a dead weight. I saw myself stretched out on my bed, rigid and cold, rubbishy in my cerements, rotting underneath, something to be discarded as quickly as possible, like the dead magpie. Around me stood my sobbing family. I saw the hearse carrying me away and, behind, my sister in black veils, triumph in her eyes dutifully red from crying. I saw my grave and my dog refusing to leave it. All that was unavoidable, inescapable. It could happen tomorrow or many years on — but it had to happen, and against that no revocation or merciful exemption was possible. I was overcome by great fear. Clouds like black cinders stood over cooling embers in the scarlet evening firmament. I felt like fleeing — but where? Wherever I might go, this fear would go with me. This death fear would henceforth be with me, inextinguishably and forever, and it would hollow out my whole being: even if fleetingly I might forget it, it would rise in me at some moment and gnaw at my happiness or joy, or be ready to sink down to the bottom of my soul like a heavy stone; henceforth I would always know what it meant when someone told me that I too was mortal. In utter despair I asked Cassandra whether this was truly so, whether it had to be irrevocably so. Cassandra was incorruptible: “Everything has to die!” she said. “Your father too, and your mother and your sister, and I too, we all have to die one day!” And I knew she was telling the truth: Cassandra, the seeress.

I cannot dissociate the memory of Cassandra from that of the landscape that produced and nurtured her, the land whence she had come to us: the melancholy spaces of a landscape peopled with peasants and shepherds through which the silver band of a river meanders lazily, edged by hills and mountains shaded by forests. The view from the windows of our nursery carried the eye over the green humps of the treetops in our garden, out to the two rows of poplars bordering the big arterial road which led straight as an arrow to the pallid blue remoteness where the great forests stood. It may well be that the apelike sorrow in Cassandra’s jet-black eyes originated in her longing for the stillness of those forests, filled with the drumming of woodpeckers and the scent of waving grasses in the meadowed clearings, and that her impish merriment was meant only to shield this incurable homesickness. Whenever her glance happened in that direction, it clung there, stretched out to the vague faraway somewhere, which, like an incontrovertible fate, exerted a steady undertow on our own souls as well. Cassandra could not turn away from that perspective without a deep sorrowful sigh, as if she saw herself as a wanderer on the wide dusty road between the poplars, forever drawn by her own inescapable destiny. And each time she would clasp me in her long simian arms only to thrust me away abruptly, as if pushing me out of her life. Even I — that God-sent gift replacing her own child, the sweetly restored core of her life — even I she saw merely as a short-term wayfaring companion on her road through life, the road that ultimately she had to travel alone. And because I sensed this in my innermost self, I also took up life as if it were but a succession of leave-takings in the course of a long journey.

In the image I hold of her in my mind, she is part of the prospect from the window of our nursery. She moves in front of it in all her scurrilous and farcical animation, haunting and weird even when sad, angry or moody, reminding me of a figure in one of those Turkish stick-puppet shows: the female counterpart of Karagjös, the jester. We never were able to determine her nationality with any degree of certainty. Most probably she was a Huzule — that is, a daughter of that Ruthenian-speaking tribe of mountain Gorals, who, it is said, are the purest-bred descendants of the Dacians who fled before the Roman invaders into the impenetrable fastness of their forests. Yet Cassandra just as well could have been a Romanian — that is, a product of all those innumerable populations who coursed through my country during the dark centuries of the decaying Roman dominion. She spoke both Romanian and Ruthenian, both equally badly — which is not at all unusual in the Bukovina — intermixing the two languages and larding both with bits from a dozen other idioms. The result was that absurd lingua franca, understood only by myself and scantily by those who, like her, had to express themselves in a similarly motley verbal hodgepodge. Even though it may be questioned whether I was actually fed at Cassandra’s breast, there can be no doubt that linguistically I was nourished by her speech. The main component was a German, never learned correctly or completely, the gaps in which were filled with words and phrases from all the other tongues spoken in the Bukovina — so that each second or third word was either Ruthenian, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Armenian or Yiddish, not to forget Hungarian and Turkish. From my birth, I heard mainly this idiom, and it was as natural to me as the air I breathed. Just as naturally, I repeated guilelessly everything I heard from her, at least at first, and only when I was constantly corrected, when some of my expressions brought on irrepressible laughter while others were greeted by an uncomprehending shake of the head and yet others severely prohibited, did I begin to realize that Cassandra’s and my way of expressing ourselves was something out of the ordinary, a secret idiom within the general means of communication, albeit one with so many known patches that confidentiality itself was somehow full of holes without, for all that, being readily decodable.

Cassandra certainly could have limited herself to her ancestral Ruthenian or Romanian, both of which she spoke in a highly colorful manner with a strong dialect and rurally coarse inflection. That instead she chose to speak her laborious linguistic farrago, newly minted with every sentence and ultimately corrupting even her native tongues, was probably due to her innate humility. Submissively she tried to adapt herself to the languages spoken by her masters; and where German failed her, she filled it up with words from all the other idioms she knew. She made do with linguistic tidbits, like a beggar who collects the crumbs fallen from a rich man’s table. If this, like her sterilized folkloristic garb, led to the grotesque opposite of unobtrusive assimilation, the blame should be put once again on the furtive ambition for betterment. German had been the language of the masters in the Bukovina during Austrian times and remained that of the educated classes. That Cassandra was allowed to live and work in and be part of a German-speaking household, that she was permitted to use German herself, even though corrupted with foreign borrowings to the point of incomprehensibility, constituted for her an admittance to a more exalted world and to a higher life form. She thought of herself as raised above her own kind on the strength of her speaking German, as much as on account of her fictitious nurse’s uniform. In contrast to the black, white and gray abstraction of the uniform (in her own inimitable way, she is supposed to have said: “I go about like photograph of myself!’’), her linguistic garb was composed of thousands of many-hued patches; whoever did not happen to know their multifarious origins could hardly understand what she was trying to say. Maybe I was the only one to understand her completely; the others, who couldn’t plumb the etymology of her neologisms, found in them a source of unending merriment. In our household, she played the role of linguistic court jester. Through her speech patterns, and prodded and guided by my father, we developed a rare awareness of language, an almost maliciously acute way to listen to the spoken word and an interpretative feeling for written expression, to a degree that otherwise I have encountered only in students of Karl Kraus, whose linguistic education certainly was less fun than ours, even though it too stemmed mainly from the satirical pointing up of the ridiculous and the corrupted.