Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

“And?” asked Bunchy. “What was your answer?’’

“What could I answer at that time? What can I answer even today? What do I believe in? In everything and nothing. Today — maybe with a bit more awareness — less than everything, more than nothing. You know what our religious education was like. You always called us the happy pagan heirs of Christendom. Cassandra never missed the chance to drag me into Orthodox churches, and I supposed it was there that I felt most comfortable in the lap of God, enclosed in that mystic twilight, with the worm-eaten wood, polished dark brown by much handling, and the crumbling gold and ancient red of the icons: a firmament of long-faced saints with the glittering disks of their halos crowning their carefully combed heads; lulled to sleep by clouds of incense and the honeyed scent of beeswax candles, gently cradled by the fluctuating voices of bass, baritone and tenor priests with their beards, their greasy robes and their stovepipe hats. But the most sensually intense faith — if I may put it like that? — I indulged in was the Catholic devotions honoring the Virgin Mary in May, for that was my mother’s childhood faith. Not much remains of it now except a breviary bound in red velvet, which she probably opened for the last time at her wedding and never looked at again, and a similarly unused rosary. Of the Ten Commandments she probably retains only the fifth, though even there she excepts Father. Remember her indignation over his antipapal slogans from the Break with Rome movement, which he had adhered to during his Storm and Stress period? Yet when all is said and done, I’m more than willing to let myself be wrapped in the heavenly deep blue of the mantle of our Blessed Virgin with her starry crown, and I’ve always tried to identify myself with the infant in her arms (though the discrepancy in age always bothered me: either the sweet child seemed too small and precocious or he already wore a beard and lay dead in his mother’s lap)…. Polyphonic bells also aroused emotions encouraging me to surrender to the nameless; the gold in the saints’ halos, glittered as brightly in churches of the Sacred Heart, where guardian angels stood ready to spread open their swan’s wings to guide and protect me on the narrow path over the abyss. Long before all this petrified into the spectacular splendor of Gothic and Baroque cathedrals, which nowadays only evoke art-historical awe in me, it invested my soul with a basic emotional tone that set me off to advantage, mainly over Jews, I thought, although I couldn’t say exactly how. Later on, in Kronstadt, I sang in the Protestant church choir, most gloriously in the St. Matthew Passion: See Him! Whom? The bridegroom see. See Him! How? A lamb is He. O sacred head sore wounded, defiled and put to scorn. O kingly head surrounded with mocking crown of thorn. And soon after that, Nietzsche’s observations on a God who weeps… But we weren’t that far yet, that autumn, how many years ago? — fifteen, sixteen? — it was before our parents separated and before you left us, before I was sent to Kronstadt to the house of the subsequent bishop of Transylvania: impressive man of God, neo-Platonist, with a finely developed Adam’s apple and a preacher’s baritone…. A rigid world in the shadow of the Black Church: black robes closed with silver clasps like knights’ cloaks, limp clerical berettas and philistine double chins squeezed in dignified probity into collar bands and ruffs… And also the singsong of pious Jews emanating from the prayer houses in Czernowitz, and their apostle heads with long side-locks under the fox tails of their rabbinical hats… All of that passed through and over me, leaving traces but no impression in depth. Never mind the hodge-podge of Plato, Hinduism, the cobbler Böhme and shamanic magic that the spiritualist circles around Aunt Hermine infiltrated in my brain the year my sister died. What impressed me in all that — probably because it’s so comforting — was the doctrine of transmigration of souls. How soothing a distance it provides from one’s present life! How long ago was all that? A mere five years of eternity… Well, I make fun of all of it, and yet surreptitiously I cross myself and pray that Our Lord may forgive my heresies; even though I do not believe in His existence, I send my fervent prayers to Him in heaven whenever there is danger of anything going wrong in my life or when I truly wish for something. This, my beloved Bunchy, is the reply to your Faustian question, which back then I couldn’t give you.’’

“It could all have been foretold quite easily at the time,” said Bunchy. “Together with all your signs of a predisposition to typical adolescent cynicism.’’

