Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

My sister was deeply wounded. She found it hard to accept that her beloved father could show so little perception, and she held it against me for a long time that, in his most childishly defiant manner, he dropped her forthwith and turned to me, by then a tolerable hunting companion. We spent an unpleasant summer, riven by dramatic tensions — partly in Jacobeni, my mother’s newly acquired property that was meant to be transformed into a sanatorium, and partly at the deserted Odaya. Before it was over, the second and third events occurred that were to ease greatly my father’s departure from the Bukovina.

The supreme authority of the Orthodox Church in Romania issued a decree according to which administrative officials not belonging to the church hierarchy could be retired after thirty-five years of service instead of the customary forty. My father claimed that this totally arbitrary decree had been promulgated only to get rid of him, but he was not the only person whom the Church had taken over from the former Austrian civil service. He may not have been wholly wrong, however, in believing he was the main target of the decision to cleanse the Religious Fund of all foreign elements. Greater Romania, the product of the 1919 Treaty of Trianon, was at the peak of its vainglory and did not like to acknowledge that, together with its minorities, it had been bequeathed their cultural heritage. My father never let an opportunity pass to proclaim this loudly, and on one of these occasions he had precipitated a nasty dispute with Professor Jorga, pope of all Romanian historians, an effrontery equivalent to lèse majesté and defilement of the national flag.

Be that as it may, he could only welcome the premature termination of his service, since he could now indulge his passion for hunting without restraint. Unfortunately, there was a snag: the “frocked vultures” argued that he had been in their service for merely eleven years, namely from 1919 to 1930, and that he was entitled to a pension for that period only. Pension for the remaining twenty-four years, from 1895 to 1919, he kindly should collect from the Austrians. This was clearly contrary to the provisions set forth in the state treaty regulating the takeover of former Austrian civil servants. But even if the Romanian government had agreed to pay him for that time, it would have meant a severe curtailing of his benefits: eleven years in the service of the church and twenty-four years in that of the state did not equal a full pension for thirty-five years of service, especially if these thirty-five years were to be counted for the customary forty. My father was ready to submit his case forthwith to the courts, where undoubtedly he would have prevailed if he had had the support of similarly affected colleagues. But of these, none was ready to make a move: they were all of shorter service and his juniors in rank, and trusted in some future compromise.

While negotiations in this matter were pending, he was the victim of an additional misfortune. For years he had undertaken to collect and transfer the retirement benefits of colleagues who had been pensioned earlier and who had returned to Austria. By giving him power of attorney for these transactions, they saved themselves the time and the bother of coming back from God knows where to collect their monies. While at the bank collecting this large sum of money, the yearly remunerations of several high-ranking colleagues, he placed the entirety in a billfold next to him on the counter of the bank window and filled in the forms for the transactions; when he was finished, the billfold was gone. He had to make up the money from his own pocket. He always had lived well above his means and was heavily in the red at the bank. The bank proceeded as banks are apt to do: it granted him the credit and in return took everything he still had. The beautiful dream of living henceforth in the woods and only for hunting dissolved.

He was not the sort to lament such strokes of fate. His mood was in a minor key only when he spoke of his diminishing chances for hunting because of the “damn continuous and forever growing depredation of God’s nature by the ever greedier and more numerous human herd.” What then remained for a huntsman but to withdraw to the depths of the woods, where they were still relatively untouched, where one’s last shot and the dog’s barking in sorrow for a dead master would be lost in pristine remoteness…? But he would wait a while longer before taking this step. For the time being, thanks be to God, the Carpathians were still rich enough in trees and game to make the heart of any true huntsman leap with joy at the mere thought of it. Even as he saw his dreams in the Bukovina evaporate into thin air, he began to realize their fulfillment by other means elsewhere. The virgin woods were his only true home and hunting was now his only profession. Count Mikes of Zabola, who owned immense tracts of forests in Transylvania, was looking for a manager to organize high-priced shoots for foreign hunters. My father applied for the position and was accepted.

There, in Zabola, in 1932, he received the news of the death of my sister. He, who was in no way superstitious, reported a strange occurrence in this connection. He had spent the night in the forest under the skies and had been awakened by a something that most tenderly stroked his cheek. He had not doubted for a moment that it had been a message from his dying daughter, even though he tried to explain it away by the touch of a moth: but could there be a moth in early March in mountain woods? a bat? the wing of a wood owl? Whatever: he knew my sister had died, and went down to the village to collect the telegram with the news of her death. Countess Hanna Mikes later told me that he sat motionless on a bench in front of the castle, holding the telegram in his hands, while the tears ran down his cheeks. Then he got up and returned to the woods.

His stay in Zabola was short. He had a falling-out with the count, who wanted to sell shoots of stags that my father considered not sufficiently reconnoitered, let alone securely positioned. They separated in anger. My disputatious father immediately wrote an article, triumphantly printed in a German hunting periodical, in which he warned against misleading promotions of capital game shoots in Romania. The matter was brought before a kind of court of honor of the hunters’ collectives in Romania. Its decision overwhelmingly found in favor of my father on all points, praised the manly courage with which he had uncovered a disgraceful blotch on the national honor and committed it to extirpation. He was presented with a ceremonial hunting knife, which he put away in a corner of his gun cabinet with the comment: “Those arseholes would like nothing better than to stick it in my back.’’

He moved to Hermannstadt (now Sibiu), in the heart of Transylvania. Never for a moment did he grieve for the house of my childhood on the outskirts of Czernowitz. From it he took with him only his guns, his painting gear and his spaniel, Trixy. Even easier to him came his leave-taking from the “Jew city” and the fake “black-red-and-gold Bukoviniensers,” the “frocked vultures” and “Russnyaks and Polacks.” He loved the Saxonians of Transylvania, who for eight hundred years, as he conceived it, in defiance of the wrongs inflicted on them throughout the history of Eastern Europe, wedged in between Hungarians, Romanians, Turks, Wallachians and Poles, had nevertheless managed to preserve a German heritage to his own liking: pre-Bismarck, even pre — Frederick the Great, also pre — Maria Theresa and, in fact, anti-Austrian. He capped the Wartburg pathos of his youthful Sturm und Drang period with this Meistersinger version of the idea of the Reich. That it wasn’t so very different from the Bukoviniensers’ “phony black-red-and-gold Germanistic to-do,” which he despised, need hardly be stressed. But he believed that the evidence supported his assertion that the Germanophilic attitudinizing of the Bukovina Swabians was nothing but presumptuous affectation: they deformed spoken German when they opened their mouths — in truth, it was an ugly dialect — and, generally, got along well with Jews.