Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

For it would have been anything but natural if I had not hated my sister. She knew how to keep my irascibility red-hot with the same mastery with which she knew how to throw the hourglass cone of her diabolo, catching it effortlessly on the string stretched between the sticks held in her skillful hands. For that, at times I hated her with an almost religious frenzy. I came close to murdering her when she made fun of me because she had somehow found out that I was enamored of a lady whose picture I had cut out from one of my mother’s fashion magazines; or when, knowing that we were still dressed in identical outfits, she intentionally chose to wear a frock that she knew would torment me because of its girlishness; or when, behind my back, she changed a sentence I had composed laboriously in mirror-writing type, so that it would be full of sense-distorting words and ludicrous orthographic errors when, unsuspecting, I thought of proudly showing my product to others. (No one, incidentally, hit upon the possibility that my type box was meant to serve for the making of matrices from which the actual type fonts would be pulled. Probably Uncle Rudolf had somehow lost these. I continued undaunted to print my mirror writing, assiduously and passionately, and resented any interference in my hobby, which I concentrated on all the more intensely and ferociously.) Just as, earlier, Cassandra had known how to exacerbate the feud between us for possession of the chamber pots until it became absurd, tipping it over into the realm of play and blunting its sharpness, so Bunchy proceeded along the same strategic lines: she expanded the textual changes made by my sister into new and hilarious sentences and distorted the orthographic blunders into amusing monstrosities, then suggested that we recompose this nonsense into readable palindromes, unaffected by the reverse mirror writing. And before we knew it, my sister and I were sitting amicably side by side over the type box.

I was an affable child and, later, a notoriously good-natured young man. Once I overheard my mother saying to someone who had praised my patience, “He is not patient. He has a cold heart.” She was right. There were few emotions, however stormy their inception, that did not quickly perish in the cool climate of my inner self. Once I came close to admitting this to Bunchy. It was at the start of the winter of 1937–1938, long after she had left us; my sister had been dead for five years and childhood lay far behind in a mythical past. After some eventful years in Bucharest, I had returned to Vienna. Bunchy lived and taught there, a cult figure to her many pupils. We had not seen each other since my sister’s death but were as close with each other as ever before; I felt no reluctance in telling her of the sordid quarrel that by then had erupted between my mother and Philip over the Odaya. I also told her about my last day hunting there with my father, and how I had felt that that lucky, almost random last shot of a hare marked the end of a phase in my life. “Maybe this was not the case for you alone,” said Bunchy.

At the moment, I didn’t attach as much significance to her remark as I would only a few months later, in March 1938, but I was intent on speaking of the past. The magical sentence “Do you still remember when…” was uttered in an ironic, melancholy mood, as we noted the various blind spots that prevented us from gaining a fuller and clearer view of what had once been present and was now the past. “Do you still remember,” I said to the old lady in black (in the fifteen years that had gone by with spooky swiftness since her blissful presence in our house, and during those last precarious years of peace between the two cataclysmic world wars, I never saw her again in a white summer dress, so that the image I kept of her in the Bukovina unconsciously was imprinted on my psyche as the impression of a sunnier world basking under an immaculate blue sky, in strong contrast to the actual pains and tribulations that this period had held for me. Bunchy in the earlier days was a festive and youthful figure, even though she was already of advanced years. The stately matron I faced in the early winter of 1937–1938 — she was living in a room crammed with furniture and memorabilia in the house of one of her benefactors in Vienna — belonged to the stormy, confusingly unsettled era of my growing up, but in her widowlike black two-piece suit, of a cut that was even more outmoded now than it had been earlier in the Bukovina, with her ramrod-straight posture and her snow-white hair over the high Ibsenesque brow, she conjured for me a Victorian epoch reaching back even further into the past than the turn of the century — now she had to be well over seventy; her mind was as alert and sharp as ever and she still had her ready laughter of earlier times), “do you still remember,” I said to her, “when we went to the Odaya for the first time? We were alone. Father took us and immediately left; he was going to fetch us the next day. You took me around the property and showed me everything and explained it all in detail — how it had been in my grandparents’ time, how my mother and aunts and uncle had joined you there in the summer as your pupils, how my parents had been exiled there — as Mother thought of it: Father always away on assignments, Mother most of the time in Egypt or Switzerland, and my sister sole mistress of the house with her retinue of nurses and servants, a child mostly left to her own resources, growing up almost as if bewitched, happy, rich in poetic life, yet only a mere child, family offspring no different from myself…. That, for me, was deliverance from the trauma of not-being when my sister was already of this world. It’s hard to explain why and how, but it somehow took away the bitterness of my envy of her. At a single stroke I saw that the wondrous four years that were my sister’s advantage over me did not belong to her alone. There had been others too, and then they had been joined by me, a latecomer, yet one of them. I — how shall I say it? — had entered the flow of time. The world I had not been allowed to experience belonged to the same world in which I took breath. The Odaya was no longer a dead memorial to my sister. I had only to blow away the dust from the furnishings for the room to fill with life once again and for the specters lying in wait to be chased away. That mysterious part of my sister’s life, which she so jealously guarded, henceforth also belonged to me.’’

