Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

While she was still in Vienna, I played hooky from a catchall institute for school dropouts. I skipped so many classes that I had to allege illness: appendicitis pains are symptoms easy to simulate, and these I reproduced so convincingly that the institute thought it necessary to advise my family. Our parents were in faraway Romania and the nearest available relative was my sister. She seemed so self-assured that no one dared doubt her competence in making the right decisions. She didn’t even consult me before issuing her verdict: “I give you until tomorrow morning to think it over. If then you are still sick, you will be operated on.” I would rather have had both my legs amputated than admit to her that I had been malingering. The next morning I was in the hospital and was soon caught up in the wheels of the medical process. A few hours later, I awoke from anesthesia, feeling terrible. The doctor declared that my appendix had been chronically inflamed and had been removed just in time, and though this assuaged my conscience and even gave me a certain creepy satisfaction, it also laid the foundation of my lifelong skepticism about the infallibility of medical science. Nor was my sister greatly impressed by this vindication, which was as unexpected as it was miraculous. With the terse observation that I would be bedridden for the next few days and would have no use for my pocket money, she took it from the bed table where it had been lying among the thermometer, the pill cup, my wristwatch and the bed pan, and pocketed it.

She met the “man of her life” at the Consular Academy. Tall and gangly, delicate of limb, with dark straight hair, expressive brown eyes enlarged by horn-rimmed glasses, a sensitive youthful mouth that was scarcely rendered more resolute or manly by the short-cropped moustache favored by Austrian aristocrats, he was far removed from the type I had imagined as my sister’s suitor. Even though I credited her with enough taste not to lose her heart to some Rudolph Valentino — Douglas Fairbanks combination I nevertheless had expected her to choose someone as superior to her as I thought she was to me. But this well-brought-up adolescent struck me as merely a somewhat older schoolmate of mine, and I couldn’t understand why she considered him more than that — indeed, as a man in her life. At first, he seemed just that: a colleague as ambitious and serious, as diligent and conscientious as she.

I did not see her often in those days. When we didn’t meet on holidays at Grandmother’s house on Wickenburg Street, I would find her in a small coffee shop near the Salesian church, always with her chosen one — they were cramming for their exams. I felt like an intruder, and after exchanging a few laconic trifles, I would leave them to themselves and to their work.

Only the luncheons on Sundays and holidays at Grandmother’s house brought us together in the old mutual understanding, punctuated by malicious winks. We loved my mother’s relatives, though with reservations: my sister’s unquestioning partiality for her father had automatically ranged us on his side, and we bore his name with a clearly distancing pride which, in their eyes, made us liable to the same criticism that they always leveled at him. My mother’s siblings were not so much older than we that we could accept their authority over us without demur, yet they sometimes arrogated this authority to themselves, though less so over my sister. But in doing so they failed to take into account the acute perceptiveness with which young people discern foibles, scurrilous traits and idiosyncrasies, absurd situations and comical attributes displayed by those who presume to be their educators. Our Viennese relatives now provided more than ample fuel for our uninhibited paroxysms of laughter, the explosions of mirth which were our way of resolving nervous tensions. Aunt Paula’s hopeless singing lessons, which had been going on for decades and resulted only in a monstrous development of her bosom, from which mighty breastwork her voice emerged with ever reedier thinness; the brainless fanaticism of Aunt Martha, who had dedicated herself to the cause of the radical left; the spiritualism, worn with a supernaturally knowing smile, of Her-mine, in whose presence furniture actually creaked, chandeliers tinkled and the family’s cocker spaniel would bark angrily into the empty corners of rooms; Helene’s hackneyed folk-artsy hobbies; and last but not least the awesome stupidity of our insufferably handsome Uncle Rudolf — all this sweetened our duty in attending Grandmother’s communal table. The smallest incident, charged with the accumulated comical effects of countless precedents, would trigger our mirth. Then we separated without the slightest sentimental feelings, I to return, after an afternoon of aimless roaming through a city empty of crowds, to the bleak severity of my institute, and she presumably to the little coffeehouse near the Salesian church, where her beloved Fritz awaited her over tomes of constitutional law, the trade balances of small and large nations, or comparative analyses of the diplomatic methods of Talleyrand and Metternich.

I was lonely in those last years of the 1920s and the early 1930s. My radical avoidance of scholastic discipline placed me apart from my schoolmates. I had no friend — even less a girl— with whom I could achieve a measure of contentment and self-satisfaction in a coffeehouse or wherever, in the shared pursuit of my current life tasks. I roamed the streets not merely on Sunday afternoons. These were still years of promise, after all, not only the promise of my own future, which still some day might spread butterflylike into varicolored fulfillment, but the promise of a fairer future for all mankind. Despite the threats that hung over the world, people lived with faith in the future, whether in a chiliastic or apocalyptic spirit, in a critical or fatalistically hopeful mood. Sharp-eyed pessimism and starry-eyed optimism went hand in hand — but both were looking ahead. One foresaw the horrors of a second world war in the near future — the first one had ended only a decade earlier — and could depict them vividly, but at the same time one expected the ultimate deliverance of the children of Adam from the curse of labor through the benefits of technology and the establishment of an earthly paradise thanks to socialism. A whole peacock’s fan of glowing ideologies new and old, hundreds of reform proposals, from novel footwear for the prevention of flat feet to mystically ecstatic meditations supposed to raise the quality of life — all promised a new and better world and a grander life for everyone. Utopian dreamers designed cities such as Metropolis for a future in which the submerged masses would be freed from the yoke of proletarian slavery. One shed prejudices and one’s clothes and, naked, engaged in calisthenics on mountain meadows. The uncle of one of my schoolmates in Kronstadt, son of a dentist by the name of Oberth, experimented with rocket vehicles and planned a trip to the moon, like the one that Jules Verne had anticipated half a century earlier. I was sixteen going on seventeen, and all of this filled me with a nameless anguish. But I did not live it; it was I who was being lived by it.

And I also was lived by the anguish of sexuality. This is not the place to confess when and how I lost my so-called innocence — I lost the innocence spiritually long before losing it in the disappointing physical act. To keep this innocence for any time, I would have had not to be raised in Czernowitz; it may well be that the cynical — or more accurately, incorruptible — sense of reality which is one of the boons derived from such East European schools of life, made my approach to the subject “man and woman” even more prosaic than it would have been, given my natural disposition. Nor did it require my father’s sharp aphorisms, barely lightened by humor, on related themes. From Cassandra’s earthy closeness to nature, through Mother’s shifting, flickering professions of tenderness alternating with explosions of rage and cruel punishments, all the way to my sister’s icy distancing from me, my childhood held nothing that would have promoted a gushing romanticism. Nevertheless, and as a docile son of the West, I did whatever possible — though perhaps not my best — to conform to the accepted norms. Love was a myth to which everyone clung all the more intensely the more reason there was to render it suspect. The reality was as the pop song lyrics had it: “Alas, love is but a fairy tale….” Whoever has offered me the apple of knowledge, I have chewed on it contentedly in the gratified realization that the lost paradise was nothing but a cloud-cuckoo-land peopled by mischievous goblins.