Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

For fifty-six years — a whole life span — there has not been for me a single happy or unhappy moment, neither success nor failure, no significant or even halfway noteworthy occurrence on which she might not have commented. She is mute but she is there. My life is a wordless dialogue with her, to which she remains unmoved: I monologize in front of her. In the sequence of images in which I experience myself in life, she is included in every situation, as the watermark in the paper bearing a picture…

The result is a measured celebration of a life cut short, and a portrait of a clever, brave, and largehearted young woman whom the ancient Stoics would have welcomed as one of their own.

Indeed, the stoic note is struck throughout, and nowhere more resoundingly than in the wonderful, closing portrait of Miss Lina Strauss, otherwise known as Bunchy — one of the meanings of the German word Strauss is “bunch of flowers’’—the Pomeranian tutor who first taught Rezzori’s mother and then young Rezzori himself, and who remained his friend and mentor until her death at a grand age. Bunchy had led a remarkable life. She had lived for many years in New York and Florence, and had been a good friend, and perhaps more than a good friend, of Mark Twain’s. She brought to the Rezzori household “a more civil tone,” and probably imbued young Gregor with something of her own civilized and culturally sophisticated outlook upon the world and its not always appealing inhabitants. He recalls the regular postcards she would send him in later years, usually with reproductions of paintings by the Tuscan masters, and remarks, beautifully, how “the golden background of those Annunciations lined the place in my psyche where her name was embedded.’’

Flakes of that gold leaf adhere to every page of this wonderful, luminous memoir. The Snows of Yesteryear may deal with a lost world but in its affirmation of the necessity of clear sight, humor, warmth, and a jealously maintained sense of due proportion, it is a welcome reproof for the laxities of our time. Writing of his sister, Rezzori remarks the matter in which they felt “an identical, close affinity,” namely, “the perceptive handling of unavoidable losses. We knew the fabric that fed the poetics of our life; we knew the value of those myths into which lost realities are transformed.” By a seemingly selfless concentration upon the figures that surrounded him in his earliest years, Rezzori manages to portray vividly both a public world that has gone and a private self that endures. In a haunting passage he recalls a Joycean epiphany experienced on a long-ago “brooding Romanian summer afternoon,” when he sat by a window above an enclosed garden, raptly attentive to the music of what happens. There is an ancient vine, and summer flies that “threaded the hour,” and a sleeping cat, and soaring swallows.

I had before me an 1873 issue of Over Land and Sea. From its yellowed pages rose a subtly musty whiff. A foxed steel engraving of a three-master with reefed sails in a small palm-fanned harbor in front of a background of steep volcanic cones — this lured my imagination into the airy remotenesses of spiced shores. But there remained a floating core of consciousness filled with nothing but a transparent void — I would have called it my “I,” had I been asked — that was neither here nor there but, instead, in an anguished and tormenting nowhere.

— JOHN BANVILLE

Swarms of waxwings have settled in the ripe clusters of rowanberries. It is said that they come only every seven years from high up north, from Lapland or Siberia, and only when the winter threatens to turn exceptionally severe. They’re also called plague birds, even though they appear rather pretty: plump and colorful, with a saucy crest, velvety black heads and throats, white-banded wings on scarlet pinions and tails edged in lemon yellow. Their fluffy breasts, of a rosy mother-of-pearl hue, crowd against the spiky gridwork of the cluster stems as they busily pick the red berries. A sudden detonation: someone is shooting with birdshot into the swarm, which rises like smoke above the crowns of the rowan trees. But a good dozen of the birds tumble from the fruit clusters down into the snow amidst fallen berries and drops of blood. Who can tell whether the survivors will ever return? The clusters are torn to shreds and the denuded twigs show as a rigid pattern against the pale winter sky .

When she joined the household, it was said, she was hardly more than a beast. They had peeled her out of her peasant garb and had instantly consigned the shirt, the wrap skirt, the sleeveless sheepskin jacket and the leather buskins to the flames. But clad in city clothes, she looked so utterly absurd as to be frightening. People would say in rude jesting that if a pregnant woman encountered her, she might well miscarry. Forthwith they dressed her once more in her traditional costume, though a somewhat stylized version, devoid of the many-colored embroideries on shirt and skirt, without the vermilion sash and the saffron-colored kerchief: a nunnish garb in subdued black, white and gray shades. “They turned a goldfinch into a sparrow,” she would say of herself. It had not been anticipated that she would be even more conspicuous in this contrived costume than in her traditional clothes, notwithstanding which she wore it with great and dignified pride, as if it were a monastic vestment.

No one ever found out how she had come by the name of Cassandra. Under no circumstances could she have been baptized under that name. The godforsaken hamlet in the Carpathian Mountains whence she had come — she still knew its name but no longer where it was located, in any case, “way back in the woods’’—consisted of a handful of clapboard hovels whose inhabitants slept with their sheep in winter, while in summer the plangent sound of their shepherd pipes mingled with the wind rushing through the pine trees of their mountain fastness. To what name she answered there she stubbornly refused to reveal, nor did she divulge who first had called her Cassandra. Probably it was someone at the monastery where my father had found her, but even that seemed doubtful: no one but the abbot himself would have been likely to bestow on her, out of the bevy of maidservants — perhaps by reason of some evil-boding prophecy? — the name of the seeress from The Iliad. The monks in their black frocks, the stovepipes of their rimless hats on their shaggy-haired heads, shy, wildly ecstatic or half mad in self-absorption, were no less ignorant than their village brethren. Anyway, she came to us as Cassandra and took care of me from the day of my birth — as my nanny, my mother said; as my wet nurse, Cassandra claimed.

It is typical of my mother’s misguided pride that no photographs of Cassandra have come down to me. When the northern part of the Bukovina where we used to live — formerly a crown land of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and after 1919 a province of Romania — was ceded to Russia in 1940 as a result of the pact concluded between Stalin and Hitler, or more accurately between their lackeys Molotov and Ribbentrop, the authorities in charge of Interests of Germans Abroad “repatriated” us and all other former Austrians “of German blood” to the German Reich. Each person was allowed to take fifty kilograms of belongings. My mother had a Russian colonel quartered in her town house in Czernowitz who gallantly permitted her to take with her twice as much, of which at least a third consisted of memorabilia of the family. Among the hundreds of photographs, all those showing Cassandra were eliminated. Not because of her ugliness, although she must have looked, with me in her arms, like a female gorilla costumed as a nanny kidnapping a white infant. That Cassandra had been in our service, first as nanny and later, when I was growing up and my parents had separated, as my father’s housekeeper, my mother could not help admitting. But that the “savage one,” as Cassandra openly was called in the household, had also been my wet nurse — this my mother resolutely denied. To have nursed me with her own milk was a distinction she claimed for herself alone.