Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

My sister was born on July 14, 1910. Partly to honor the coincidence of her birth with Bastille Day (though my father hated the French Revolution, he greatly admired French hunting traditions), and partly to accustom the newborn to the sounds of a huntsman’s household, the newly baked father fired off a few shots under the windows of the young mother, whose delivery had been attended to at home. Mother suspected an attack by robbers and was close to fainting. A sympathetic physician declared her chronically ailing and toward the end of the year, when my sister could be entrusted to the experienced care of a nursemaid, prescribed a few months of rest in Egypt. The cure proved so salubrious that it was repeated each subsequent year until the outbreak of the war. Every year, after Christmas — a feast dear to my mother’s family, celebrated with sentimental effusion, much to my father’s distaste — my mother proceeded to Luxor, where she stayed until Easter. In July at the latest, she went to Montreux for additional recuperation. Whether these long absences had a salutary effect on her health may be doubted. I rather fear that the atmosphere of such resorts, so vividly described by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, added to her remoteness; certainly they did not improve her marital life and her relationship with her infant daughter. All this was worsened by my own precipitate arrival in a coach in May 1914.

I cannot be certain whether Mother herself or someone else who was privy to such family secrets told me that I had not been entirely welcome. Because of her kidney ailment — which by then had become a devoutly believed fact not only for herself but also for all those around her — it was alleged that several efforts had been made to abort my burgeoning life, efforts which, however, I withstood with the toughness I may have inherited from her. One thing is certain: I had not been a child of love. She was more unhappy than ever in those years; and since she believed that the cause of this unhappiness resided not only in her marriage but also in my sister’s increasing refractoriness, I soon became for her the most appropriate object on which to lavish maternal selflessness. Had I not been shielded by Cassandra during the early years of my life, her possessiveness would have smothered me altogether.

To some extent I played into her hands, inasmuch as from the very first I was a problem child. When, a few months after my birth, we had to flee the advance of the Russians, we were ambushed by a group of beggar gypsies at the top of the Bargău Pass. An old witch wished me a happy life, emphasizing this benevolent augury by spitting in my face, a politeness I acknowledged by developing a pink rash, whereupon Cassandra bathed me in an icy torrent. From Bistrice we continued by train to Vienna, where I arrived with pneumonia. My grandparents showered my mother with reproaches for not having taken better care of me and for having left me in the hands of “the savage one,” thus starting a kind of battle between the two in which I served as the unfortunate shuttlecock.

When the Italians joined the war and we had to decamp from the shelter of my grandfather’s summer house near Trieste, we stayed until 1918 in the house of friends in Lower Austria. It was located on a pretty patch of land but in what is known as a foul-weather corner: sudden storms made the aestival peace treacherous. In the middle of a storm that surprised us during a walk in the woods, I was soaked to the skin and came down with my second pneumonia. Then, at an unsupervised moment when I had scarcely recovered, I fell into a cattle trough. (Cassandra fished me out after my sister casually informed her of this mishap.) But pictures from those days show me as a robust boy: my mother’s cannibalistic solicitude was probably motivated more by psychological reasons than by any frailty of mine. In a manner of speaking I was her only child; my sister rapidly outgrew her reach. Also the deprivation of our refugee life conferred a legendary aura on her maternity. That my boyhood was played out around the cow stables of Lower Austria with peasant yokels was due solely to the intrusion of the forces of history: in “normal” times, the scenery of this phase of my life would have been Luxor. The Madonna-like tone of her chosen role naturally also included a future mater dolorosa ’s concern over the possible loss of this gift from heaven.

It would be hard to say who suffered more under this state of affairs, she or I. Her anxiety over me became manic and her concerns obsessive. My two pneumonias grew into a menetekel , warning of the ever present threat arising from her imagined wanton defectiveness. A doctor had told her that a third pneumonia would be fatal to me, and so everything possible was done to prevent such a recurrence or the onset of any other such life-threatening disease; eventually everyone got rather bored, when the intensely awaited catastrophe failed to materialize and I continued to exhibit red-cheeked vitality. Something of this disappointed expectancy always remained: when I had grown up and myself had become the head of a family, one of my aunts once asked me absentmindedly: “Weren’t you a bit stunted as a child? or epileptic? How are your own children?” Though it may be perilously close to the bounds of good taste to say so, it seems a bitter irony of fate that not I but my sister died of a pernicious disease in the prime of her youth.

Thanks to the zeal, then spreading epidemically, to invest every moment with eternity by means of the camera, the early phases of Mother’s maternity are fully recorded pictorially (an unfair advantage over Cassandra). The threesome always appears as the same little group in fashionably changing attire: my mother’s hats draw in their broad rims, shrink in size and finally cling snugly to the head. The tight lacing at her waistline loosens gradually, and the skirts, instead of following the body’s spindle form, are tucked up full in the seat and then fall to the instep of the high-heeled shoes. What remains unchanged is the young woman’s countenance, looking straight at the camera: the eyes are of someone not entirely present in the here and now, of someone eager to recover reality. The plumb-straight posture indicates clearly that she is more than ready to present herself as the proud creator of two successfully produced children. I appear at first, cradled in one arm, as a truncated cone from which, as from the cotton of a Christmas-tree angel, emerges a crest of blond locks; soon I descend to earth, and my baby clothes are succeeded by sweet little sailor suits and folkloric costumes. My sister is ever the showpiece: almost too pretty to be true, her doll-face animated by a fresh awareness — open, trusting, precociously coquettish. In her sober school dresses she becomes grave, more maidenly, all the more lyrically beautiful, as if emanating an intimation of her latent frailty. My sister, of course, was embraced by Mother’s neurotic and often domineering solicitude, but in contradistinction to my own experience, she was not used to it from the very beginning of her life. Father saw to it that she was allowed much greater freedom, but this did not make her relationship with Mother more tender.

Our childhood was befouled by two disinfectants: permanganate and Formamint. The first consisted of small purple hexagonal or octagonal rodlike crystals of hypermanganate acidic potash which dissolved in water to a kind of red-beet slop in which everything we came into contact with was washed: our toys, door handles that might have been touched by outsiders, all the table silver and any uncooked fruit — even from our own garden. My mouth still puckers whenever I am about to take a bite from an apple, in the unconscious anticipation of the insipid, tartly acidulous taste of permanganate.