Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

He was less perceptive in the matter of my schooling. The constantly changing governesses — in addition to Bunchy, there were five others during the four years my sister and I were at home: two misses, one of them from Gibraltar, who my father steadfastly maintained wasn’t English at all but Jewish; and three French mademoiselles, all of them, to my father’s great disappointment, rather homely and each one staying only a few months — unhappy creatures who hated and feared him and his cutting sarcasms, and all of whom he dismissed with a shrug. The nursery was my mother’s domain, into which he intruded only to take my sister off on long walks, during which he instructed her lovingly in botanic lore, or to provide her with books — boys’ books, really: Viktor von Scheffel’s Ekkehard and The Cat Hidigeigei; all of Scott, Kipling and Twain, but also Brentano, Storm and Fontane; and earlier, children’s books like Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio . He didn’t bother with books for me, apart from occasionally expressing his dismay at the fact that I was so late in learning how to read and write. After my first year at the Gymnasium in Kronstadt, he addressed me in Latin, which he spoke fluently and colloquially, and was outraged when I couldn’t answer him. “You dullard, how will you make yourself understood if you ever go to China?” he asked. “You don’t speak a word of Chinese. The only way out is to talk in Latin to a Catholic priest.’’

He followed my schooling with utmost skepticism. As a consequence of the constant struggle between his views and my mother’s, I was removed from Kronstadt and sent to the German Gymnasium in Czernowitz, from which I was expelled almost immediately as a result of some misdeed. For one happy year I was then instructed privately, shunted from one tutor to another; during this time I learned more than in my entire formal school education. It had long since been decided that I was to conclude my schooling in Austria, and at this juncture my father’s interest in me was reawakened. The Theresian Academy in Vienna he considered too elitist, infected with affectations stickily preserved in Austrian high society, the nasally drawling snobbism reminiscent of a monarchical gentry. For the Scotch Fathers, also in Vienna, he considered me too stupid. (I believe this view was strongly endorsed by my sister.) In Kalksburg, masturbation was rampant; buggery was prevalent in the Stella Matutina in Feld-kirch. Waidhofen on the Ybbs and Waidhofen on the Thaya were not quite right either. But in his assiduous correspondence with school principals, he found one who turned out to be the son of a man he admired above all others: Professor Valentinitsch, the author of the definitive work, six hundred pages long, on the partridge. Thus, I was placed finally in a kind of reform school in Fürstenfeld, in eastern Styria. My stay there was also of short duration. When, after further years of torture, I was actually graduated and obtained my high school diploma, my father wired me a single word: “Ahi!’’—an exclamation current in the Bukovina to express utter amazement.

My great passion at the time was to draw, for which I had an undeniable talent. However, he insisted that first I was to finish some academic work regardless, before devoting my time to graphics. In my various attempts to conform to this request — at the Mining Academy in Leoben, in architecture at the Technical Academy in Vienna and by short digressions into medicine and stage design — I lost those years that truly could have been fruitful for an artistic formation. And then I had to return to Romania to do military service. At that point it turned out that my Austrian high school diploma was not recognized in Romania — with good reason, in my case: I was as ignorant as a carp. So I could become an officer candidate and not have to play soldier for three years, I obtained a supplemental Romanian baccalaureate. Only then, at the age of twenty, did I finally learn something of the history of the country in which I had been born and whose citizen I was, and discover the treasures of Romanian language and literature. I did not hesitate to express my enthusiasm for all this in every way I knew, assailing my father with questions regarding the monasteries he knew so intimately. I met with a strangely cool reaction. He understood my sudden thirst for knowledge of Romania as a sign of my defection from the values of Western Europe, perhaps even as my betrayal of himself: with the newfound pride in my Phanariot forebears, I professed, in his eyes, a shift to my mother’s family and thereby also to my Romanian origin. I was strictly forbidden to show myself in Romanian uniform. When I later moved to Bucharest to work there, he wrote me off completely.

But I’m jumping ahead of my story. I still shuttled between confused stays in Vienna, filled with all kinds of other activities and pastimes rather than studies, and vacations in Czernowitz and the Carpathians that were pleasurably eventful with respect to both erotic and hunting experiences. My head was buzzing more generously with tie patterns and lecherous crushes than with useful knowledge, a fastidiously barbered, sleekly slick lounge lizard in pearl-gray chalk-striped double-breasted suits and suede shoes, blindly absorbed in the trivial doings of bars and nightclubs, in the boudoirs of demimondaines and the beds of dubious hotels. For the latter, my father showed tolerant understanding. When I then declared that I wanted to give up my studies for good, he made one last, lame attempt to persuade me to study what he himself had missed out on: chemistry. After which he gave up. It was too late to make an educated man out of me in accordance with his own standards. From then on he considered me an ignoramus, a mere consumer of illustrated periodicals, a harbinger of the barbarians who, he foresaw, would soon engulf all of Europe.

He perceived this barbaric invasion as advancing from two sides: from Bolshevik Russia as much as from an America dancing in worship around the Golden Calf. “To fashion present-day Americans from the Pilgrim Fathers, we sent them our human dregs,” he was wont to say. “Jefferson’s America was drowned in the flood of human riffraff flushed in from Ellis Island. With the conquest of the West by the immigrant rabble, the greed for possession has become epidemic. Any act of violence, any fraud, any whopping lie is all right as long as it serves the pursuit of money, success and power. And it infects us all.” These were controversial words at a time when America was regarded as the rising star of all future hopes. My mother dismissed them with a shake of the head, as she did with all his oddities.

As for the Russians, no comment was necessary. They were the murderers of the tsar’s family, butchers of the flower of their nation. The rabble of the entire world found in them not only a horrible model but a political objective, more bestial, more inimical to life and more alien to reality in its utopianism than the calamitous French Revolution. Moreover, the Russians were threateningly close. The border of Soviet Russia was only a few dozen miles to the east, on the other side of the Dniester, a stone’s throw for a motorized army. Sooner or later a little excursion to a neighboring country would be made — that he foresaw with certainty. A chain of events in his personal life made it easier for him to draw his own conclusions. The first of these and the most personal affected him grievously.

My sister had finished her studies and in the course of these— true to tradition — had found the “man of her life’’: in her case, unfortunately, quite literally the one and only. That this might be merely a harmless school flirtation can be ruled out; the young gentleman showed honorable and serious intentions, and she no less. Nothing could be said against him. He was the scion of a prominent Austrian family who would one day inherit lands in Styria and Galicia, and he had trained — like her — for the diplomatic service. They did not plan to marry right away; after graduating from the Consular Academy, he had to obtain a law degree and spend a year at an American university; his grandmother was American, a fact my father could not carp about, since she was a southerner and, in addition, wealthy. Nevertheless he behaved as if a Lebanese white-slaver were about to kidnap his daughter, and treated the presumptive suitor accordingly when he came to pay his respects and introduce himself.