Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

The second disinfectant, Formamint, was a leftover from a pseudo-English governess (whose blessedly short stay in our house I memorialized episodically in a novel). It came in flat white lozenges with a sweetly sharp, somewhat alkaline taste. These were placed on our obediently stretched-out tongues like the host at Holy Communion, so as to guard us prophylactically against aspired or licked-up pathogenic organisms. Especially when we happened close to any gathering of people or, worse, when we passed a funeral procession, a Formamint was instantly slapped on. To be able at least to speak without obstruction, I was in the habit of storing my lozenge hamsterlike in the pouch of my cheek, where it dissolved not only itself but also my teeth. The enamel of the first tooth that I had to have filled and, eventually, pulled — in dentist’s parlance the third right mesial — had been eaten away in my childhood by innumerable Formamint tablets.

The fright of the disorders that occurred in the Bukovina after the breakdown of the Austrian monarchy and before its occupation by Romania in 1919 remained with my mother for long after. She did not feel happy in a country whose languages she did not understand and to which she no longer had any ties after her parents had left it. She felt that she had been relegated to this exile by my father’s passion for hunting, and she saw the deeper motive it expressed: his resolve not to return to a shrunken Austria and to her own family. She failed to bear in mind that he was being paid a salary in a relatively stable currency which would have been devalued by inflation in a matter of days had he returned to Austria and which, despite everything, assured us of a comfortable livelihood. The cheapness of food and services in Romania in those days, which appears today almost like a fairy tale, allowed her an incomparably more luxurious life-style than what she could have afforded in Austria after the loss of her own fortune; but she thought of herself as destitute and déclassé, and she transferred to her children the vulnerable pride generated by the myth of a grand and lost past. (No wonder that one of the favorite books of my sister’s childhood was Brentano’s Gockel, Hinkel and Gackelaia .)

Mother’s arrogance, occasionally erupting from the constantly smoldering fire of her repressed rage, paralyzing her at such moments into a mute and rigid statue, did not improve her dealings with the people around her in a setting that was going to seed. Ever since the pillaging bands in the first weeks after the breakdown in 1918, she suspected the entire population in both city and country of waiting only for an opportunity to turn into marauders, to slit the throats of their betters, to skewer the children. It was obvious to her that this ragged and unwashed populace, coughing and spitting and pissing against the next-best fencepost, was composed of militant carriers of infectious germs. Any and all occasions for us to come into contact with ordinary people were restricted to an absurd minimum.

I know of no children who might have grown up in comparable isolation. We were never for an instant without supervision. When we played in the garden, the fence of which we were strictly forbidden to trespass, there was hardly ever another child present, and the colorful outside world was known to us merely through the images, rapidly flitting past our eyes, of animated street perspectives: an exotic travelogue through which we were transported in hasty processions of coaches, dogs, nurses and governesses from one enclosure to another, from the city to the country and back again to the city, shuttling between watchfully secluded confines. When a child did chance to penetrate our isolation, grotesque precautions were taken before and after its visit: Formamint and permanganate were lavished on us in extravagant profusion. Once an unfortunate pair of siblings borrowed some books from us and soon after came down with scarlet fever, whereupon the books, on their return, were placed in quarantine and we were not allowed to touch them for a year. I still recall my welcoming joy when once again I opened one of them, outside in the blazing sun, so that the sharp black print on the white page suddenly appeared grass-green to my eyes — and my ensuing alarm, for I imagined that the scarlet fever had poisonously discolored the lettering.

Yet all the images I have from that period are of an incomparable well-being — not a corporeal and even less an emotional one: we were more frequently unhappy than happy and more often rebelling against repression than enjoying a feeling of freedom. But even our unhappy times were filled with a self-assurance that I cannot ascribe to any other source than the innocence of life — not merely the innocence of childhood, nor the lighter emotional freight of an era not yet so guilt-ridden as the present, but rather and in large part the innocence of my mother. Her restlessness, her volatility, her occasional unfairness and even her rage and her almost vindictive manner in meting out punishments were all the result of a desperate attempt to realize an ideal, namely that of the perfect maternal head of family (irrespective of the fact that the paterfamilias refused to play the obligatory counterpart role), so everything she did, whatever its surface appearance, stood under a kind of ethical blessing. All her actions, even the most aberrant ones, were undertaken with pure intentions and to the best of her knowledge and belief. While in other households likenesses of the Madonna might hang on the walls — or nowadays portraits of Che Guevara, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Pope John XXIII — our youth was dominated, so to say, by a lithograph of the categorical imperative. Our well-being was rooted in the security of ethical and moral incontestability, whatever objections may be raised to the methods used in our upbringing.

This sharp blade of pure intent was hardly ever wielded by my mother with unadulterated logic. Yet strangely enough, everyone submitted to her, even my father. Nannies and governesses were as powerless against her as we: they groaned and called on their maker to witness the extent of so much senselessness — her outlandish directions, her eccentric regulations regarding attire and nourishment — but almost always yielded to her. That one should not eat crawfish in the months whose names are spelled with an r is a generally acknowledged rule; but that in those months one was also prohibited from sitting on the bare ground or on a stone because vapors emanating from the soil generated infantile paralysis was a belief singular to our own family hygiene. Governesses with different notions about the physical strengthening of their charges either shrugged in resignation and conformed or were replaced by others who cared less for their own ideas than for gaining respite from their employer. To drink a glass of cold water when one was overheated was fatal. Melons and figs were the source of pernicious gastric fevers; we were allowed to eat them only when we had reached adolescence. Even when we thought of ourselves as grown-up, it would have been out of the question for us to drive even a short distance in an open car without wearing fur coats and hermetically fitting leather driving caps — and this too in the blast-oven heat of Romanian summers.

Little by little these quaint fancies, once seen merely as gratuitously imposed torments, began to erode the ethical and moral certainty of our world. In the face of one of my mother’s extravagant fantasies, the commitment to the categorical imperative began to yield to a skeptical impatience bordering on cynicism. I recall a dramatic scene at one of the mountain lakes we used to visit for our “aestival recoveries.” I was almost thirteen and had taken the liberty — imagine it! — of renting a rowboat on my own and of rowing out alone on the lake. When I returned to our hotel, my sister, with bloodless lips, told me that my mother had locked herself in her room to commit suicide.