Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

And then again in the Bukovina, after 1919: we have disappeared for a worrisome long time, the whole house is searched until we finally reappear from somewhere, talking confused nonsense, laughing without reason, finally sinking to our knees in front of the nursery stove, tearfully begging God that He may prevent it from falling to pieces, which would cause us to freeze to death in winter. We are put to bed, our temperature is taken but we have no fever. We forthwith fall into a deep sleep from which we regain consciousness only on the following day. This time we speak with delight of some delicious fruit compote which we found in Father’s study and consumed almost to the last. It was Father’s rum pot, in which, each year, he marinated ripened fruit, berries and green nuts.

The list can be continued. But what is decisive is the fact that in all these episodes from our early time together, even in those in which I stood helpless against her delight in mocking me, I felt my sister to be a part of myself as self-evidently as my arms or my legs. There was as yet nothing that separated us. She did not take advantage of the superiority, conferred upon her by her greater age, as perfidiously as she did later on. She occasionally played tricks on me, which prompted me to complain to Cassandra or to my mother that she was bullying or “ragging” me, but this remained within the boundaries of the perfectly normal; matters were no more tumultuous between us than they usually are between siblings. In vain do I look for occurrences that would correspond to the relations between brother and sister as described by Krafft-Ebing. Patient Baron F. corporem superiorem partim nudavit et puellas trans pectus suum et collum et osradere inbit et poscit, ut transgredientes summa caleibus permerent . Nothing of that sort. She never tormented me physically. If ever she should have felt envy for my tiny penis, she was able to repress it with ease. I suspect that somehow and at some time she had had occasion to observe the difference between boys and girls and to be annoyed by it even before my own appearance in her life. In any case, I cannot remember with the best of intentions an instance when she would have tried to eliminate that difference with a knife or a pair of scissors.

Yet one thing is certain: I was not welcome to her. I had to be a thorn in her flesh. For four years she lived alone in the radiance of her father’s love, unmolested by her mother’s shifting emotional outbursts and in the stable world of the splendor and (deceptive) self-assurance of imperial Austria. Then one day I appeared on the scene — and forthwith the splendor faded away: her father vanished from life, the house that was hers alone, the garden that was her realm, the toys, the animals, the beings who looked after her suddenly came under a terrible threat; she had to leave them from one moment to the next, she went through a terrifying flight and entered surroundings that were both confined and anguishing, under the exclusive domination of a panicky, nervous mother who had eyes only for me, the newborn, who devoted all her care to me and who pushed her aside impatiently, reprimanding and punishing her both erratically and excessively. She was bound to associate all of this with my existence. In a word, she held me responsible for the First World War, and this she made me feel throughout her short life — although so subtly that the accusation may seem absurd.

Only after we returned to the Bukovina at the end of the war did her finely spun, spiderweb-like acts of malice become obvious. Circumstances may have fostered vindictiveness in her, if merely because of the festering boredom resulting from the restriction of our freedom. We lived in a state of suspension that excluded us from the world at large. House and garden, at the edge of town in a “villa district,” were adjacent to maize fields and pastures (in those days, cities were not yet girded by mangy belts of messy construction sites, small industries, auto repair shops and storage sheds; behind the last houses, open land lay directly before one’s eyes), but it was not a landscape in which we were allowed to roam freely. We were enclosed in our garden as in a cage, cordoned off as much from the town as from the fields, which did not belong to us and in our mother’s eyes were dangerously wild. We lived as on an island enclosed by the garden’s iron picket fence; beyond was the uncertain and alien world in which adventurous souls might find their way about, but certainly not we, who lacked experience.

Our social life was of like insularity. We considered ourselves members of a class of masters, although we were no longer masters of anything, taken over by another class to which we deemed ourselves superior but which, in fact, treated us as second-rate citizens because of the odium attached to an ethnic minority. We felt excluded, but on the other hand, our isolation made us feel out of the ordinary and even that we belonged to a chosen elite. The myth of lost wealth rankled in us but also made us arrogant. All our efforts were directed at not being deemed déclassé. Nothing was entirely unambiguous. Nothing was what it really was with any degree of certitude. Everything was bathed in a dubious twilight. In every way our existence was tinged with irreality — and if this irreality also possessed a highly poetic element, this was due to the queerness of our situation. Our parents were odd and off center, each in his or her own peculiar way, each in his or her own wrongheadedness, the cause and origin of which could be found in their quixotic reaction to an out-of-joint world. Their obsessions — our mother’s anxiety-whipped, guilt-ridden sense of duty and our father’s blindly passionate escape into his mania for hunting — were specific responses to circumstances that in no way fitted their upbringing, their existential concepts and expectations, even less their dispositions. We lived in the Bukovina — more radically than would have been the case elsewhere — as the flotsam of the European class struggle, which is what the two great wars really were. Our childhood was spent among slightly mad and dislocated personalities in a period that also was mad and dislocated and filled with unrest. And where unrest leads to grief and grief gives rise to lament, poetry blossoms.

Among the theories I developed concerning the possible causes of my sister’s premature death, there is one according to which the gradual loss or, more accurately, the renunciation of the poetic content in her life contributed to a psychosomatic preparation for death. I do not speak of the ordinary loss of childhood’s poetic quality, nor of the profanation that set in with the growing realization of the dwindling quality of life in our time, its loss of individuality. It is hard to describe this without being reproached for myth formation and nostalgic idealization of the past; essentially, one can’t quantify the degree by which the quality of life not only of the privileged but also of the disadvantaged has been cheapened and debased in our century. The tangible expression of this — depredation of nature, hybrid growth and chaos of cities, drowning of the world in junk, lack of orientation in Man — has been pointed out, and yet it does not address the substance and core of the loss. In 1919, when we returned to the Bukovina after our refugee years in Italy and Austria, we were terrified by the specter of Bolshevism looming right at our doorstep. What had taken place a few dozen miles from us on the other side of the Dniester River since the revolution of 1917 sounded bad enough to conjure a horrifying transformation of reality. If any of this ever was to reach us, it meant the end. Not only could we expect to be mistreated, plundered, pillaged and finally shot; we feared more the gray subsistence that would be our lot if we were allowed to survive: the immense pauper’s asylum into which so animated and varicolored a world as that of tsarist Russia had been transformed and which our own world would irrevocably turn into. Had I fallen asleep at that moment of history to reawaken now — a modern Rip Van Winkle — I would have to consider our worst fears of those days childish in comparison to the present actuality, which is grayer, more dreary, more anxiety-filled and more hopeless than we could have imagined. Withal, I would have to admit that the changes in the world only kept pace with the changes in me. Not because I might have been compelled to adapt myself but, quite the contrary, because I, as a true child of my time, carry in me, together with all my contemporaries, the quality of our time. We who live today are a species of human beings different from the one we were a mere fifty years ago; but even then we carried in us the seed of what we have become today. This truism can hardly be thought through too much.