Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

The days I spent hunting with my father are among the truly happy days of my life — and there haven’t been that many. I remember images and episodes of incomparable splendor, brimming with life, in which the beauty of the Carpathian landscape contributed as much as the colorful population. I was allowed to go with my father on his visits to the monasteries, in the surrounds of which we would then hunt together. I preserve in my memory a whole sequence of images — but they are of which of these jewels: Putna, Dragomirna, Suceviţa, Voroneţ…? We are guests of the abbot; with paternal kindliness the prior shows me fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts in bindings of chased silver; sunlight falls through the high windows, in broad stripes alive with dancing motes of dust, into the semidarkness of the library, and outside, jays are heard quarreling in the pines; my longing thoughts wander to the glories of the autumnal forest beyond the church walls blazing in picture-book colors. I am proud of my father, whose talk with the abbot gives proof of his profound and esoteric knowledge. With envy and sorrow I realize that I shall never get so far in any branch of science. Later we are joined by a half-crazed monk who seems to know more about game than the gamekeeper whom the forestry administration has assigned as our escort. We enter the forest. The monk, in his black cassock and his stovepipe hat on shaggy hair, knows that he is not quite right in the head, but he is a genius at tailoring priestly attires and vestments and is sent all over, to archimandrites and metropolitans, to clothe the princes of the Church. He chatters on as we walk, much to the annoyance of my father, who prefers to observe silence in the woods. Suddenly the monk stops in his tracks as if nailed to the spot: in the fork of the branches of a rust-red beech tree a golden shimmer appears, only to vanish in an instant. For a split second we are granted the sight of one of the forest’s most elusive dwellers: a lynx in the wild is very rare. An enigmatic simpleton’s smile plays around the monk’s mouth. Within minutes, he lures a buck into our sights by tweeting on a leaf of grass spanned between his thumbs. Then he resumes his chatter: he spends most of his time in the woods when he doesn’t happen to be busy making a new robe for one of the high priests. I ask him whether he doesn’t have a sister: he might be Cassandra’s brother.

The hunting rights that went with Father’s (professionally legitimate) assignments extended all over the Bukovina and deep into Moldavia; my father took them as his self-evident due and privilege. This gave me a feeling of unrestricted freedom: wherever we went, we were honored guests. But I was at home truly only in that part of the Bukovina which he had deliberately selected, with thorough knowledge of the local topography, as his very own, right in the heart of the Bukovinan Carpathians, between such world-remote hamlets as Cîrlibaba and Rusmoldavita, twenty miles west of the Bargău Pass. Long before I was born, my father built there for himself a hunting lodge made of wood that over the years turned silky gray. It stood in a clearing that sloped down to the swift flow of an ice-cold mountain brook. In the deep water-holes downstream from its innumerable cascades, the trout hung perfectly still; only the gentle fanning of their gills betrayed that they were alive. Otters fashioned their slide chutes in embankments overhung by dense bushes. With the exception of two or three huts of some Huzules who grazed their sheep on the mountain slopes, no human habitation was within miles. The village of Cîrlibaba was an hour away on horseback. The woods all around had hardly ever been touched by human hand and only rarely were visited by some stray shepherd or by a Huzule poacher. To spot and scout stags, we sometimes lived for weeks in the open.

One might have believed that in these circumstances my father would be just as happy as I. Yet a shadow of melancholy often darkened the grave serenity of his comportment while hunting. He saw that such idyllically primeval conditions would soon be over. One day he told me: “Remember this day. It will soon be impossible to spot within the span of a few hours a pair of ravens, two imperial eagles, a golden eagle and a peregrine falcon.” He was right. Nor was I ever again granted the pleasure of luring hazel hens all the way to my feet, though we frequently did this right behind the lodge whenever we fancied them for our cooking; or of lying in an old cutting, looking up to the starlit sky through the flying sparks of a short-lived campfire, while the bellows of stags could be heard echoing back from the surrounding hills. On such a night beside a campfire — I was not quite seventeen, and proud as a peacock because I had spotted the herd with the bull stag that had been more elusive in the grease than any other, far and wide — as we sat in silence and listened in the night, I suddenly felt my father’s hand pressing something into my own. It was his seal ring, which four generations had worn before him.

