Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

In a word, she was much more of the stamp of my mother’s family than I and therefore had her roots in the East as much as I. Nevertheless, she now strove “homeward’’—or more accurately, she willingly let herself be repatriated to the truly Germanic world. Not merely willingly but with a sigh of relief, as of one being liberated. I know that my emotions then were bred of wild imaginings — or perhaps inversely: my speculations were the monstrous offspring of tumultuous and highly ambivalent emotions. But today it seems to me that it was no mere chance that just at the onset of the calamitous Third Reich, the union of my sister — herself of old Austrian origin — with a legitimate Austrian suitor triggered my search for our genotypical heritages, their links in blood and soil, and their relations to mystic ideas of a unified nation. We did not live our own lives. Our lives were being lived by our period.

Thus the summer of 1931 went by. Fritz went home to Styria and from there to the United States to complete his law studies. It was accepted that thereafter he would marry my sister. Meanwhile, she had gotten her job as secretary for the Danube Commission and had moved to Galatz. I enrolled at the Mining Academy in Leoben. My father was holed up in the woods. It was paradoxical: he who always had preached to us about the “return to the West” and our affiliations with Germany’s cultural world, he who never tired of deploring his exile to the Bukovina and the thanklessness of serving as “cultural fertilizer in the Balkans,” now balked violently and resentfully at his daughter’s projected repatriation to Austria and attributed absurd motivations to it so as to hide his jealousy. The break between him and my sister was accomplished. It would have been irreparable had she not become fatally ill.

I revert stubbornly to the psychosomatic origins of her illness (even if, in truth, these are presumed by no one but myself): what happened after those summer days in Jacobeni was so grotesque as to border on the farcical — and more than once served as an occasion for one of our convulsive explosions of laughter; but the point is that it destroyed once and for all the fragile texture remaining of what we still then called our family. I am speaking of the so-called sanatorium in Jacobeni, which had its origin in one of our mother’s unfortunate bursts of entrepreneurial activity. It began with a friendship between our father and a certain Dr. Z., a physician who had his practice in Cîrlibaba, a dump of a place in the deepest Carpathian woods; he was the only doctor for hundreds of miles around. The Huzules — a Ruthenian-speaking tribe said to be the direct descendants of the Dacians, since whose times they barely had been touched by the hand of progress — hesitated for years before entrusting to him their bone fractures, wolf bites, the eelworm nests in their lungs and their syphilis-eroded noses, instead resorting to their own herb-brewing witches; but ultimately they came to him, since he was covered by the state health insurance plan, and they did not have to pay him anything besides occasional voluntary contributions in the form of cheese, wild berries, or trout and grouse hens from their poachings.

Cîrlibaba was an enchanted place. It might have been created by Chagall or by a stage designer for a spaghetti western: in a green mountain hollow stood a handful of wooden huts and a minuscule timbered church roofed with wood shingles, a sawmill and three wood-framed Jewish stores in which could be bought whatever was needed in these remote backwoods — whips, axes, saws, hemp ropes, leather goods, multicolored kerchiefs, cart shafts and salt herring. The center of the hamlet was not the church but the log-framed kerchma , the village pub, where the men of the hamlet and, occasionally, some shepherds who had climbed down from their mountain slopes would get drunk. The wondrously luminous mountain air was saturated with the scent of freshly felled wood. A hundred feet below, in the valley, the ice-cold, lime-green waters of the Bistriţa River, rushing over white rocks, were dammed up by a wooden weir which, once enough logs had accumulated, was opened up to let the then wildly raging torrent carry the timber to the lowlands. Legs that from time to time were squashed by the playfully jumping and rolling logs were treated by Dr. Z.

He was a man of glittering abilities, small and wiry, full of beans yet somewhat abstracted, brightly alert though appearing mentally absent, highly intelligent and surprisingly well-read and informed about everything. Together with his wife, Wanda, he lived a few hundred feet from the hamlet in a spacious wooden house, a haven for a multitude of much loved and spoiled pets: hens, geese, dogs, cats, a couple of otters in the garden pool, sheep and cows and some Huzule ponies, tame as lambs. The dark forest rose behind some fat grassy meadows, where capercaillies could be heard calling in spring; the roaring of stags resounded in autumn; and wolves howled in winter, when the pines towered like giant icicles from the deep snow all around.

Yet Dr. Z. was not content with this idyllic retreat, redolent with the scents of hay and resin. Each year he closed his practice when the snows melted and, together with his wife, traveled from March to May in the capitals of the West: Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London, and home again by way of Madrid and Rome. Money was no object, for he made more than enough and had no other way of spending it. He returned covered with the pollen dust of Occidental culture and once again labored for ten months as a country doctor in Cîrlibaba. From time to time I was given a chance to nibble at this cultural honey. It was in his house that I delighted for the first time, as if hypnotized, in art magazine reproductions of the paintings of Mondrian and Modigliani, of Braque, Picasso and the Italian Futurists, and discovered, through an osmotic absorption of the style of the era, a harmonious concordance between the violence and sarcasm of Majakovsky’s posters and the pioneering visions of Kupka. In the issues of Studio and Gazette du bon ton , available in my parents’ houses, such things could not as yet be found.

My sister had not been in the Carpathians since her childhood — surprisingly, it seems to me in retrospect. It may be that my father considered life in the woods too rough for a girl, let alone a young lady. It may also be that he didn’t want her near, when her dislike for hunting was obvious and ever present. I, on the other hand, was a frequent guest at Dr. Z.’s house. When my father went hunting, he never missed calling on him, not only because of his pleasure in the company of the doctor’s attractive wife, but also because he enjoyed talking with Dr. Z. about all kinds of topics. In particular, they liked to discuss poisons, a subject stimulated by my father’s early love for chemistry (and alchemy), and in which Dr. Z. showed an astonishingly thorough knowledge. This shop talk always ended with the hypothetical quest for the perfect murder by a poison that could not be detected. I remember well one of these conversations. A fire burned in the chimney, the two men sat over glasses of wine while the doctor’s wife and I were busy with a large basket of huckle-berries, picking out unripe ones, when the talk turned to the question of whether it was possible to detect the presence of potassium cyanide in a corpse. The closeness to our hosts lulled us into a feeling of comfortable well-being, a belief in the immutability of this well-appointed and lavishly run house and in the contented happiness of its owners. But Dr. Z. surprisingly complained of the schizophrenic nature of their life, split between Cirlibaba and the great hotels of Europe. They had to come to a decision, he said. He wanted to change his life. But to do so he needed more money than he could make in a year and waste in three months. He had a plan, thought out in all details, as simple as it was foolproof. The valley of the Bistriţa River was rich in healthful springs, primarily sulphurous ones. He, Dr. Z. — and he alone — knew also of one that contained arsenic: it bubbled up, until now undiscovered, next to a former convalescent home for railway workers, a building going back to the days of the Austrian monarchy which had stood empty for decades and could be had for a pittance. How would it be, then, if my father were to purchase this building and place him, Dr. Z., as medical director of a sanatorium which, with the lure of sulphur and arsenic health baths, would soon attract crowds of patients, thus making both of them rich in no time at all?