“Yes,” said Bunchy, “it had become history and was no longer myth.’’

“But wasn’t that precisely what my sister died of?” I asked.

“No,” said Bunchy, “though it might well be that renouncing her own myth ate away at some of her life force. But she had to do it. It is dangerous to venture too far into the mythic realm.’’

“Anything is dangerous that you don’t dedicate yourself to unconditionally. I maintain that someone who falls from a rock face can fly so long as he abandons himself completely to the falling.’’

“Yes,” said Bunchy, “until he hits the earth.’’

“What I always liked about Pomerania is its matter-of-factness.’’

“You’re right in this too. But let’s talk about the Odaya.’’

“Do you still remember how I told you that once I had been there with Mother and had a memorable falling-out with her?… It was one of our truly intimate hours, we walked arm in arm, holding each other close, mother and child in heartfelt union, like that other time — was it earlier? was it later? — in Constanta, when my beautiful model ship foundered so swiftly and both of us just laughed and went on to eat ice cream, like a couple in love to whom nothing can matter…. That time at the Odaya, our harmony was even more intimate, if that is possible; we stole away from all the others; not even Cassandra stood between us. And I collected all my courage and asked her whether I could have a pony of my own; it would be so easy to keep at the Odaya, and even if I could come out only once a week or month, it would still be my very own pony. She shook her head angrily — you know well how she turns to stone once she’s caught in her panicky fear. Of course I immediately understood. She feared to let me go riding: I would fall off and break my neck, the pony would trample me or dash off with me, never to be seen again — God knows what else she imagined…. So I said that of course I wouldn’t ride alone, and only near the house, in the yard or park or whatever we called it. Maybe I wouldn’t even ride at all, but just drive the little cart Uncle Rudolf used for his pony, which was in the carriage house. She became quite gruff and said, ‘No, it’s out of the question, and that’s that.’ I was so angry that I ran off to the orchard, where she wasn’t likely to look for me. I hated her as much for her obstinate refusal as for the disruption of the happiness, for her lack of understanding and her manic anxiety. I hated her for having soured our happy time together at the Odaya and for all those other moments when she envenomed our lives by her foolish aberrations, for every pill of Formamint stuffed into our apprehensive mouths. Do you still remember those delicious Calvil apples, with their paper-thin skins, from the Odaya orchard? They were just about the only thing we got out of the farm — that and our Christmas carp and your artichokes; but even those had to be washed in permanganate before we were allowed to eat them. Well, when I ran away from Mother, so full of hatred for her, a whole basket of those apples stood under a tree, and just as I was about to take one out for myself, a giant of a man jumped down from its branches — a kind of cross between Rasputin and Tolstoy, in heavy boots and a Russian-type smock and scraggly hair down to his shoulders and a beard reaching all the way to his belly. He cursed and bellowed at me with the voice of a bear…. He was one of those Lipovanians who came and bought up the fruit harvests in the Bukovina. I hadn’t noticed him up there in the tree and had no idea that we had sold our fruit. Now he’d descended from heaven and was loudly scolding me — I was not only terrified and mortified for being thought a thief, but crushed to imagine that this was meant to be a heavenly punishment for my hatred of Mother. Do you still remember, Bunchy? I told you about it when we were alone at the Odaya, and then you asked me what I really believed in.’’