Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

Still, we children had that stereotyped experience of seeing Mother enter her bedroom, her deep décolleté glittering with jewels and she herself transformed into a movie star, followed by my father, who left it undecided whether the high color of his face was due to the tightness of the stiff collar he wore with his tails or to his rage at having to spend the evening on diversions he hated and in the company of people he despised. There existed in Czernowitz at that time a theater in which German-language plays were put on with “leading talents from the homeland,” as it was advertised, until Romanian students ended these performances with a violent demonstration. This chauvinist manifestation sufficed to prompt my father never again to set foot in that theater. But other social events tempted — or repelled.

The Gay Twenties were upon us. From the illustrated magazines arriving at the house, we received graphic instructions on the fashionably updated life-style models, saluted by popping champagne corks. Even our unworldly mother knew enough of the world to recognize the difference in quality between these glittering images and the true level of the locally available entertainment. Father’s ruthlessly acerbic comments the morning after such nights of revelry left no doubt concerning their real worth. Still, some romance remained in preparing for the hoped-for enactments of the great dream-life, however inadequate these might turn out to be. Whenever we found ourselves in my mother’s dressing room, Cassandra would rummage with monkeylike curiosity in the costly fabrics of evening gowns and wraps from a more expansive prewar era, the heron feathers, diamond clasps, silk shoes, brocaded caps and other paraphernalia. But the atmosphere of real or imagined festivities was felt most vividly when the baubles had been put away and left once again gently to gather dust. And this happened soon enough: Mother’s fairy-queen appearances at our bedside became increasingly rare and eventually ceased altogether. My father, once more in the best of moods, set out on his hunting trips and stayed away for weeks, while my mother again wrapped herself in manically conceived maternal duties. We children were her only connection to reality, her sole life possession, and she claimed it for herself alone. The shell around us closed hermetically while the years bypassed her life dream.

Nevertheless, the no longer so young woman — she is past the “Balzacian age,” la femme de trente ans , after all — is granted a short, late bloom after she separates from my father. For me it is a difficult time, for I am away from home and suffer much from homesickness. On the other hand, I too am given a new life, for I am freed of my sister’s affectations of superiority; she is with our grandparents in Vienna and about to go to finishing school. I am almost nine and I am sent to Kronstadt (now Braşov), in Transylvania, to begin my education at the renowned Honterus Gymnasium there. Among strangers and released from Cassandra’s guardianship, I am faced for the first time by the question of who and what I am. There is no doubt in my mind who is the steadying keel that gives me at least some self-assurance, which from the start had been weak and had been shaken further by the loss of my parental home: I am in love with my mother. Whenever she visits me, she is followed by glances of admiration, respect, desire. I find her at the Hotel At the Crown, an exemplary establishment of the old-fashioned Austro-Hungarian kind. The lobby with the deep leather chairs I founder in, the restaurant with its black-white-and-silver table settings and tailcoated waiters, the coffeehouse with its marble-topped tables and gypsy orchestra, the winter garden with its tropical plants and the diffuse light from its colored glass windows — all bespeak the elegance of a period about to vanish: the legendary luxury voyages on international trains such as the Orient Express and at palace hotels. We are privileged guests. The way my mother is treated by the employees, the waiters and the reception clerk makes me proud to be her son. The high regard and courtesy shown her by the men and the assiduity displayed by the women extends to me. I am spoiled because I am her child. I observe her sharply and compare her with other women, including the mothers of my school comrades, and the result makes me arrogant. The assurance with which she gives orders and makes her wishes known in her clear French to a chauvinistic assistant concierge at the hotel who alleges not to understand German and insists on speaking Romanian (which my mother never mastered); her girlish blushing when a gentleman of the old school who chances to witness this unpleasant scene (a typical one, incidentally, for the successor states to the Empire in those early years) compliments her for her fine bearing by a wordless bow — these are lasting impressions. In photographs from that period I see her gathering a fur piece around her naked shoulders in a gesture that nowadays is frequently imitated by transvestites; with her, it conveys an inimitable grace, seldom seen in the fatidic stars of the society sheets and the movies (beginning to flicker with their omnipotent promise even in those remote parts), who forfeited in the theatricality of their gestures a good deal of their ladylike pretensions.

It is difficult to reconcile this image of her with the last two-thirds of her life, when she increasingly distorted and coarsened herself. Two decades later she was so different that no one possibly could have recognized her, let alone have found in her the willowy girl with the grave and dreamy glance she had been prior to her ill-fated marriage. Perhaps someone might have realized, on the strength of faint signs — the claim to respect that betrayed itself in her bearing; a certain fastidiousness; her still well-formed hands — that what had occurred here was not only a personal decay but one of the countless individual destinies swept away and crushed by the eclipse of an entire world.

The surprising thing, given the rigidity of her character, was the pliancy with which she adapted to that fate. Her angry resignation somehow seemed like an act of revenge. She adapted to increasingly uncomfortable circumstances not only without resistance but almost with alacrity, as if she derived some perverse satisfaction from it. In her last years, she displayed a teeth-gnashing, reluctant submissiveness. By grimly bending under the blows that fate delivered to her, she could prove to the world the magnitude of the suffering for which she had been predestined. This psychological pattern must have had very deep roots, reaching back to her earliest days.

One of today’s many overused words deriving from popular psychology is frustration. In the case of my mother this term is to be applied not merely in the figurative sense of bafflement but quite literally, as a castigation, a flagellation. In my mind rises a horrifying scene from her early girlhood that she once told me about, half in saddened forgiveness and half in awe of the pedagogic harshness it demonstrated with such naked brutality. The time is just after the turn of the century and she is thirteen or fourteen years old, on a summer afternoon bathed in a vine-green light that invades the house from the garden. She is doing four-handed piano exercises with her sister, younger by one year, and believes herself alone with her, for once unobserved, and so she begins to joke, to fool around, to laugh and to twattle — and is abruptly called to order by the biting stroke of a cane across her back. Her father stands behind her in all his mythic authority, as he towered all her life over her parental home, the embodiment of law and order in the entire world. When he punishes her he is not merely her idolized papa but the incarnation of universal law in all its inflexible severity. An irrevocable verdict has been pronounced: she is unworthy in her role as the oldest child and model for her five siblings, unworthy of the expectations placed on her, and of all those that will be placed on her throughout her life…. Never again will she regain full trust in herself. She was destined to fail, and she did not rebel against that fate but accepted it in smoldering rage and suppressed culpability, a self-lacerating readiness to suffer that she invested with the aura of martyrdom.