Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

She never indicated with a single word, an inadvertent gesture, a glance or even a twitch of the eye that she might be disappointed with what had become of her former pupil. She treated my mother with the same even-handed, loving and tolerant care she must have shown to her when she was a young girl, her attitude now heightened by the polite respect granted to the mistress of the house. A more civil tone entered our home, where hitherto emotions had been expressed in fairly unbridled fashion. Even Cassandra straightened up with a pride that had been awarded her at long last and that no longer could be denied her by some miss from Smyrna or some vaguely whorish mademoiselle from Marseilles. Bunchy’s dignity stood watch over our own; withal, we were freer in our manners, we laughed more frequently and less maliciously, and we took whatever still pained us — such as my mother’s regrettable and frequent accesses of temper and manic vagaries — in a spirit of greater tolerance. When a certain pettiness of outlook degenerated into stubborn narrow-mindedness, Bunchy’s determined intervention drew our attention to basic discrepancies between the conception of life held by normal civilized people and that held by us. We then made haste to follow her implicit injunctions.

When she came to us from Vienna in the summer of 1921, I was so confused by her apparition that I had to be fetched with almost brute force from Cassandra’s room, where I had taken refuge, to be presented to her. We had heard of her for as long as we could remember; she was spoken of within the family as a temporarily absent relative, all the more dear because of her absence; she appeared in most accounts of my mother’s youth, that mythic time, even more remote and splendiferous than the period in which I was not yet and my sister already was “of this world.” I would have considered her as a pure fairy-tale figure had we not received from her regular congratulatory postcards, usually reproductions of paintings by old masters, especially those of the Tuscan school (it was said that she had lived for years in Florence), on the occasion of our birthdays, Christmas and Easter; the golden background of those Annunciations lined the place in my psyche where her name was embedded. She had been a living presence in my inner being long before there was any talk of her joining us, and when one fine day this was announced as imminent, it seemed a barely believable miracle, almost a profanation. This witness to the lost glory of our house, a glory in which I had not been allowed to share, this guardian of the irrevocable, whose existence in this world reached back into the secrets of time even further than my sister did, was now to face me in person; she was to become flesh and blood. She had been a participant in the reality that no longer was real but was perhaps only an assertion by those who had lived before me, a reality that was documented solely in a few surviving artifacts and graspable in these only in some moments, in shadowy singular aspects — as in the wrought-iron backrest of that rowboat rotting in the pond at the Odaya…. It was she I was to face and to whom I now was to introduce myself, as so often in the past years and with growing rebelliousness I had done with the misses and mademoiselles flashing by like transient comets. Cassandra washed my hands, brushed my hair and nudged me through the door of the study into the drawing room. There, majestically towering next to Mother, stood the mythic figure of Mother’s family, Miss Lina Strauss, arrived that very moment. My sister already stood confidently close to her and looked expectantly at me — in malicious amusement, so it seemed.

It was a bright summer day and, to my pleasant surprise, Miss Strauss was wearing, not as I had expected, a severely black turn-of-the-century dress, like a child murderess in a wax cabinet, but a white traveling dress; the skirt reached to her ankles, and the short jacket, old-fashioned in cut, was buttoned all the way to the neck. It seemed a garment fitting the resplendent wearer and the radiance filling the room. “So there he is,” she said, as if greeting someone she had known forever, and stretched out to me both her black-gloved hands, one of which I grasped and kissed, as I had been taught was the polite thing to do when being introduced to a lady — though at that instant I realized it was hardly proper to be kissing the hand of a governess, particularly one in a black glove. It would never have occurred to me to do this with Miss Knowles or Mademoiselle Derain (she actually had the painter’s name). Involuntarily I glanced at my sister, but the imposing figure in white had interposed herself between us. Miss Strauss knelt down to me, took me in her arms and kissed me, saying, “He is too polite. We shall settle between ourselves to whom he is to show such courtesy and where this is a bit too much.” When she stood up, she kept my hand in hers, placed the other on my sister’s shoulder and said, “Now show me where I shall be staying. I have to recover from my journey. I’ve been traveling almost two days.” I saw that my mother had been watching this encounter as an engaging spectacle in which her well-bred children showed themselves to best advantage — and in a better light, certainly, than at those costumed affairs she had been arranging for us. We were finally behaving with the grace and poise she expected of us, as in a genre Biedermeier painting, and she basked in the moment. Maternal satisfaction — all too infrequent — brought her a rare instant of true relaxation, and it triggered a mood wholly different from the nervously imperious harshness we were used to. This was a foretaste of Bunchy’s blissful influence on the atmosphere of the household.

