Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

Thus we came to the summer of 1930. My sister was graduated with flying colors from the Consular Academy, well versed in political and economic sciences and constitutional law, with a diploma as an interpreter in English, French and Italian; she was closely followed in achievement by her classmate Fritz, whom she now intended to show off to our parents in the Bukovina as her future husband. I have reported earlier on the unhappy outcome of that meeting with my father. My mother showed herself of greater understanding. All of us proceeded to Jacobeni, the site of my mother’s putative sanatorium, to enjoy the benefits of the piney scents and the sulphur mud baths. No clients had arrived as yet. In the hope that they might, a medical director and partner in the enterprise, Dr. Z., together with his wife, and an estate manager, Mr. von L., a decrepit gentleman who was almost blind, and blessed, moreover, with a scrofulous son who was supposed to serve as bookkeeper (both soon left the venture, presumably without ever having been paid), meanwhile took up residence and lived on credit. We — my sister, Fritz and I — were lodged in a peasant house, which Mother had fixed up and furnished on the model of that folkloric gingerbread cottage where she had spent the interim period before her second marriage. I still can see my sister standing in front of it, amidst the luxuriant greenery of mountain meadows, her arms full of cornflowers, birdgrass and daisies, happily smiling up at Fritz; he wears a gentle, solemn and somewhat owlish look and is clad in leather shorts and white half-stockings, foolhardily exposing his spindly aristocratic legs to the potential bites of vipers, which happened to be plentiful in the region. Together they are — as the saying goes — but one soul and mind. I am totally left out.

That, shortly before, my school in Vienna had granted me a diploma, I owed solely to my inspired idea of declaring that I would study at the Mining Academy in Leoben, in Styria. This venerable institution, housed in a building that my grandfather had designed, was about to be closed for lack of students, so that even such scholastically deficient pupils as myself were encouraged to matriculate there. To demonstrate how serious I was, I decided to undergo some practical training in mining. I didn’t have to look far for such an opportunity, as Jacobeni is (or rather, was, since Comrade Ceaşescu has since seen to it that Romania is cleansed of most minorities) a settlement of German miners from the Zips region. Not far from it, an ancient manganese-ore mine was still in operation, and it did not prove difficult to place me there as a volunteer.

In this heartland of the Bukovinian Carpathians I was destined to feel my Germanic sympathies reach their apogee. The woods I crossed each morning, climbing to the mine entrance long before sunrise, epitomized the dark coniferous forests described by Stifter, with morning winds rushing through the fir trees under turquoise skies breaking in sharp suddenness from the darkness of the night; it was Caspar David Friedrich’s spruce forest, its mad lighting clouded in white fog, its stillness pregnant with the purling of hidden sources and the silence gently scanned by the falling of dew. The blood drops of wild strawberries shimmered among the rich greenery of their earth-hugging leaves, the moldy and mushroom-scented thickets half concealing an entrance to the gruesome stronghold of Siegfried’s dragon; at any moment the scaly monster might emerge, snorting fire, clawed fangs raised in awesome threat, exposing its yellow-ringed belly as it writhed over mounds of whitened bones and staring death’s-heads, of fallen knights’ swords and broken lances, of the treacherously murdered eremite’s cowl and cross.

I believe I now know what prompted me so eerily to Germanize that arch-Romanian forest in the Carpathians where I felt more at home than anywhere else in the world: it was the carefully barbered, smooth-haired adolescent in Styrian summer garb, down in the valley, who sought to abduct my sister and take her with him back to his country, our own parents’ land of origin, home to the mythical, mystic fairy-tale Holy Roman Empire of German Nations (or the sorry shambles of its remains); and it was the careless lightheartedness with which my sister bade farewell to our own Romanian homeland (which she probably had already repudiated when she lost the house of her childhood) to become once again the daughter of the Occidental world toward which our father had always steered us. I had to admit I was jealous. Not merely of the gently arrogant wearer of hornrimmed glasses and leather shorts, under the codpiece of which garment successive generations already lay in wait, who would bear another name and would split my sister forever from our clan. I was also jealous of the advance she had once again gained over me: the legitimacy of an Austrian affiliation to which I too aspired, even though I knew my true roots were right here in this country which, notwithstanding its variegated historical fortunes and constantly changing national flags, official languages and custom tariffs, had imprinted on the medley of races that lived on its soil an unmistakable, undeniable stamp. Despite which it pleased the rulers of that country at the time to consider me an alien interloper, while for my Austrian schoolmates I was but a Balkanic gypsy from the remotest southeastern backwoods. The untainted Germanness extolled by Hauff and Schnorr von Carolsfeld was denied me forever.

I strove down to the Mothers. When I descended into the mine pit, it was as if I penetrated deep into the womb of the earth that had borne me. Cassandra’s nourishing maternal milk aside, only one-eighth of my blood had its origin in this earth. And yet it was my own soil, and the bond with it was stronger than the Wagnerian sounds that my father had implanted in me, stronger than the All-German aggressiveness with which every schoolchild was inoculated by the politically assiduous German Scholastic Association, stronger too than the German Romantics’ seductive world of fairy tales and legends, which were no match for the mystic appeal of Cassandra’s earthy sagas. The mine in which I lent a hand here and there was old and dilapidated, a labyrinth of shafts and drifts, where manganese ore was still being mined in only a few adits. Most of the old faces were decayed and had been abandoned. Here too I roamed and ventured to descend to dangerous depths, into precipitous shafts and tunnels that long ago had become insecure through random pillaging. My miner’s lamp darted spookily over a subterranean forest of posts and cappers sunk centuries before, barely able to withstand the mass of ceiling weighing on them, over walls hung with old men’s beards of arctically bleached lichen, glittering with moisture dripping from above, apocalyptically snowy and pointing downward to fathomless abysses as in a delirious vision of Edgar Allan Poe. The smell of the rock intermingled with that of the carbide fueling my lamp, a clammy smell of mineral ore pervaded by the sinterings from sulphurous veins in the rock. These could have been the antechambers of King Laurin’s ruby-shimmering empire of dwarfs or the bottom of the dream lake, the Mummel Lake, to which Simplicius Simplicissimus descended. In my innermost self I felt the arch-German poetics, the deep mythical truth that all of this encompassed. Yet it was also my direct and immediate existence into which I penetrated here, my true homeland, irrespective of the language and the emotional world, the circle of myths and legends and fairy tales I had been raised in. I felt so closely linked to this earth that I thought of my sister, now happily ready to desert all of this, as a renegade, even worse, as a traitor.

For she too was a daughter of our mother — even though she seemed so exclusively her father’s daughter that no one would have thought of counting her with the distaff side of the family. Among us blue-eyed family members, she was distinguished by the greenness of her iris — a lightish green which, strangely enough, was also to be found in all her dogs (all of whom too, except Troll, her childhood playmate, died young). Irish eyes, it was said, from my mother’s side; or Turkish bird-of-prey eyes from the Phanariots who had come to Romania from the Sublime Porte, though it was also maintained that in that green the dark eyes of my father’s Italian ancestors mingled with the blue Irish ones. Who can say what Normans or Spanish Goths in remote times, in far-off Sicily, haunted the coloring of the autochthons’ eyes? In any case, the olive smoothness of my sister’s skin seemed to have had its origins there, though it was of almost translucent delicacy and without the leathery full-bloodedness of the Mediterraneans. Anyhow, the resemblance of her character to our maternal grandmother, her cool sobriety and — someone finally had the courage to call it by its true name — selfishness I noticed only after her death.