“I’m all the more grateful that you didn’t intervene. For I now say, ‘It’s of no concern to me.’ Probably I’m stuck in the cynicism of puberty. But it doesn’t disturb me. I look at the garbage heap of religious impressions in my soul with an affectionate, tolerant smile. Everything lies peacefully side by side, higgledy-piggledy, and I don’t want to think that one day I might be assaulted and enthralled by one or the other of the pieces lying there, that I might want to penetrate the theological dungheap, perhaps the arguments on the divine nature of Christ or the difference between ‘is’ and ‘signifies’ — certainly most interesting questions…. I suppose I lack something there, you know? Something is missing that other people have, which you really could get hold of me with, grasp and shake me, seize and move me for once…. But that isn’t why I told you of the incident with Mother and the Lipovanian come down from heaven. We spoke of myths and I found myself thinking how you had opened my eyes about Cassandra’s fairy tales. Up to then, everybody merely doubled over when I retold these in her own linguistic mishmash. That they contained something very beautiful, that their distortion through Cassandra’s impish spirit held great fascination — only you saw this. Will you forgive me if I tell you that this has had a deeper religious impact than all the inanities the catechists and pastors tried to drill into me? If you ask me now what I believe in, I’m tempted to say that it’s the magic of words. Do you remember that there was one word my sister and I would pronounce only with horror and for wicked purpose when nobody else was around? Even then we were so scandalized by it that whenever one of us used it, the other ran to the grown-ups and denounced it: ‘He’ — or she — ‘has pronounced The Word.’ It was nothing more than a very vulgar expression we had picked up for ‘mouth’ — ‘kisser.’ We knew much worse words, but this one — God knows why — seemed to us the utmost sacrilege. Well, one night when we were alone in our rooms, I heard my sister tiptoeing in the dark toward my bed. She bent over me and whispered, ‘You shut your kisser once and for all.’ It was like a curse in one of Cassandra’s fairy tales, and though I was scared by it, I felt there was something beautiful in it, something that kept me in awe of its power.’’

Bunchy remained quiet a few moments. It is carved in my memory that she then unexpectedly asked, “Do you still draw much?’’

“Not at all,” I had to admit. “I lost out on the years when I could have been trained.’’

She didn’t say “A pity!” as did everyone else to whom I gave the same answer to the same question. After another short pause she asked: “How old are you now?’’

“Twenty-three,” I replied resignedly, “almost twenty-four.’’

She nodded earnestly, if ironically, and said, “Well then, you can have a glass of sherry with me.’’

That was in November 1937, and we were speaking of a time that seemed to me very far removed in the past, as generally happens with a twenty-three-year-old remembering his childhood — that is, much further removed than is the case for me today at seventy-five. The intervening years held their own disappointments and lost illusions, and Bunchy’s question whether I still drew touched a sore spot. When she had been with us, she had supported my passion for drawing, and that too had been beneficial to my developing self-reliance. That I had talent — more important still, an insatiable passion that displaced and superseded all my other occupations — was commonly accepted; everyone thought of it as something I was born with and therefore as nothing special; no one considered that it also threw me back on myself; and no one encouraged me. It was also accepted that I was in another world whenever I had a crayon in my hand and thus was well out of the way, bothered no one and knew no other conflicts than those resulting from the discrepancy between my insufficient technical skill and the notion I had in my mind of the perceived subject. The household was not spared my temper, my accesses of crabbiness and susceptibility, my occasional outbursts of anger, but when these were occasioned by my playing with crayon and sketch pad, they were smiled at. No one seemed to understand that this avocation was part of my nature, indeed its very foundation, through which my personality and life could have developed. Bunchy was able to lay the first stones toward such a development, but there was no follow-up. She was the first — and only — person who understood my needs, who had helped and corrected me, and who had drawn the attention of others to my capabilities. Incomprehensibly, not even my own father, despite all his own joy in his pictorial creations, showed any interest in my talent; I suspect that it irritated him that I could create, with three or four strokes and more spontaneously, something that he could reproduce only painstakingly, with laborious concentration and careful constraint. He could not teach me anything in draftsmanship, and I lacked the inclination for water-colors or oils. I watched his own efforts with indifference, and regrettably, this was to remain the limit of our relations in the artistic realm. But under Bunchy’s inspiration I blossomed. With a stroke of genius she had given me a toy with which I could experience all the bliss of self-forgetting, time-oblivious fulfillment: she taught me to adapt my little printing press (which in time lost many of its letters) into a linocut press. Secretly I copied Masereel and thus earned my first laurels.