Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

It goes without saying that he was not entirely free of his old crotchets, oddities and paradoxes. Any talk with him might be diverted toward a dead end by his pedantry. All too often he would interrupt a general conversation to leave the room and return with a pile of lexica and encyclopedias, so as to ascertain a disputed word or an ambiguously defined concept, or correct a wrongly spoken name. His lack of self-criticism in the matter of his painting was disarming, but it seemed inexcusable and irksome that he also stuck to the most incomprehensible prejudices and fixed ideas. Among these were several that he himself breached in practice, especially those involving women. In his world order and following Nietzsche (and his favorite author, Péladan) in an interpretation rather more naive than philologically accurate, he classified the weaker sex as belonging to a species predestined for bondage and submission. But when actually confronting a woman, he would suddenly emerge as a compliant knight, extolling the virtues of his chosen one to the heavens. His tendency scornfully to dismiss whatever did not conform to his expectations in no way contradicted his basic inclination to faithful devotion. I was not surprised that he asked me to propose to my mother that she might return to him should the discord between her and Philip become unbearable.

She took it with a hint of a sarcastic smile around her slightly compressed lips, which at the same time drew down at the corners in bitter disdain, and there was even the beginning of a contemptuous nasal snigger, as if she understood only too well the true motive for this belated contrition: past middle age, impoverished and deserted by his “other females,” he would try to come back to her in repentance. Nothing could illustrate more clearly how deeply she had misunderstood him all her life. To be sure, he had not always been considerate of her, he had failed to behave well, scarcely mindful that he had married not a mature, experienced woman but a dream-besotted child, rigidly educated according to prevalent doctrines that she then followed meekly as a lamb, in both thought and deed. In all their life together, she had never understood that he too thirsted to be redeemed. And though he would have liked nothing better than to show her this, he would have done so with deplorable awkwardness. His lovable traits — his limpid lightheartedness and playfulness — drummed down on her as something frightening. Everything about him was a size too large for her, too impetuous. Significant for this was the moral indignation with which she complained, even decades later, that he had not understood her loathing of his physical advances. (She did not speak of this often, but at one time or another everyone she considered an intimate — an ally — learned of it.) She spoke with the tight-lipped restraint she considered appropriate to so delicate a subject, summed up in the verdict: “In a word, a man of uncontrolled animal instincts.” Had she not had to witness how her husband, his amorous approaches rebuffed by her, disappeared for hours into the darkroom with one of her cousins, whom allegedly he instructed in the art of photography? She shared the opinion of him that presumably she was accepted in Czernowitz: cold, arrogant, vain and mad, but mostly mad — an opinion that probably is held all over concerning those who tend to react to stupidity, provincialism and philistine narrowness of mind with acts of jocular rebellion à la Till Eulenspiegel.

He lost none of his bright nature. Of his dead daughter he spoke without a trace of sentimentality and with a loving cheerfulness, as if she were still alive and he were merely reporting an engaging example of her graceful charm. Once he did this quite extensively. He had come back to the Bukovina on the matter of his unlawfully premature retirement from the Religious Fund. The dispute between my mother and Philip concerning the Odaya finally had resulted in my usurping the property, so that now I considered myself the proprietor of this forsaken piece of no-man’s-land. I found it amusing to invite my father to my shooting grounds for a change, though I didn’t have much to offer: a few ducks and hares in the wetlands of the Prut. But I knew that he would be pleased to see again the house in which my sister had been born and in which she had spent her first four years more under his own loving care than that of her repeatedly absent mother. We both were aware of my sister’s ambivalence about the Odaya, oscillating between mute and bitter resentment of the essentially Eastern, only marginally European nature of the Bukovina and, on the other hand, her love, repressed into a mythic past, for the land of her childhood: the grove of firs, beeches, birches and willow trees that lay behind the manor house like an oasis in the desolate landscape. A small pond and two or three benches on its winding paths, laid out God knows when, gave it the appearance of a park, even though this pretty stand of trees soon diminished into bordering scrub, lost in the wide spaces of maize fields and the Prut River marshes. Jays, magpies, rollers and songbirds took refuge in the crowns of those trees, and from their mystery-laden dusk could be heard the crepuscular hooting of wood owls and the ringing song of nightingales; woodpeckers, their wings stretched or retracted, flitted to an fro in whirring flights and accompanied their rising or descending loops with the corresponding scales of their laughter. Hedgehogs rustled in the leafage under the brushes; frogs croaked in the reed banks around the pond, in which an old rowboat with a seat made of curlicued cast iron lay rotting. My sister, conscious of my mother’s complicated feelings about the Odaya, balked at spending time there; she preferred to dream of the lost past while reading the fairy tales of Brentano and Fouquet’s Undine . But for a child who had been taken in hand by a loving father, to whom every chirping bird and every scurrying mouse, each crocus blossom sprouting from the spring-moist soil, and each hazelnut breaking free from the heart-shaped leaves of its stem had been shown, explained and given, a child who then had had abruptly to leave all this munificent glory — the place was bound to remain in the soul as a lifelong and lovingly preserved dreamland.

On a blue-golden autumn day in the year 1937 I strolled with my father through those river marshes. We had shot a few ducks; my father, to his joy, also a late longbill. The dogs were working diligently with their tails straight up in the air when a hare abruptly jumped from the undergrowth and crossed my sight. I fired a shot after it — it was one of those shots whose success has something of the divinely ordained: the hare rolled over perfectly and lay stock-still, dead already when the next dog reached him for its recovery… and in an instant of illumination I knew: this is a final point, the full stop at the end of an era. Never again would there be for us a repetition of such a day in this country.

I took the hare from the dog, looked at my father and knew that he felt the same. He gave me a brief nod, we stopped our hunt and went home. My father continued to show signs of unrest. He declined the dinner I had ordered prepared for us and insisted on being brought back to town. During the drive, he spoke of my sister. Among the anecdotes that showed her in the ideal transfiguration into which his loving memory transposed her, the one that amused him the most was the following: It was shortly before the onset of her disease; she had started working for the International Danube River Control Commission in Galatz, whence she sent him the following telegram: “Important discovery: Teskovina [a rough Romanian brandy] with soda almost as good as whiskey!” She could have given him no better proof that she was his true daughter. But for the first time he said this as of someone dead. It was the end of an epoch. Indeed, it was the last time we were to see each other.