I watched eagerly to see whether her imposing appearance would also induce my father to kiss her hand. Quite apart from the fact that it was pretty hard to get my father to kiss anyone’s hand, excepting that of his beloved of the moment, he and Miss Strauss already knew each other. After having greeted her with a formal “Good day,” he contented himself with a dry comment: “Well, this one hasn’t gotten any younger either.’’

She was then — in the summer of 1921—probably about sixty, though we were never able to ascertain her exact age; in any case, she was older than my father, who had been born in 1876. She had come to our then eight-year-old mother in 1898 and stayed with her until shortly before her marriage in 1909. So she would have met my father as bridegroom, wearing his woolen ski cap, in the midsummer of 1908. Magical dates! They troubled me because they were preludes to my sister’s birth — that is, preludes to that special world experience which was her handicap over me. Now, before me stood the Keeper of the Great Seal of this treasure, and I began to watch jealously to see whether my sister, on the strength of her advance in time over me, would try to establish a secret and deeper intimacy with Bunchy, our new and in so many ways meaningful housemate…. But then something miraculous happened: a few weeks later Bunchy went alone with me to the Odaya.

First, however, I have to recount how she gained my confidence. In contrast to children today, we were not spoiled with a surfeit of toys. Christmas and birthday gifts from my mother were always selected with great empathy and were joyfully received, but they were anything but lavish. The legendary ship’s model that foundered in Constanţa belonged to a later period, when we no longer had a true home and my mother tried to compensate for the distance that separated her from me, at school in Kronstadt and desperate with homesickness. As long as the family lived together, we children had contented ourselves with a few stuffed animals from our infancy — and of course, our live pets: dogs, rabbits for a while, two or three broken-winged birds found in the garden, a magpie, a starlet, a robin — until our mother somehow got it into her head that they carried meningitis and tuberculosis. My sister’s dolls moldered at the Odaya; she didn’t want to see them ever again. My “German Brother” was in rags; shortly after the Romanian soldier had thrown him in the gutter, his belly split and a sad mixture of straw and sawdust dribbled out, leaving a slackly empty uniform — the felt it was made of suddenly seemed horribly shabby — crowned by the stupid blond head without its rookie’s cap. My ball with the multicolored circus pictures I had lost to the treacherous seducer from beyond our garden gate. Of my toy saber I had been relieved, after wounding a child of one of our country’s new masters with it, a deed that might have drawn on us down their vindictiveness unto the seventh generation; as to the handful of lead soldiers I had, Cassandra usually kept them hidden in a box, so as not to arouse the wrath of my father (though the real reason for secreting the soldiers was probably that they wore the uniform of Austrian dragoons and as such would be deeply distasteful to any Romanian). Miss Knowles, arriving and vanishing in our lives like a meteor, had introduced us to some indoor games, to be played at a table in sedentary gentility — such as tiddlywinks, which soon bored us after we almost split each other’s heads open over it. Even worse were games like merle or ludo; neither of us was what our bucktoothed Miss called, in her jolly British way, “a good loser.” I ardently wished for a miniature railway set and never got one, though the Christmas and birthday presents with which Mother bribed us became more opulent with the passage of years. From a remote and shadowy time (near Trieste? in Lower Austria?) I also seem to remember a cardboard with holes into which many-colored glass balls could be inserted to form a variety of patterns; all my life certain ornaments, some luminous advertisements and, more recently, photographs recomposed in computerized images have reawakened with almost electrifying intensity the early optical impression made on me by this toy. Any object that we could consider personal property held intense power for a while, a feeling heightened by fear of losing such a beloved object — which probably contributed, in fact, to our frequent losses; our often wounded susceptibility helped to develop a resigned, loose relationship with property. (It may well be that later this was also expressed in matters of the heart.)