A similar recognition came my way only once again, many years later, and not from him. I was with friends in Transylvania in order to study the rugs that the Turks, on the occasion of their generally bloodless capture of the localities, had presented to the peace-loving town elders — rugs now kept in the fortress churches of the small market towns; you can see the dedicatory inscriptions on their so-called appendages (the unknotted endpieces of the underlying fabric). It was spring, at the time of the cherry blossoms. We had stopped at a little town with miniature gabled houses, and all around the snowy globes of cherry trees crowded up the slopes of the hill on the crest of which stood the fortified church. The surrounding fields shone with newly sprouting green, and pale foliage shimmered on the black-and-white-flecked birches. The baroque convolutions of a huge white cloud stood motionless in a sky of immaculate blue. We sat on the market square in an old pub — we should have been wearing wigs and buckled shoes in such a place — and drank the sweet heavy wine of the region; our mood became cheerful and animated, as the innkeeper proudly brought us ever more select vintages from his cellar. In a corner of the room sat an old Romanian cioban —a mountain shepherd — who watched our doings with a benign smile. He wore traditional garb — the garb of the old Dacians as it can be seen on the Trajan Column in Rome: a roughly woven linen shirt over close-fitting cotton trousers, girded by a red sash; a sleeveless sheepskin jacket, heavily embroidered in many colors; and high-laced buskins. On his hair, falling to his shoulders in straggly silver-gray strands, towered the cioban’s high black lambskin bonnet. His stubbly face shone with guileless sympathy. We invited him to join us for a glass. He accepted. Upon hearing that we had come from Bucharest, the capital, he nodded in acknowledgment, but then pointed at me and said, “But you, you’re from the woods. I can tell. You’re dressed like someone from the city, but that doesn’t deceive me. You grew up in the woods.” We all laughed and my friends said they had always known I had come straight down from the trees. But from him, the recognition had been like a patent of nobility. I bowed, grateful and proud, and thought that my father would have been pleased to hear it.

I know — I always knew, intuitively — what the woods meant to my father. He who seeks solitude is a solitary. And he was a solitary to the point of melancholia. Only his defiant contrariness, the innate rebellion in his nature, the stubborn persistence in any decisions or judgments once formulated forbade him to yield to spleen and, at the same time, lent him his air of eternal boyishness. Yet they mutually generated each other: defiance was born of melancholia and melancholia of defiance. At times it seemed incomprehensible that someone of such clearheaded intelligence could be so set in absurd prejudices and outlandish fixed ideas. His view of the world was that of a medieval woodcut. Humanity was divided into those to be taken at full value (huntsmen) and those he called perioecians: the multitude who lived marginally, a motley agglomeration from which he sometimes would pick the odd, queer specimen worthy of passing interest — apothecaries, for instance, because they knew how to mix poisons. He respected conventional painters such as Rudolf von Alt or the portraitist Ferdinand von Raissky and of course painters of animals (all presumed to be hunters) such as Ernst von Dombrowski, in addition to Rubens (because of all that alluring female flesh). He detested music, notwithstanding his zestful morning vocalizing — with the exception of Richard Wagner, ideologue of the Greater Germany movement. All this was proof of a disarming mediocrity in matters of taste. But his lack of cultural sophistication was compensated by a decisiveness in choice that was the mark of both his intelligence and his obsessions. Anything connected with the military was distasteful to him ever since he had lost his commission as reserve lieutenant. Though he rose to the rank of cavalry captain in the First World War, anything to do with soldiering was repugnant to him. Socially unacceptable were all those in trade, and totally despicable was anyone dealing in money.