Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

The most beautiful present I ever received in my childhood I received from Bunchy. She brought it with her from Vienna, and she took it out of a large cardboard box — the first one she opened after we took her to her room and her luggage was set down. “It belonged to your Uncle Rudolf,” she said as she carefully unwrapped two small wooden boxes from their layers of tissue paper; one was larger and lighter, the other one smaller and heavier. My anticipatory pleasure was so great that I didn’t even care what gift my sister was getting — and now I’ve forgotten what it was. Urged on by the unfamiliar white lady in her white traveling suit — still too overwhelming a presence to be called Bunchy — I carefully opened first one, then the other of the little boxes. The lid of the lighter one was opened and closed by screws that, with a gentle pressure, would squeeze down on some three dozen parallel slots as on a writing block. The heavier box had two compartments, one of which contained a small hand roller and several bottles of variously colored ink, the other one filled to the top with tiny, square-cut pieces of lead. Taking one of these in my hand, I found it showed on one of its surfaces, cut in relief, the letter F; a second one showed a lowercase a . They were the letters of a complete miniature printing press, adapted to my own diminutive size. Our new governess’s black-gloved fingers took the two pieces from me, placed them in one of the slots, selected some more letters from the compartment, rejected some and chose others until she composed, letter by letter, the words “Family Rezzori.” Only then did Bunchy take off her gloves, as after a task well done. “This little printing press comes from America,” she explained. “I shall tell you later how I got it. I gave it to your Uncle Rudolf.” She added offhandedly, “He hasn’t played with it very often.” (Miss Knowles would have said: “We are not surprised.’’) I looked at the line of type and said, “But if I now put a paper on it and draw it off, our name will appear in mirror writing.” Bunchy stopped short, thought for a moment, took another piece from the box and scrutinized it closely. “You are quite right,” she said. “The type has been wrongly cast. That’s probably the reason why your Uncle Rudolf didn’t much like this printing box. You’re a clever little boy to have noticed this so quickly.’’

This remark was more than ample compensation for the disappointment that I would never be able to compose anything on the miraculous printing box that could be read properly and as it should, from left to right. Bunchy’s praise, expressed in front of my sister, was a triumph that initiated the slow recovery of my badly damaged self-reliance. From that moment on, I loved the lady in white and never called her anything but Bunchy. She reciprocated this love. She became a powerful helper during my entire adolescence, as Cassandra had been during my childhood.

It is evidence of the permanence of the impression Bunchy left with me that she remains even more vivid in my aural memory than in my visual one — this in accordance with the former’s multidimensional impact in depth, which invests the sudden sounding of a long-forgotten musical motif with the power to bring forth the very essence of an entire period, and in a richer, emotionally more lasting way than any visually remembered object. There are some sounds that have moved my soul for a lifetime — and I don’t mean great music or cathedral bells but rather the intimate aural experiences of my sentimental biography. (I could make a long list of acoustic banalities that, precisely because they are commonplace, epitomize the components of that biography, for instance: the wintry sounds of sleigh bells, or the crack of gunshots coming from behind yellow birch leaves on a crystal-clear autumn day; the warbling of a merl on a city side street, or the moon-sick forlorn baying of a dog and the rattling, dying away in the distance, of a peasant cart making its way over a dirt road under a starlit sky somewhere in Eastern Europe; the rhythmic creaking of saddles, accompanied by the wetly metallic sounds of horses munching on their bits during a ride with someone, or on some empty Sunday afternoon, the repeatedly interrupted and then resumed tinkling of a child’s piano practice in a neighboring house, while the wind carries puffs of sound from the crowd roaring in some far-off soccer stadium….) Among such aural milestones, the evocation of Bunchy’s dark-colored voice and her guttural, good-humored laugh, reminiscent of pigeons cooing, brings her back to me with all the fullness of her kind understanding and wise presence — and reminds me of the proud moments when she would appreciate one of my character traits, traits that before had elicited only Cassandra’s crude peasant cackle or the family’s sharp rebukes.

Bunchy discovered and promoted my talent for observation and humorous description, and opened the eyes of others to it. Whether this was of unqualified benefit to me, I cannot be sure; among my shortcomings — albeit more readily pardonable than many — is my predilection for amusing others with comical exaggerations tending to the paradoxical and absurd (though not always obtaining the desired effect). But in any case, Bunchy’s encouragement was a balm in those difficult days of my final severance from the sheltering warmth of childhood, the age in which awakening consciousness urges one forward helter-skelter into life, however alarmed by clear-sighted foreboding and oppressed by puberty. With her acute sense for balanced measure, Bunchy did not encourage me in the monkeyshines I was wont to indulge in when not under her direct supervision. She limited herself — and me — to a cautious appreciation of the grotesque in life. This was achieved by nothing more than a rapid, almost clandestine glance exchanged between us whenever the situation threatened to tip over into the absurd, which in our household was not exactly a rarity. Her glance was swift and covert only in the first meeting of eyes, after which it resumed its steadiness, its studied indifference, as if the reciprocity of our silent concordance had been the result of mere chance. Thus it revealed nothing to the outside, least of all its intimacy. It was a glance denoting not complicity but, rather, acknowledgment of similar perceptions by two minds on the same wavelength.

Our congeniality began with Bunchy’s requesting me to translate for her the German-Romanian-Ukrainian-Yiddish linguistic salad I had inherited from Cassandra. More than willingly, I exaggerated its humorous aspects. For her, I opened up the treasure trove of anecdotes that had accumulated around my exotic nurse over the years. I gloated over the mirth this incited in Bunchy and relished even more that she did not follow the earlier examples of Miss Knowles and Mademoiselle Derain in treating “the savage one” with even more condescension and contempt but, quite the contrary, showed her a heightened affection and consideration. Surely Cassandra clung to her like a neglected dog that finally finds its master, and Bunchy took her under her personal wing. I believe Cassandra owed to Bunchy her instruction in many of the household skills she later displayed to such advantage in running my father’s home. As for me, I attached myself to Bunchy even more passionately, if possible, than I had to Cassandra, and I have felt all my life that I too owe what little virtues I may possess to Miss Lina Strauss. Among these I include my lifelong striving to overcome a fatal indifference, an innate indolence of soul. For the benefit of others and for myself, I have always pretended to feelings that in truth I experience only tepidly, if at all. The only wholehearted feeling I knew during my childhood and before Bunchy’s appearance was hatred.