Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

Such wrongheadedness in an otherwise intelligent and highly educated person of superior character is less surprising when one remembers the spiritual situation of the period. In those days, the nebulous romanticism that conjured a mystic aura around the idea of a Greater German Reich was an infection spreading like an epidemic among German-speakers in Central Europe, a disease to which not even the Transylvanian Saxonians were immune, even though they were absolutely sure of their unequivocally defined identity. They were first of all Transylvanians, German in origin and language but completely independent and themselves almost aboriginal to the region: deeply rooted in a country they had inhabited for almost a thousand years, with a self-assured culture they had created themselves (and, incidentally, a culture that conferred much of value to the people between whom they lived, the Hungarians and the Romanians). They were connected to the German world of their origin, but no more emotionally tied to it than, for instance, the German Swiss. But when they forgot all this to follow the mythic call to greater national unity trumpeted in its most depraved form, that of the Third Reich, they lost everything: their country, their culture and their identity.

There was, however, quite some time left before reaching that point, though it was only half a decade — time appears short only in retrospect. My father blossomed in Transylvania. The world of the Saxonians seemed to give reliable support for all his psychic needs. Here he no longer had to play the thankless and tiresome role of the leftover colonial master. Though Romanians were Transylvania’s sovereigns, in this region they comported themselves with discretion. The problems of living together and of getting along had been fought over and settled long before. Hermannstadt, a thoroughly German city, prettily centered around its cathedral, was a world apart from Czernowitz, a “town of the steppes” and devoid of tradition. The burghers’ houses were strung together along streets and perspectives of venerable dignity. The gables left over from the late German Renaissance evoked, indeed, an atmosphere reminiscent of the Meistersingers; the baroque and classical façades were of old Austrian vintage. The Saxonians themselves were a solid, upright sort of people, and their broad dialect resembled that of the Baltic with which my father felt affinities. In like manner he was fond of Hungarians; having served in a regiment of Hussars, he spoke Hungarian better than Romanian. The countryside was magnificent, large forests were close by, and the trophies of the bucks were several degrees better than elsewhere. What more could he ask for?

It never entered his mind to think of himself as impoverished. Curiously enough, his painting earned him some rather substantial pocket money, though the pictures no longer consisted exclusively of mate-calling capercaillies and bellowing stags. He produced pleasing watercolors of the churches, which he knew better than anyone else: his impressions of Voroneţ, Dragomirna, Suceviţa and all the others found buyers in friends with a taste for folkloristically accented art. In fact, a series of these paintings of monasteries, done for the Bishop of Hotin, is now shown with great pride in the Museum of Arts and Crafts in today’s Chernovtsy. And he did have friends. He no longer scorned contact with the locals as he had in the Bukovina. A friend of old was the Saxonian bishop Dr. Viktor Glondys. Another was the royal Romanian hunt marshal of that time, Colonel von Spiess, a Ganghofer type in folksy flowing pelerine, eagle wings adorning his Lettow-Vorbeck hat, and an open Schiller collar worn with a jacket that, thanks to an abundance of stag horn and oak leaves, combined the glamour of a marshal’s uniform with the woodsiness of a forestry apprentice’s jacket, and that, in its modishness, might have incited the envy of Emperor William II or Hermann Göring. Colonel von Spiess had a bevy of charming daughters, with whom my father surrounded himself as with a garland of flowers. These beloved friends stood as assurance that he could feel welcome in his new surroundings.

He lived modestly in a small house with a housekeeper, Mrs. Agnete, who — as was to become apparent later — knew how to feather her own nest. There wasn’t much to be had. Occasional remaining artifacts of his once expensive life-style showed his insistence on quality even in reduced circumstances. He had always lived rather abstemiously: he liked good wine but drank only moderately, and smoked each day four or five cigarettes which he rolled himself. One pocket in each of his jackets was lined in doeskin: in it he kept long-fibered blond Macedonian tobacco and some very thin cigarette paper. I never overcame my envious impatience as I watched him lower one hand into that pocket, listening almost pensively to its hidden manipulations, and come up a few moments later with a perfectly rolled cigarette, the paper of which he merely had to moisten with the tip of his tongue to close it before lighting up. My efforts to emulate this sleight of hand led only to a disgusting mixture of crumpled paper and tobacco crumbs that could not be brushed from the pocket seams. When I asked him how on earth he managed to accomplish it, I got as answer, with the same astonished shaking of his head that my and others’ inadequacies elicited from him: “How else can you do it when you’re on horseback holding the reins in one hand and have only one hand free?” It was left to me to ponder whether some Catholic priest in China might give me a more illuminating explanation in Latin. His hands, incidentally, were like rough paws, coarse and red from sunburn and frostbite, but his nails were regularly cared for by a very pretty manicurist.

Whether it was because he relished the idyllic and easygoing yet by no means narrow-minded town of Hermannstadt, or because his mellowing sunset years mitigated his harsher traits, he seemed to me more amiable and relaxed and less aggressively eccentric. His figure soon became an integral part of the town-scape of Hermannstadt, for he was set in his habits and these led him, day after day, through the same streets — he called them his “runs’’: easily recognized from afar by his height, his rural clothing and his old hunting hat, he walked with deliberate steps, his feet pointing slightly outward (a dandy’s affectation from the turn of the century, which one can see in the caricatures of Caran d’Ache) in his mirror-polished, rakishly narrow custom-made shoes, one of the expensive relics from better days, his black-and-white cocker spaniel, Trixy, following at his heels like a shadow. That he now wore a short-trimmed ice-gray beard did not diminish the hardy freshness of his cheeks. His blue eyes flashed above cheekbones that a fine web of small red veins transformed into rubicund apples. Whenever he lifted his hat in greeting — which he always did with an ironically wide flourish — his shining head would appear like a dark ivory billiard ball. He always looked as if he had just emerged from his bath, the blood circulation still invigorated by the ice-cold shower, scrubbed dry with rough towels, and the skin freshened by sharp lotions. His fragrance was not ostentatious but unmistakably individual: a highly masculine, acidulous scent, composed of good soap, leather and fresh linen from a closet in which he also kept heron feathers, an ermine skin, a little box with medications (some of them highly poisonous) and pistols emitting a faint whiff of gun oil and gunpowder. He no longer practiced pistol shooting in the first light of dawn; his present dwelling was too confined for that. But it was now his pleasure to let a visitor select a green nut on a tree in a neighboring garden that he then would shoot off its stalk with unfailing accuracy.