Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

I need hardly expand on the enormous legacy she thereby bequeathed to me. But at that time, the “culture of the Occident” conveyed by Bunchy was regarded as more valuable. In this respect our parents were of one mind: we did not belong to Romania, which had surrendered to its Balkanization and was therefore part of the East. It was the year 1922; Europe was not yet divided, as it was to be after 1945, yet even then we felt definitely and consciously that we were “Occidentals.” That this would make us doubly homeless we were to experience later on, when we moved to the West and in many respects felt like Easterners there, felt this even more acutely at a later date, when our homeland irrevocably became part of an East that was fundamentally and ideologically separated from our own world. The disintegration of our parental home preceded by two decades the disintegration of Europe.

For Cassandra this meant what in the ugly legal parlance of today is termed “deprivation of existential legitimacy.” It started for her with the appearance of Bunchy. Cassandra came to realize that she had become superfluous, for I too was leaving the world of the nursery forever. In truth, there was no longer any use for her. She helped out here and there and temporarily, in whatever it was, but pretty soon she mainly took care only of the dogs. And the dogs themselves felt that something was amiss — as they always sensed whenever a trip was planned on which they were not to be taken along or when one of us was banished to his or her room as punishment or was about to be taken sick — and reacted with dazed distress; some forgot that they were supposed to be housebroken and all of them were disobedient and irritable, at times even biting each other. Troll, the old stubby-haired setter who had been placed as a puppy in the cradle of my newborn sister, was almost throttled to death by my Airedale, who had been my first birthday present and was thus younger by four years. This prompted my sister to conduct a fierce vendetta against me that lasted for months and also was directed at Cassandra, who still loyally stood by my side.

My memories of that period are clouded. I was rebellious and must have been greatly trying to my father. I usually committed some infraction during his absences when he was off hunting or at what he called “business assignments,” with which he legitimized his week-long disappearances, and these infractions were deemed too grievous to be judged and punished fittingly by the household’s female judicial system. Because he was annoyed by the very fact of being made to play the family bugaboo, his punishments generally turned out even more severe than his hotheaded temper in any case would have dictated. Such things sank too deeply in me to be amenable to Cassandra’s consolations. Though she managed to come up with comforting pleasures, such as a choice tidbit secreted for me in the kitchen, or puppies from a new litter: Mira, my father’s favorite pointer bitch, was as fertile as a queen bee, and Cassandra was as merry and efficient a nursemaid in the kennel as she had been of old in our nursery.

Cassandra became more easygoing and, if not engaged in one of her clownish pranks, exhibited a somewhat comical but undeniable dignity. She held herself stiffly erect — as much as she could with her short neck and huge, lopsided head — erect “with the pride of a Stone Age female who has discovered that she can stand on her hind legs,” as my father used to say. Sometimes the family thought of marrying her off — “to a blind man, perhaps,” it was suggested maliciously. Bunchy even thought of the possibility of further cultural improvement, although she knew of the failed attempt to rid Cassandra of her obstinate illiteracy. “How about an educational trip to Florence?” wondered my father in ironic allusion to Bunchy’s own past. “If only she were a little smaller, we could get her hired in a circus sideshow,” quipped my saucy sister, who always maintained that Cassandra was in reality a giant dwarf.

Cassandra herself would have acknowledged this collective racking of brains with incomprehending surprise. What, after all, was wanted of her? Surely we could not think of depriving her of her claim to residence in our house! She lacked nothing. She had a roof over her head — even a room to herself, with a bed, a cupboard, a table and a chair; she had plenty of good food and as much fun with the dogs as she could wish for. She was alive. She’d had enough of men, once and for all. Of her children, one was lost and the other was about to go his own way, as was but natural: such was life. In passing, I began to notice ever more numerous silver strands in her bobbed hair.

When my parents separated and my sister and I were sent to schools abroad, so that two separate households were established, Cassandra at first stayed with Father. There she exhibited hitherto unknown talents which enabled her soon to transcend her duties in the kennel and assume brilliantly her new and rightful place as housekeeper. She became expert at just about every household art: she knew how to cook, how to clean rooms, how to sew and iron, how to set a table and how to serve; she knew how to manage the linen closets and the pantry, how to tend flowers, harvest the fruit of the orchards and train servants. When in doubt, she visited with my mother to get advice. Because my father was even more frequently absent, the house remained almost exclusively under her sole management. When my sister and I came for a few weeks’ vacation, we found almost everything as it had been — though somewhat airlessly inanimate, as in a museum, and pervaded by that peculiar boiled-cabbage fustiness which creeps into houses deserted by their masters. “There’s a smell of servants’ quarters,” said my sister. Cassandra herself was much too keen-witted not to notice this herself. One day she declared that the time had come for her to leave. “Is come my tshyass,” she said: her hour had struck. She repeated it for weeks and months, but then one day the hour really came. A widower with three small children needed her more urgently than we.

I could never have imagined a day when she no longer would be in our house, and it is not to my credit that when the day came I accepted it as a matter of fact. She spared me seeing her leave. She was there when I left for school, and she was gone when I returned. But by then so much had changed in my world that I considered this disappearance of Cassandra as a kind of logical sequel. I was thirteen years old, an age when one doesn’t look back. Although I suffered homesickness when I was away at school, I also found myself being homesick when at home. I guess this was probably due to that persistent undertow emanating from the wide poplar-lined wayfarers’ roads that crisscrossed our countryside, leading to a dove-blue never-never land that filled my soul with nostalgia for something forever lost, something I had already lost the moment I was born. When I asked about Cassandra, I was told that she had found a noble task in life with the widower’s children and had every reason to be happy. Czernowitz being so small, I did not have the impression that Cassandra had disappeared from my world. She occasionally visited us when her responsibilities toward her new foster children allowed.

She raised those children. When their father died, she stayed on alone and worked her fingers to the bone for them: flourishing children, two pretty girls and a dark-eyed boy who may have reminded her more than I of her own lost son. I saw her for the last time shortly before the Second World War, in the winter of 1936–1937. She still had her sterilized nurse’s costume, threadbare by then, a bit slovenly, and not so scrupulously clean as when she was with us, yet worn with great self-assurance. Her ugliness may have been frightening for someone who had not known her, particularly when she stuck out her gigantic dwarf’s head and laughed so that her white teeth — set in pink gums and by now showing some gaps — seemed to jump out of her dark simian countenance. Her hair was as straggly and Eskimo-like as ever, but by now it had turned iron gray: “Like tail of white horse my accursed corporal rode — does Panitshyu remember him?” She called me Panitshyu, or “young master,” and when I reproved her, she replied in her own patchwork language: “How else shall I call such a tall young gentleman? Nowadays I would no longer be allowed to hold the potty for you — would I?” She laughed her full-throated peasant’s laugh: “Hohohoho!’’