Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

This house changed when my mother moved into town. The garden went to seed but, in exchange, gained in romantic appeal. The so-called reception rooms, which had seen so few receptions, turned into storage rooms for hunting trophies and related paraphernalia. My mother had had a loathing for walls decorated with stag antlers and stuffed grouse. Now antlers, horns, pelts of stags, hunting knives, pheasant tails, shooting sticks, cartridge boxes, dog leashes, bird snares, spring-traps and cleaning utensils for rifles were stacked high between and on top of the furniture. Our old nursery rooms were now the realm of his own games. On easels stood canvases and aquarelle papers on which he painted rather mediocre wildlife scenes and occasionally produced quite attractive architectural studies. His lack of self-criticism surprised me until I understood that he was interested much more in the process of painting than in its result. He stretched his canvases himself and mounted the Japanese papers with masterly skill on the drawing board; I admired, even envied, his knack in sharpening his pencils. No doubt he would have liked to grind his own colors. He was anything but a hobbyist, but he cherished craftsmanlike thoroughness and the excellence of select materials. In his search for the best in everything he was uncompromising: just as his shotguns had to come from Purdey and his custom-made rifles from Mauser, he bought his brushes, colors and papers from the most expensive suppliers in London and Paris; this fastidious insistence had been the despair of my mother. In addition, he bought everything in stock quantities, as if he feared that in so remote a corner of the world as the Bukovina he might be cut off at any moment from his sources of supply.

There were towers of boxes with mealy-greasy pastel crayons from which a whiff of the eighteenth century seemed to emanate; different oil brushes bundled in dozens, the bristles attached neatly and very firmly by metal clamps to elongated, top-flattened handles; other bundles of watercolor brushes made of marten hair, generously heart-shaped at their bases and tapering to thread-thin points, tied with red-lacquered silk yarn and attached so painstakingly to quill holders as to suggest the expert hand of a Chinese master. In between, on top of and next to piles of all kinds of hand-laid papers rested the small windowlike frames, meticulously lined in thin green felt, in which his photographic plates were exposed to light to make prints. He was a passionate photographer, and during our childhood he subjected us to all too many trying sittings. But for these I found myself amply compensated by the cavernous mystical experience of the darkroom, where, bathed in the blood-red shimmering obscurity, the yellowish coating of the glass plates slowly began to darken in the shallow rectangular pan rocked gently by Father’s skillful hands, releasing both acidic and basic fumes, magically to reveal, in the gradually separating depths of lighter and denser mist grays, the emerging pictures.

There was a great deal of medieval craftsmanship in the instrumentarium of his manifold hobbies. The sunlight that had once fallen on our dolls and toys was now reflected richly in the copper plates used in his (unfortunately rather amateurish) etchings, and all about were strewn — as heretofore had been our building blocks or my tin soldiers — his bottles of chemicals, his printing rolls, his scrapers and his palette knives. With the difference that all this paraphernalia of his playful enthusiasms was invested with the solemn aura of art utensils, just as his hunting weapons and implements were witness to adult occupations that were to be taken even more seriously. The very abundance of all this equipment, bought in quantities of dozens and lots, made it awe-inspiring. It was as if the bohemian atmosphere of the artist’s studio were transposed to a higher level by the very costliness of the materials, each of which had the select character of a bibelot. Furniture, on the other hand, was expendable unless its immediate usefulness was obvious, though he loved the clublike comfort of deep leather armchairs. With maniacal care he watered and cultivated his plants in the many-shaped planters, species that seldom blossomed but were all the more luxuriant in their verdancy: asparagus ferns spilled out from their stands and crept along the floor; cacti achieved monstrous sizes.

He attended to his matutinal activities unclothed, covered merely by a bath towel girding his loins, a liberty he indulged in after my mother left. Once, when his faithful friend and professional colleague Paul H., who came to fetch him each morning, impatiently demanded at around ten o’clock: “Finally, would you go and get dressed?” he sheepishly donned his pith helmet, which had hung unworn since the days when he had gone to Egypt to visit my mother.

