Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

Nothing can explain the end — and generally also the beginning — of a love affair. In our case it was indeed a love affair: her maternal love for me and my child’s love for her in all their volatile passion had been much closer to an amorous relationship than to a natural growing-together of mother and child. From the very beginning, Cassandra had stood between us, Cassandra who — at a clear remove from my mother — had let me taste the animal delights of brood-warm love and had thus transposed my mother from the realm of a primeval mother to that of an intellectual experience in which her magic charm and seductiveness, her pride and her vulnerability, her obsessions and her whims had joined together to form for me the allure — and possibly also the travesty — of the quintessential feminine. I was on guard against her long before I watched out for any other women. Even in our happiest hours, when she visited me in Kronstadt, I loved her at a distance, with reservations about a possible sudden sobering, in the twilight of fundamental otherness: that never-entirely-to-be-understood being that woman represented for me. I think too that she had perceived in the love object “child,” assigned to her as “mother,” the man into whom the little boy — Baldur-like — would grow under her maternal nurturing, and had believed he would also embody the qualities she most hated in men. All too often her demonstrations of maternity had had the earmarks of rape.

Now, faced by a grown man who himself had raised sons, she was helpless. And I was not perceptive enough to forgive her for never having been a true mother. She took possession of our sorry household and my children with all her tough energy, now concealed by a newly acquired submissiveness. We lived in much straitened circumstances; in those days, hardship was general in Germany and we might well have ended up with hunger edema like so many others had we not received some help from abroad through one of her sisters (the socialist who had married a Jew and who, repudiated by the family, had emigrated to America, whence she helped us keep body and soul together by sending us CARE packages). Mother gave us her all. She assumed the lowliest chores, as if she had to atone for being tolerated by us and by the world. Yet her presence was not always a blessing. Her fidgety absentmindedness, her overwrought anxieties and her occasional outbursts, her sporadic forlorn musings and woolgatherings, from which she would rouse herself as if sternly called to order, could hardly calm our already exacerbated nerves. She lived as if constantly rushed and hunted; she stinted herself on every mouthful of food, sewed children’s coats from her last warm blanket, managed at the cost of indescribable abasement to get hold of black-market goods and procured ration coupons from unfathomable sources; she would hand these benefits to us with the hectic sacrificial eagerness of someone in full flight who rids himself of excess baggage to appease his pursuers. But she meant us to come along on this flight: a demonically driven flight in which guilt pushed her into self-annihilation. Her solicitude, her kindness and her self-devotion were as imperious as they were obsequiously degrading, and the angry servility that accompanied them, ever more exhibitionistic, turned into a formidable blackmailing weapon.

To protect my children from it, I told them the fable of Sindbad’s rider: the old man dying of thirst on an island, asking the sailor who had been cast off on its shores to carry him to the well on his shoulders and who, once astride, took him so firmly between his iron thighs that he almost rode him to death. The allegory was not quite accurate, since it was my mother who had saddled us with her fate and who now was carried by us to her own death, yet the parable illustrated well the two-edged nature of despotic altruism.

I left the end of the tale untold: to wit, Sindbad manages to rid himself of his tormentor only by racing under the low branches of a tree, against which the head of the old man is finally smashed to death. This was a much more pertinent pictorial simile for my comportment toward her, though I could not be proud of it. The jumble of world events covered the torment of our private history only inadequately. Nor did the past offer consolation. The loss of her home and fortune pained my mother much less than the numberless small wounds inflicted to her pride in happier times. Hardly ever did an image arise from the magic formula “Do you still remember…?” that wasn’t marred by bitterness or corroded by irony. Only memories that were ludicrous and typical of absurd circumstances were acceptable; one feared to evoke hidden sufferings. She told us of the first peaceable occupation of the Bukovina by the Russians in 1940: the colonel who was quartered in her house showed exemplary manners. He spared the bed linen in fear “it might get dirty,” and she found it each morning neatly folded next to the bed. After a few weeks, he was joined by his family: a hefty wife and an equally generously proportioned nineteen-year-old daughter. The two ladies, summer-clad in cotton shirts through which saucer-sized nipples were darkly visible, went on a shopping spree for whatever had not yet disappeared from the shops of occupied Czernowitz. They came home with strange-looking bonnets made of light netting with puffy pink paddings, held by two ribbons knotted under the chin. They turned out to be sanitary napkins, whose true purpose was unknown to the ladies.

But even in these merry reminiscences of the terminal phase of the great shoveling-under of the old world, preparing the soil for a new one, my mother’s jagged edginess made itself felt. Thus she told us that one day a young man called on her who showed an astounding resemblance to my father. He introduced himself as the offspring of a little love interlude between my father and some local maiden, a pleasurable by play during a hunting expedition, with its imprudent but foreseeable consequences. The mother had been a Ruthenian. Because he himself was married and the father of small children whom he wanted to grow up in Germany rather than Soviet Russia, he asked my mother to testify to his racial high-grade value and thus to enable him and his family to be relocated. She did so, “for the sake of the children, of course,” she explained in a brittle aside. I can well imagine the icy disdain with which she comported herself on that occasion. The man and his family were indeed relocated, but she stubbornly refused to divulge where or under what name, so that I know nothing more of him and of my nephews and nieces. Nor was it of any avail when I explained to her that I felt guilty toward this half-brother: in a way, I had cheated him of primogeniture, as I had done to Cassandra’s son, from whom I had stolen the mother’s milk rightfully belonging to him.

Her life together with us — myself and my wife and the children — was not to last long. My marriage soon broke up. It was as if my mother forgot that I was her son and not her irresponsible husband; she began to address me by his name and blamed his escapades for the failings in our family life. She identified wholly with my wife of the time and, with a fervor she had lacked at the meetings of the feminists in Reps, lectured her on her right to emancipation from the bondage of marriage and from housewifely and maternal duties. These sermons did not fall on deaf ears. My wife emigrated to Africa and I too left Germany; the children were sent to boarding school. My mother remained alone in wretched circumstances, which I could have alleviated somewhat. I did not do so. She probably derived some consolation and a few happy moments from her love for my youngest son. In her relation with him all her lyrical capacity for love, freed of trivial obsessions, blossomed once more, and he kept as affectionate an image of her as I in the days of my childhood.