Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

Yet this is not quite what I mean by the loss of the poetical, or rather its renunciation, which led to my sister’s death. I have to be more explicit. There are times when I spend idle moments speculating on how far one can elude the impact of worldwide changes occurring in the spirit of the time — and what price is exacted for even trying to do so. Occasionally I encounter people who, seemingly unaffected, survive from a former world and populate the present in odd incarnations, like dinosaurs; when I look a bit closer, they seem somehow hollowed out — all of them without any doubt personalities, that is to say, utterly and completely personae : masks shaped in a period-given stereotypical form. The growth of a shell around the time-resisting personality has eaten away the individual within. What remained, irrespective of the personal qualities, is a more or less anachronistic period document. I often wonder whether this was not the case with my father toward the end of his days. His apparently sovereign stand above the times seemed less a declared anachronism because he had donned the timeless mask of the huntsman. It did not cover the individuality but rather served to emphasize it. The mask was acquired by obstinate monomania, and he paid the price with alienation into loneliness.

The opposite seems the case with my mother: a typical example of a failed attempt at adaptation. The angry piety with which she endeavored all her life to “go with the times,” first in slavish observance of Victorian rules and regulations, and then in an uncritical acceptance of the shallowest modernizing reform trends and emancipation efforts, always along well-trodden paths, always only halfheartedly and yet with total self-abnegation — all this led her into an unrelievedly prosaic existence, an ever closer adherence to prevalent commonplaces and current platitudes, an ever more confining entanglement in the allegedly necessary and supposedly beneficial, and ultimately in the merely material. By the end of her life, she had erased, denied and canceled out all traces of her beginnings, so that finally nothing remained of her that could recall the era of her girlhood, neither a cogent content nor a recognizable outer shell, neither she herself nor a living document of her time.

Of my sister I know that she died early because she could not take her time into the present. It was not the brutal breakup of the idyll of her infancy that destroyed her capacity for the poetical and, together with it, her will to live. Quite the contrary: the Odaya’s house and garden, which she had had to leave in such a headlong rush at the outbreak of the First World War, in her inner self she turned into the myth of an incomparably lofty existence, truly her due, her secret distinction. Until our parents’ separation, her girlhood was spent being reprimanded by her mother and spoiled by an all too often absent father, and in the conceit of being a princess in rags. Only when a further decline in our circumstances forced her to realize what a fairy-tale delusion she had been living did she reconcile herself to the prosaics of reality. And this broke her. Even more heroic than my mother — and unfortunately also more clear-sighted and disillusioned — she too tried to adapt herself, but none of the realities that offered themselves to her could make up for what she had lost.

One can preserve the treasured moments of the past as one would a hidden jewel; or one can be dragged down by them as by a convict’s ball and chain. For sensitive natures, these alternatives are very close. If there is any resemblance between my sister and myself, it is little else than our shared innate knowledge of the essence and value of renunciation. Our spiritual development proceeded along entirely different lines. Hers was fed by books; mine thrived on dreams. She was educated more or less systematically by halfway qualified governesses; I struggled in vain to catch up, never content with what I was assigned, which seemed like crumbs fallen from the table of the rich (encouraged in this by my sister, who spitefully denigrated what little I learned as inferior dross). All the more avidly I took refuge in Cassandra’s fairy tales, peasant anecdotes and picaresque stories. My big sister bore herself with the self-assurance of a privileged birth; I was the late-born offspring of an unglamorous, restless and plebeian era. I envied her for being our father’s favorite; she despised the blind infatuation my mother showed me, suffered maternal injustices with mute pride and devalued her mother’s preference in my own eyes. She was a graceful girl, when I was a small oaf; she was a precociously exemplary young lady while I still was a lout. Only in a single matter did we feel an identical, close affinity: in the perceptive handling of unavoidable losses. We knew the fabric that fed the poetics of our life; we knew the value of those myths into which lost realities are transformed. But my sister lacked the strength to hold on to them all the way through.

One example: When I was sent to school in Kronstadt, feeling as orphaned as only a homesick nine-year-old can feel, I was granted the blessing of the friendship of an eighteen-year-old. Here too I must warn against any assumption of sexual connotations: nothing could have seemed more absurd, ridiculous and insulting to either my protector friend or me. It never even entered our minds. What happened between us was nothing more than that he treated me, quite naturally and without the slightest condescension, as someone on the same footing. We chatted in the recesses between classes in the schoolyard; we walked home together; once I went with him into town when he bought a new pair of gym shoes; once we went to the movies and together doubled over at a Fatty Arbuckle film; another time he took me to his boxing practice and once to a philosophy lecture of which I didn’t understand a word. If all this was quite natural, in no way extraordinary, I nevertheless awaited our encounters with a trepidation I rarely felt later on when expecting to meet some lady-love. He was just about to take his final exams and spoke with me of subjects he felt weak in, explaining the difficulties involved as if he were speaking to a comrade facing the same problems. No one else saw anything out of the ordinary in our companionship. When I was with him, I felt nothing of the gap that in the rigidly hierarchic world of adolescence usually separates a little squirt from someone about to enter the university. My mother came to visit me in Kronstadt; I raved about my new friend and she invited him together with me for dinner at her hotel. He behaved in exemplary fashion and left her with the best possible impression. The school year drew to a close; he passed his final exams and I returned home for vacation (more accurately, I took up my shuttling between the houses of my parents, by now separated). A few weeks later I received a postcard from him: Best regards, he was about to continue his studies in Paris, this would be his address there… My mother urged me to write without delay. “Never!” I exclaimed, “I never want to see him again.” My mother was outraged by this incomprehensible mulishness. But my sister understood and said, “He is right.” At thirteen she knew as well as I with my nine years that to preserve something valuable, one has to know how to renounce it in good time. I only wish she had stuck to her guns.

I also understood why, after our return to the Bukovina, she balked at visiting the Odaya. The old manor house on the Prut vouchsafed for her the imagined survival of those years she had spent there as a fairy-tale princess. There were times when she even pretended to be sick to avoid going; later, she simply refused — and in this found the support of her father, who also seemed to have an inkling of why she behaved this way. Anyway, it was not as if other people were wildly enthusiastic. Nothing impelled our mother to go to a place that held nothing but painful memories for her. To reach it, moreover, was complicated, since there was no rail connection, and the roads were impassable by car in winter and even more so after the melting of the snows in the muddy season, while in summer one choked in dust; by horse carriage, the fifty miles were a trip of at least two days with no accommodations for spending the night. Once at the Odaya there was no distraction, the landscape hardly invited one on walks, the park had grown wild, the farm was run sloppily and brought in hardly anything; there were quarrels with the manager and mutinous threats on the part of the field hands whose wages he stole. When my parents lived together, my father would go for some shooting in the Prut wetlands, and sometimes he took me along. I looked forward to these rare occasions with the same trepidation with which I anticipated my meetings with my friend in Kronstadt. I loved the Odaya. What drew me there was the secret concealed in the period when my sister already had been born while I had not yet arrived.