Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

This coolness on his part was understandable. Bunchy had come to our house at a difficult time, a time of “brewing crisis,” as my sister and I recognized later, under abnormal conditions that never reverted to normality after Bunchy left. A crisis was brewing not only in our parents’ marriage but in everything touching our home life together. My mother was less and less able to cope with the willful girl my sister was becoming. At the same time, I slid out from her and Cassandra’s supervision and developed into what my mother found an intolerably rowdy boy; I was far from the affectionate, curly-headed sweetie pie she would have liked to cuddle, as in a painting by Romney or Vigée-Lebrun — if not Raphael. Her increasing isolation and alienation depressed her. Family finances were precarious: her dowry was gone; what had remained of her parents’ fortune evaporated in the inflation. Her husband’s salary, in her opinion, stood in no relation to his costly hobbies. Moreover, our political situation was rife with ambiguity. Only now, in the early 1920s, did we realize that as former imperial Austrians we had lost not only the war but also our national identity. We trembled at the stormy awakenings of major-power aspirations and conceit on the part of Romania’s new sovereigns. Taught to be submissive to any form of authority, my mother was terrorized even by the mere appearance of a policeman. Her nervousness pervaded the entire house.

We had had a confusing series of mademoiselles and misses coming and going, women who became rebellious and distraught because of our insubordination, and then even more so because of my mother’s wavering interference in their pedagogy. For all of this, she held her incompetent husband in some way responsible.

Bunchy arrived as a result of my mother’s desperate call for help to her family in Vienna. My father could hardly have assumed that her own dearly beloved governess, deeply attached to her family, would be impartial in relation to him. More likely, he could presume that she had been sent to back his wife in every possible way and to draw his children away from him and into the bosom of the maternal family. Yet until my mother abducted us to Vienna, Bunchy never gave my father any grounds for suspicion that she was playing a role in the family intrigues. Her attitude was perfectly fair, discreetly insistent on meting out justice on all sides in questions of conflict and never lowering herself to a cringing neutrality. Although much too tactful to remind my mother that she had once been her governess and as such might allow herself the odd reprimand or correction, she did not refrain from voicing disapproval when it counted. She soon gained unquestioned authority throughout the house, and she exercised it in a way that impressed my father and calmed my mother’s flickering moods. But my father could not easily give up a prejudice once formed, and he expressed it by sometimes letting fall that Strauss was really a Jewish name.

Had he had an inkling that she had injected us with the “ferment of disintegration,” whose origins he, as a faithful pupil of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, attributed to the Jewish spirit, he would have prided himself on his intuitive powers. But her Pomeranian uprightness was not, as he claimed, a typically Jewish camouflage: after 1938 she had no trouble documenting her untainted Aryan lineage. In any case, my sister and I continued to maintain close relations with her after she returned to Vienna, where she resumed giving private lessons in English, French, Italian and art history to innumerable pupils, many of whom became our friends, and all of whom happened to be Jews. Faithful to Bunchy’s corrupting influence, these friends continued her mission of liberating us from the narrow-minded provincialism into which we might otherwise have sunk.

To my shame I did not realize this right away. I was proud to be the son of a huntsman and did not wish for anything more keenly than to indulge my father’s passion wholeheartedly myself; I admired him and loved all his whims and incongruities, even forgiving him his almost pathological anti-Semitism — but fortunately I never took him quite seriously. It had always been hard for my sister and me — less so for her than me — to take anything related to our family life seriously, for presumably we had an alerted instinct as a result of some intellectual self-preservation, since otherwise we might not have sanely survived the absurdities. Many eventful years had to pass before we became conscious that some of these aberrations could indeed hardly be taken seriously enough. At first we made fun of anything and everything, especially whatever was painful. Laughter was our means of keeping operable the mechanism of the compact between matters that in fact were incompatible. We never accepted our mother without a reservatio mentalis , but we never doubted either that thanks to her we had been granted the very best that a good birth and a sound education could produce. Likewise, we might shake our heads and roll our eyes at our father, even censure him for his harebrained follies, and yet be convinced of his ultimate infallibility. Our reservations did not alter our faith in the deeply grounded legitimacy of our world. Because we were wont to convert the eccentricities into family legend and finally regarded them as a kind of distinction, we got into the habit of considering (and accepting) neurotic behavior, narrowness of mind, and wrongheadedness as a mark of class superiority. It was at this point that Bunchy’s influence had a beneficially compensating effect.

Much later, when the truth had dawned on me about many things that I had once considered self-evident but that were, on the contrary, incomprehensible, I wondered how, in a world that suffered day in and day out the most cataclysmic changes, we could have remained stuck for so long in our narrow, blindered complacency — not only our conceits regarding our social position, our assessment of our fellow beings and ourselves, but the overall situation of the world around us. Czernowitz, for us, was the center of the universe and our home was its very core. It was but natural that as growing children we existed in a state of cultural pupation, from which we freed ourselves only gradually, through increasing our knowledge and deepening our insights, shedding layer after layer of childhood’s dream condition and the stereotypes that indiscernibly were part of it, the wrappings that had protected us. And it goes without saying that this process was not a gentle, gradual one, let alone painless or unopposed; it happened rather by sudden jolts and shoves, in insidious evolutions which we perceived only long after they had taken effect.

When we had come to know Bunchy, it astounded us that our mother had been reared by her. Obviously she had assimilated all the rules of proper comportment, the knowledge of languages and art history befitting a “daughter from a good house,” but she had failed to acquire any of Bunchy’s sense of humor or her sound common sense (which she shared with our father, although neither he nor she would have liked to acknowledge this), nor the openness to the world, the lack of prejudice and the intellectual independence of this exceptional woman, not to speak of the generous respect Bunchy showed for other people’s peculiarities. Nor could much of this be detected in our aunts, who also had been Bunchy’s pupils; what little there was, was buried under moronic class prejudices or, worse, collective ideas and opinions. We concluded that one could teach and learn only so long as teacher and pupil shared more or less the same physiological disposition—“chemical concordance,” as our father called it. Slowly it dawned on us that the oddities in our household were in some way effectively the marks of a social class, one belonging to a dying and largely already superannuated caste, and that the only remaining salvation consisted in renouncing all of it. That this did not happen violently and destructively, as was the case with later generations, we owed to Bunchy’s perceptive and considerate guidance.