Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

Was it because of excessive perspiration due to overly heavy clothing or because of cooling off too abruptly at the onset of a rainstorm, or perhaps on account of psychosomatic reasons? In any case I contracted pneumonia in August 1917—for the second time, at so tender an age! To measure my fever, my mother put a thermometer in my mouth which I promptly crushed between my teeth. Fearful lest I swallow a splinter of glass, she scrabbled on her knees around my bed until she had recovered all the glass slivers from the cracks in the flooring of the old house. This strenuous effort — it was alleged — together with the exertion in carrying me home at the unexpected outbreak of the storm, added to her previous chronic kidney and nervous disorders, as well as her heart defect. It compelled us in later years to tiptoe through the house during many anxious hours, and it was used against us as a terrifying means of blackmail whenever our own idea of what to wear or whether to go on a sledding party in winter or a bathing excursion in summer (both in Mother’s eyes detrimental or even injurious to our health) clashed with the maternal view.

The vegetative calm with which Cassandra bore these household turbulences (to which were added, after our return to the Bukovina, marital conflicts between our parents) she managed to camouflage behind crazy parodies by which she distorted into farce any imminent tragedy. By magnifying everything grotesquely, she reduced the trifles at the bottom of most of these commotions to their true size; as my father used to say, she “pricked the soap bubbles of our family squabbles” and burst them, thereby opening our eyes to the absurdities of an unreflected life, hidebound in rigid patterns. More than anyone else, she taught us the healing power of laughter.

Today I appreciate the strength that she needed to withstand the vicissitudes of fate and that she communicated to us for the rest of our lives — a feat all the more remarkable when one remembers that war overshadowed each hour of our everyday life. The smell of blood and steel pervaded everything, even places where these had not yet had a direct impact. No one could believe any longer in the possibility of a victory by the Central Powers. Its defeats threw the discouraged into gloomy despair. It was not just an empire that broke apart: a whole world went under. And it was as if, with the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a light was extinguished that until then had bathed the days in a golden sheen. This struck not us alone: a new era had begun.

We grew up with the myth of a lost bygone world, golden and miraculous. By 1915 we were already what later hundreds of thousands of Europeans were to become: refugees, exiles, leaves tossed by the storms of history. Toward the end of the war we were forced to leave the village in Lower Austria that had been our refuge; it became even more inhospitable than it had been from the beginning. Vienna, with the dimming of its glory, had become a gray and squalid slum. My mother’s relatives who lived there recommended that we return to the Bukovina. My father, whom I saw for the first time when he returned from the war, agreed. Although the future of this former crown land was still entirely unsettled, it seemed a more promising place to live in than any of the other splinter states of the dismembered monarchy. We went home.

This too was not accomplished in unmarred serenity. In Galicia, the stretch between Lemberg (now Lvov) and the Prut River, marking the border with the Bukovina, was bordered by the simple wooden crosses crowned with the helmets of fallen soldiers. Swarms of crows dotted the gray skies. The closer we came to the Prut, the more frequently we could look through burnt-out window frames into houses through whose torn roof timbers one perceived storm-swept clouds and from the floorings of which nettles were growing. Czernowitz, on the other side of the Prut, had become restive and shabby, peopled by a wretched species of individuals, hitherto encountered only alone or, at worst, in shady twosomes or threesomes but never before in such compact exclusiveness.

We had fled the Bukovina from a house in the country my mother had never liked. It had been my sister’s birthplace. That I, too, had not been born there I owed to her panic-prone disposition. My sister’s birth had been a difficult one, and my mother did not want to face once more the risk of perhaps bleeding to death in the hands of some rural midwife, far from medical assistance. When she went into labor, she had herself driven to the city by horse carriage — a distance of some fifty miles. I was born before she reached the clinic. The experience may well have contributed to her hatred of that country house. Now, after four years of rural seclusion and with the disconcerting uncertainty of the times, it was decided to stay in Czernowitz.

