Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

Even decades later, the question whether she could not have refused to marry him encountered total incomprehension. How was that? It had been so decided, and therefore it had to be gone through. But hadn’t her parents soon realized how little the two suited each other? Why, certainly, but who truly “suits” another? The miraculous power of love is precisely that it can overcome such discrepancies, and love is alleged to develop automatically— though not immediately — in marital life. All the external circumstances fitted well enough: it was a good match for both of them. Theirs was a life deep in the provinces, in the most remote crown land of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy; her parents too lived in the Bukovina, drawn there by the lumber of the Carpathian forests and properties inherited from their Phanariot ancestors (among these the Odaya, the house where my sister was born and whence we fled in 1914). Though it was true that the future son-in-law had no money to speak of, he was in a promising position in government service, he had a good name and high patronage, as well as an influential father in Vienna. Had there been no convulsions, no outbreak of the war and no collapse of the Austrian monarchy, had the Bukovina remained part of Austria, and had the fortune my mother brought to her marriage not been lost, it could have been for her, while not an ideally happy life, at least an acceptably pleasant one — but only with another man.

In his role as husband she found my father farcical, a parody of what a head of family was to represent; in his role as lover, outright repellent. When, after four years of her staying in various sanatoria and another four years of separation caused by the war, the two finally lived together in 1919 in a radically changed world, he showed no comprehension whatever for her desire, natural with a young woman, nevertheless to keep a house where an active social life would endow her with a measure of prestige. He was unable to understand that she expected the real (albeit not necessarily “grand’’) life of marriage to conform to a young girl’s dream, to take place in an ambience of evening gowns illumined by glowing candlelight. Still less could he comprehend that this desire was not so much inspired by an urge to achieve social standing but, to her way of thinking, construed as a marital duty. She devoted much love to their house; at least it was in Czernowitz, and she could establish in it something of the solidly anchored family life she had known in her own parental home — though perhaps in a somewhat more relaxed atmosphere and without its draconian severity.

My memory places the house in a garden where beeches, birches and ash trees convey great airiness and luminosity; it is a two-storied neoclassical building similar to innumerable country mansions built in the nineteenth century throughout the Russian cultural sphere as well as in the American South; it has a colonnaded façade and a glassed-in porch in the back giving out to the depths of the garden. I need hardly mention that, were I to see it today, it would seem considerably more modest than it appeared to me in those far-off days. I had already experienced that shrinking of dimensions attendant upon any comparison between mythicized and factual past whenever I returned home for vacation from my various and dubious schools. Each time the house and garden seemed more confined, more trite, especially when, once my mother left, the familiar and beloved rooms assumed the gently run-down bohemian coziness of a bachelor’s quarters.

During my childhood these rooms had embodied all the spaciousness and glamour of the entire world. In their furnishing my mother had shown that she was not, after all, entirely conventional. As her dowry she had requested, in addition to her inherited portion of baroque and Biedermeier furniture, pieces in the then fashionable Art Nouveau style. Since these had not been brought to the Odaya, they had escaped being stolen and vandalized by the Russians during the war. Among these furnishings — they could have been ascribed to Mackintosh or Hoffmann — we children lived and played, and then, as adolescents innocent of art-historical appreciation, we rejected them as unfashionable. We would have much preferred tubular steel furniture. Even more obsolete and precious seemed to us the wardrobes and chests of drawers, as well as my mother’s Second Empire cherry-wood bedroom, heirlooms from our Greco-Romanian great-grandmother. But personally, I loved the bed. When recovering from some slight childhood ailment, I was allowed to wallow in it, huge as a blond galleon, and in its pillowed voluptuousness indulge my dreams of shimmy dances to the rhythms of the first black jazz bands.

It is but natural that nostalgia transposes this house for me into the perennial sunshine of a Bonnard painting. Yet I am certain the good taste of its furnishings favorably impressed our rare guests, who came at my mother’s invitation. These were not just evening gatherings. We, the children, soon provided an excuse for these social events; our alienation from the world around us and our lack of contact with other children finally penetrated even my mother’s consciousness and she recalled her duty to prepare us for life — though this too according to her own romantic notions. So as to bring us together with our peers, she arranged fancy-dress fêtes champêtres and pageants in which my sister, representing Titania, Queen of the Fairies, was drawn through the garden on a flower-garlanded carriage by some eleven-year-old maiden, both girls dressed in tutus and with dragonfly wings sprouting from their narrow shoulder blades, while I, together with two other boys (one of whom happened to be cross-eyed), led the cortege in page costumes, our locks crowned by wreaths, blowing on shepherd pipes. Such events were more entertaining for the mothers and governesses than for us, and they often deteriorated into brawls with my costumed coevals. Once my sister appeared as a bayadère whipped mercilessly with a cotton cat-o’-nine-tails by a fat man in a turban and Turkish breeches; this earned her such enthusiastic applause that she decided then and there to follow in Pavlova’s footsteps and become a prima ballerina. When she glowingly informed my father of her intention, he commented dryly, “If your mother allows this to come to pass, I’ll personally shoot you from the stage!” Eventually he brought a brusque end to those charades when he learned that because of them the whole town thought of us as wildly eccentric. (In Czernowitz, masquerades were thought appropriate, if at all, only at Purim.) At a house party where I enacted the role of sausage vendor, he doctored the sausages, generously offered to the assembled guests, with a potent laxative. The ensuing scenes of horror in the toilets and bathrooms remained a permanent obstacle to any further attempts to rescue his children from their isolation.

His other contributions to our social life were scant. All the men he brought to the house were rum birds: an alcoholic mathematics professor who was the only person with whom he could discuss higher mathematics (in which he was interested mainly in connection with ballistic computations); an old apothecary, expert in alchemical preparations, another of my father’s wide-ranging, albeit almost exclusively hunt-focused interests; a painter and engraver who taught him the esoteric skills of dry-needle technique (he painted, drew and engraved dreadful pictures of mating capercaillies and rutting stags); or various of his hunting companions, who either were passionate ornithologists, botanists or armorers or lived reclusively in the forest, where they seemed to have grown mossy and, like Hamsun’s Pan, exuded a pungent gamey smell. All efforts failed to awaken his young wife’s sympathy for these cronies. To be sure, his attentions were directed not solely to these men. Quite the contrary, but the many more women than men who met with his approval did so in such an unequivocal way that Mother saw little reason to promote these friendships by extending the hospitality of her own house.