Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

He hesitated at the university between chemistry and mathematics but finally decided in favor of structural and civil engineering. What determined his choice was not so much that conforming with the career notions his father still held for him was more promising than the uncertain future of a so-called free profession: rather, he was swayed mainly by the chance to get as far away as possible from his mother, as well as from the bureaucratic environment, which struck him as stuffy and confining. The Austrian monarchy in those days stretched all the way to the southeastern corners of Europe: a colonial empire whose colonies happened to be located contiguously on the same continent. And there was room in it to realize adventurous pioneer aspirations. He joined a railway construction project in the recently acquired province of Herzegovina, which at the time seemed as remote from civilization as Karl May’s wildernesses of Kurdistan. When he had earned his first spurs in that service and after some grass had grown over his rebellious aberrations, my grandfather used some pull. Together with a new chief provincial administrator, my father was assigned to the Bukovina: the position was a sinecure.

He played excellent tennis, which led to his introduction to my mother and to their subsequent engagement. She was what is called a good catch — and not only as a tennis partner. So everything now seemed to follow a track toward orderly, normal circumstances. However, long before the First World War eradicated an era of European history and disrupted the old order, it became apparent that this no longer young gentleman hardly fitted the unsettled conditions of the times. He was an anachronism, though in an entirely different way from my mother: she had been molded entirely by an obsolete past, but he belonged to a type whose time had not yet come; to a high degree, he was the “artistic human” Nietzsche anticipated — his nonconformism, his rebellion against the bourgeois social framework, his manifold talents and minitalents, his urge for independence. But he saw himself rather as a representative of the world of the Baroque who had landed in the wrong century.

He attended to his hunting with scientific thoroughness and at the same time with an almost cultic observance of its traditions, all the age-old lore that invests the hunt with solemn poetry. He intended to train me in the medieval rigor of venery’s three disciplinary phases: “houndsgroom” to “small-game apprentice” to “stag maturity’’; unfortunately, as in all his other pedagogic endeavors, he had only moderate success. Nevertheless, our relationship changed fundamentally as soon as I was able to handle a gun. As a child, I had feared rather than loved him. When he punished in anger, he wasn’t choosy as to the means he used: the closest dog whip came in handy. He seemed much fonder of my sister than of me, but she belonged to the female category of the species and as such was the opposite of everything manly that was connected to hunting. That the divine protectress of the hunt in antiquity was a goddess, Diana (or, as he preferred to call her in humanistic pedantry, Artemis), was not a contradiction. He was fond of expatiating on this subject: Artemis was not truly a woman but a virago — a male spirit in a female body, beyond all sexuality, in a higher kind of virginity. A mortal was among her retinue of nymphs: Atalanta, forsaken child of King Oinoïs of Arcadia, a great hunter who had wanted a son and rejected his daughter. Abandoned Atalanta was nursed and nurtured by a she-bear and accepted by the goddess in her cortege of hunting companions. When she became nubile, she was compelled to leave and return to the world of mortals, cast out from divine purity back into the gloom of the sexual. It wasn’t as if my father disdained this domain of human nature; he experienced the carnal with full-blooded vitality. But he chose to believe his own daughter immune to its enticements. He would have wished her to be a virginal nymph like Atalanta who, upon her homecoming, had become the perfect hunting companion for her father. Because my sister was nothing of the sort — she showed no disposition at all for the hunt — he sought the ideal hunting buddy in me, one to whom he would pass on all he knew and loved.

From that moment on, I was no longer a child to him (he hated children). Even though I was still a boy, he considered me a small man and as such possessor of an honor that was not to be violated; he no longer punished me corporeally — the disgrace of a blow could be expiated only in blood, and he expected me to appreciate this. He castigated any carelessness in the handling of arms and the slightest misuse of hunting terms. I was not yet a dozen years old when I was no longer forgiven for errors when I confused antlers with attire or hornings; rutting with mating; singles with brushes; or when speaking of fowl, of fangs or clutches (in the case of birds of prey), of webs (of swimmer birds) or, exceptionally, of simple feet (in the case of the Tetraonidae: capercaillie, woodcock and hazel hen). In comparison to this rigidly esoteric terminology, Cassandra’s linguistic patchwork was moronic babble, and I wisely took good care not to let any of her distortions enter my speech with my father.

In anything concerning hunting, he was of unrelenting sternness. In the forest, playful jocularity was replaced by watchfulness in all senses, more concentrated than any enjoined discipline, and resulting in the most stringent control. Nor would he tolerate negligence in attire; even on the hottest summer days an open shirt-collar was taboo. The slightest complaint about heat, cold, hunger, thirst or weariness drew harsh reprimand. Thanks to him, I learned to sleep on the bare ground as in a feather bed, even when soaked by rain or, in spring during the shooting of the capercaillie and in late autumn after the stag season, when I awoke on occasion covered by snow. When I went with my mother in August to the Carinthian lakes, I was embarrassed to show my bare legs while bathing, because they were covered with stings and scabby with scratches from the swarms of mosquitoes during the buck-shooting season in late May. I had to watch greedy insects gorging themselves in my blood without being allowed to chase them off (one has to remain absolutely still when sitting in wait for game), and ever since, a mosquito bite has been of no concern to me. In winter, upon returning home from long treks in the forest, my feet would swell up the moment I took off my shoes so that they wouldn’t even fit into slippers. But when once my father caught me asleep on a clattering rack wagon, on which a peasant had given me a lift partway home, I got such a dressing down that my ears rang: this, after all, was hardly proper form for a huntsman.

His softer side showed when he thought of rewarding me. Like any boy who grows up with air rifles and BB guns as soon as he can hold them, I shot with murderous accuracy. If you showed me a fly on a wall and asked me to nail it in its place with a shot, I would not consider this a great feat. When I was allowed to go with my father shooting ducks, quails or hares, he let me sometimes try a shot with his gun. Of course, I was much too excited to be able to hit anything with his large and heavy gun, and he understood this soon enough. Among the guns at home, there was one I admired ardently. Long before, it had been his gift to my mother, who, however, never went hunting with him; it stood, new and never used, in the gun cabinet — a French gun of the Second Empire from Lebrun in Paris, Lefaucheux.24 caliber, for cartridges with pin ignition. Even then it was a rarity; today it would be a museum piece. Its light weight and elegant design, the beautifully hand-wrought hammers and the damascened barrels were sheer delight. I was overjoyed when one day my father placed it in my hands and took me along to the fields. It was then that the long-dreamed-of miracle happened: I shot a hare, dead center; it rolled in exemplary fashion and lay like a stone; our dog retrieved it in fine order. My father went to the next oak, broke off a twig and presented it to me as my reward. Ordinarily, such a twig is given only for the shooting of nobler game, such as capercaillies, bucks or stags: a pine or oak twig is dipped symbolically in the blood of the bullet hole, the maw and the vent of the felled piece and presented to the huntsman, who then sticks it into his hatband as the day’s trophy. For small game one is not given such a trophy except as a special courtesy for the first piece shot by a young hunter. I was delighted, astounded. “It isn’t just your first hare,” said my father, “but the first piece of game you shot with your own gun.’’