But uncertainty also yawned all around our new house: it was located at the outermost edge of the city, where, beyond the villa gardens and small farm holdings, the views broadened to open country. The East was threateningly close. The great trees of the public park, adjacent to our own, were denuded. Impacts of howitzers had opened craters at the bottom of which rainwater formed murky pools. The monstrously swollen corpse of a horse lay by the roadside a hundred meters away. And yet this was to become the house of a merry, happy childhood, though all too short and filled with tensions that were alien to what is commonly understood as cozy and homelike.

Visitors may have thought it comfortable and even elegant. The furnishings that had been destroyed or plundered were soon replaced by new acquisitions. For this my mother had a deft hand. Jubilantly, my sister and I moved into the large and airy children’s rooms. But before the beginning of that span of my life, which I recall as my true childhood, threatening storms once more overshadowed our life.

Those were the days shortly before the Romanians, in 1919, occupied the Bukovina. The sinister species in rags that had begun to fill the streets of Czernowitz was a constant reminder that a few hundred kilometers to the east, just beyond the Dniester River, Russia lay waiting, where, for the past two years, the Bolsheviks made short shrift of our kind of people. The revolutionary spirit of 1917 had degenerated into bloody madness and might easily spread over to us. Gangs of plunderers drifting about had already targeted the ration warehouses of the departed Austrian army as their first objective. Besmirched with lard and plum jam, totally inebriated and with their bellies full, the howling gangs of rabble staggered past our house; they were more or less held in check during the day but became menacing at night. My romantic father provided everyone in the house with firearms. Even Cassandra was handed a pistol, which she hid comfortably between her voluminous breasts — with the safety catch off. The precautionary measures with which this pistol then had to be retrieved enriched the anecdotal treasure trove that accumulated around my remarkable nanny over the years. But for the time being there was no cause for laughter. These are clearly remembered images: we, the children, are fetched from our beds and hastily dressed; all lights are extinguished; I see Mother’s hands in the moonlight as she frantically hides her jewelry; the glitter of pistol barrels. But the danger passed us by. Within the next few days, Romanian soldiers occupied Czernowitz. Occasionally some shots were heard, and then it was announced that order had been restored.

But it was an eerily nervous order. We had no idea how the Romanians would deal with us. Our father stayed in the city all day long to find out how the situation was evolving. We children were strictly forbidden to exchange so much as a single word with any stranger. Of course, we were not to go beyond the garden under any circumstance. (Nor were we allowed to do so later on without accompaniment, and when once I did so, my punishment was draconian.) But this seclusion was difficult to maintain. Like all children of a nation at war, we were enthusiastically patriotic but at the same time ardently attracted to anything military, even in the form of an enemy. When Romanian troops marched by, I could not be restrained; I had to get to the garden fence to see it all. In so doing one day, I had failed to consider that I was holding in my hands a doll called “The German Brother’’: a childlike soldier in a field-gray uniform and with a black-white-and-red cockade decorating the German recruit’s visorless cap covering his blond locks (the very same headgear the sight of which, five years earlier, because it had been mistaken for Russian, had caused our first flight). A sergeant of the Romanian battalion filing past saw this toy and in a rage ran over to me, reached through the fence, tore the offending object from my hands and flung it, cursing, into the gutter. But he hadn’t noticed Cassandra, who, driven by the same curiosity as my own, had joined me at the fence. A wild sow whose piglet has been threatened could not have broken from the underbrush with fiercer speed: she threw herself with such uninhibited vehemence against the iron fenceposts that the sergeant, frightened, jumped back. A torrent of bawdy Romanian curses was loosed on him which, together with the weird appearance of the scolding fury, triggered a wave of derisive laughter in the troop. Had there not been this outburst of rude amusement, Cassandra’s impetuosity could have cost her dearly: without a moment’s hesitation, she grabbed a handful of earth and flung it after the retreating figure. She could have been shot on the spot.