When finally — after many an interruption — he was dressed, there followed the great ceremony of his departure for the archiepiscopal residence at the other end of town, where his office was located. As architect and art historian, he had been reassigned from the former Austrian civil service to the so-called Religious Fund — which administered the estates belonging to the Orthodox Church — with the special task of looking over the monasteries of the Bukovina.

It was never revealed to me in what exactly his duties at the office consisted. No doubt some desk-job activities, though it remained unfathomable how and when he accomplished these. His desk was littered with photographs, drawings, periodicals, watercolors, catalogues from weapon dealers and safari outfitters, but never any documents. No one could have been more unsuited to be a functionary. Yet it would seem that he attended to this part of his daily labors with his usual assiduity. He was highly respected in the spiritual hierarchy of the church-estates administration, in which he held the rank of a councillor of the consistory. Yet he certainly was not liked, but rather feared, for his sharp tongue and total lack of respect for any form of authority, especially that claimed by the representatives of God on earth. Unabashedly he called them “frocked vultures” and never hesitated to denounce publicly even the most hushed-up scandals in their state-within-a-state. Somehow he disarmed opponents by his rigid sense of duty, developed under the old Austrian monarchy. His daily trip to the archiepiscopal residence was a demonstrative act.

All of us had to accompany him on these expeditions in a solemn procession: Paul, his colleague; my sister and I; and all the dogs — though the dogs were sent home with a magisterially sweeping gesture once we reached the edge of town. The image of their happily wagging tails sagging sorrowfully between their hind legs as they trotted homeward at this mute but commanding gesture will stay with me to the end of my days; nothing illustrates more tellingly how our own moods dampened whenever my father was ill-tempered, packed up his things and disappeared from our lives for weeks or even months.

Officially, these disappearances were announced by the sentence: “I have to go on assignment!” This left no doubt as to the importance of the undertaking, since it sanctified it as a fulfillment of professional duties. The “assignment” meant inspection trips to the historic monasteries of the Bukovina and on the upper Moldau, the structural condition and maintenance of which it was his task to supervise. Why he had to take along his rifles and shotguns was an open secret. The Religious Fund owned enormous tracts of forest. My father, who was on equally good terms with the abbots and the local forestry administrators, was granted free shoots in hundreds of thousands of acres of largely virgin Carpathian forest.

When I had grown up enough to have at least a rough idea of hunting, knew how to handle rifles and dogs in a sensible way and only seldom made mistakes in the peculiar esoteric idiom of venery, I was allowed to accompany him on his work at the monasteries. In those days, this meant laborious trips by railway, automobile or horse carriage, or at times by narrow-gauge forestry rail lines that penetrated deep into the remote fastness of the timberlands. Even today, those monisteries on the Moldau (in that section of the Bukovina still remaining in Romania and now a part of Moldavia) are placid islands in the barbaric hustle and bustle of our civilization. In the wind-swept, rustling spaciousness of those forests spanned by majestic skies, green clearings open up with the cloistered churches standing in the center, blazing in color and surrounded by protective walls. Not only the interior but the exterior walls of six of these are decorated with magnificent frescoes in the Byzantine style. I envied my father’s knowledge, which allowed him effortlessly to interpret the pictography of heavenly and hellish scenes, the symbolism of the images of martyrs or of the cloisters’ founders, and to decipher the Cyrillic inscriptions in Old Church Slavonic as easily as if he were reading his morning newspaper. Suddenly this ironic and lighthearted man in hunting clothes, always so ready to jest and frolic, showed the dignified gravity of the scholar. Or rather, it was not that he showed it (though he liked to show off his other skills, such as — alas! — his dilettante daubings) but that it showed itself, without any help on his part. The deep seriousness of his professional routine had the modest matter-of-factness of the former Austrian imperial functionary. It wasn’t the profession of his choice. He had wanted to study chemistry instead.