Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

This anecdote did not make me fond of my grandfather. I did not at first understand how he could have been capable of so brutal an act. He was a man of the world with excellent manners and even a sense of humor. Photographs I preserve out of scientific curiosity show him in the smartly cut uniform of an officer in the reserves; as a culture-seeking tourist, clad in plaids and looking at some Near Eastern ruins; as imperial counselor in a frock coat. In all of them, a short-trimmed beard half conceals an ironic smile. He was known to be exceptionally stubborn. Molded by all the fatal preconceptions of the nineteenth century, he drew his overly developed conceit from contemporary ideas about one’s “position in the world” and from related cast-iron moral and aesthetic principles, in particular those that were grounded in property. A pompous plush-lined Victorianism imbued him toward the end of his days with a cigar-smoking vulgarity in such sharp contrast with the elegance of his appearance that paradoxically — you see this in portraits of Edward VII as Prince of Wales — it became part of it.

He always impressed me as the prototype of the flourishing bourgeois at the turn of the century, during the so-called Gründerzeit. His well-to-do family was of Swiss origin; they had come to Vienna early in the eighteenth century and, together with cousins who also had emigrated from Fribourg, gained merit through their service with the then emerging Austrian tobacco monopoly. The cousins rose high in the world, they were made counts and married into the aristocracy. His branch of the family gained only a modest title of nobility, and whether there rankled in him some envy of those favored ones or whether the entrepreneurial spirit of his commoner forebears was reawakened in him is a moot question, but his life was that of an American-style self-made man. His admirers, especially his daughters, liked to retell with unquestioning adulation the legend of how, against the will of his family — but the why in this remains unfathomable — he turned his efforts to the lumber industry, how he became a leading figure in forestry circles and amassed a fortune that allowed him to marry the beautiful, well-born and well-endowed daughter of a general of Irish extraction. (That on her mother’s side she had Greek ancestors who in the distant past had plundered some Wallachian fiefdoms increased her value — and thereby his reputation as a man who knew how to acquire the best on the most favorable terms.) This version of his triumphs, which surely in reality was not such a black-and-white thing, incensed my father, who never tired of stripping the mythic figure of his father-in-law of his nimbus; his scorn helped to set the seeds of my cordial dislike of my grandfather.

I saw him only seldom, though. My maternal grandparents no longer lived in the Bukovina. They too were part of what my father liked to call “cultural compost’’: envoys of the civilizing administration of an empire that no longer existed. Even before the First World War, they and my mother’s siblings had returned to Vienna, whither we, who after 1919 were Romanian citizens, visited them at most once a year for a few days — usually when passing through on our way to the Carinthian lakes, where my mother dragged my sister and me for summer vacations, hated by both of us and clouded by homesickness for our house and our dogs. Eventually we came to understand that these “fresh-air resorts’’—as if the Carpathians were lacking in fresh air and the fragrance of pine woods! — were a pretext for Mother to see her family and to afford one or another of her sisters a few weeks of relaxation. For those sisters had by then become impoverished and had to work for a living: the war and subsequent inflation, as well as some ill-advised speculations, had reduced my grandfather’s legendary fortune to nothing more than its zeros.

So I never saw him in the fullness of his life, but only as a sick and broken man; and on the strength of my father’s denigrations of the family myth, according to which he was the sole proprietor and protector of all civic and paterfamilial virtues, I thought of him as an unpleasant, despotic, petty, hidebound old man. He gave no evidence in his last years that contradicted this impression. He would sit immobile on a sofa in the drawing room of his apartment in Vienna, filled with heavy baroque furniture, family portraits, bronzes and layers of dark Oriental carpets, chin supported on his hands and lavishly beringed fingers clutching the ivory crook of an ebony cane. I fancied that this stick was the same with which he had thrashed my mother’s back when she was a little girl. I was certainly not the only one who breathed a surreptitious sigh of relief when he died in the icy winter of 1927. In triumph my sister showed me one of the rings that had made his large pale hands, worm-streaked by thick blue veins, so especially repellent to me. It was given her as a reward for her skill in countering his temper tantrums with the slippery smoothness of her good manners. Strangely enough, an heirloom also fell to me, who was not endowed with such diplomatic skills: an intricately worked gold pocket watch with a dial in Arabic numerals which he had brought back from one of his trips to Turkey. It disappeared, like so many other things during my student days, at the pawnbroker’s, never to be seen again.

I also have a picture of the young girl driven by that cane stroke from childhood ingenuousness into the baffling quandary of her being, to a realization of inadequacy in the face of the tasks with which life would confront her. In this photograph she stands, straight and lissome, in a high-necked summer dress in front of a bench in the parental garden — a large garden of the kind that even grandchildren, when told of its splendors, will dream about. Something of its freedom-promising green glory can still be seen in her eyes, but already it is tainted by the nostalgia of leave-taking. She is every inch the young girl brought up according to her social position — and at the same time she betrays the bedevilment of a young being imprinted by the stereotypes of convention. Her comeliness cannot conceal a puzzled consternation that has become second nature to her. She knows what’s in store for her, as the saying goes: she foresees her future and the impossibility of coping with the demands that will be addressed to her — without conceiving for a moment that she might be able to change anything. The “grand life” belongs to the world of dreams: it may happen, but this will change hardly anything at all in her preordained fate as a woman. These are the sober facts: she will be married as well as possible, to a man in comfortable circumstances and not below her own standing; she will have children and will try to educate them according to the same stereotypes that marked her own education — verbal stereotypes, which she may even recognize as such but to which she has bowed without demur. She must live in accordance with the rhetoric of her caste and era, and if she does not succeed, her failure is her own and not due to the emptiness of the phraseology.

My father, to whom she was engaged shortly thereafter, following a tennis game, told us that she was an excellent pistol shot — under his personal instruction, it goes without saying. She rode horses well, though never without being accompanied. She cut a pretty figure as a skater and she loved to swim, though again always under supervision. The secretly entertained dream of becoming a pediatrician — after all, she had obtained a diploma — could not be realized by a girl of her class, which differed from the average philistines only through its greater pretensions. Instead, she attended in succession two well-known home economics schools, one in Bonn and the other in Lausanne. But the unrealized dream of serving humanity as a pediatrician curdled into a bitter residue at the bottom of her soul. Only her naivete remained unaffected.