Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

This sobering reminder had its effect when next I met Bunchy. This was after some scholastic misadventures, ingloriously at variance with Huckleberry Finn’s, and after the boarding school in Fürstenfeld, in eastern Styria. There too I had not remained long. Irrespective of the fact that as the admiring son of my father the huntsman, I was expected to show appropriate submissiveness to the offspring of the author of the six-hundred-page definitive work on the partridge, I had shown myself a rebel and been expelled. Back in Vienna at the school for failed students, I caused my relatives serious worries as to whether I was not headed for outright criminality. At least that is how they behaved. In a way, I acted as if I were already wearing a convict’s garb. Thus did I appear one day at Bunchy’s, supposing that she too was outraged at the depth of the evilness with which I had disappointed her expectations.

Six years had gone by since we had seen each other, almost half of my own life. Bunchy — by now endowed for me with the fame of a remarkable biography, which had taken her overseas and had reached unheard-of heights, what with a circumnavigation of the world and an instructive sojourn of several years in Florence, mecca of Western cultural aspirations, now seemed even more legendary than before — and that first apparition of her belonged to the never-never land of a past that had lost credibility. So it was no longer a kindhearted lady in summery white whom I now confronted after so long a separation, but — if this were possible — an even more imposing matron in severe black. She seemed a head shorter, but I had grown by precisely that amount. I bowed, bashful and reticent.

“What’s this?” she said. “Don’t I get a kiss?’’

I forced myself to relax and found myself all the more constrained. “Forgive me! It’s been so long — I’m simply embarrassed.’’

“Embarrassed?” said Bunchy, lingering on the word and arching her eyebrows in disapproval. “Don’t be so full of your own importance.’’

That was like the lash of a whip, particularly since it had been said in front of a witness — without having announced myself, I had burst in on one of her tutorials: an elegant young man with glasses and smooth black hair, quite obviously from one of Vienna’s best Jewish families, was sitting on the sofa behind the round table at which Bunchy generally faced her pupils. At his back, reproductions of drawings by Michelangelo of Vittoria Colonna hung on the wall. I froze. The young man showed a smiling understanding that only worsened the situation. Of course, he knew my sister, appreciated her intelligence, her charm and wit….

I avoided visiting Bunchy for several years. But in the interim, her admonition bore fruit. Whenever insecurity befell me, I would take her sharp reminder to heart — yes, even today. She helped me gain a good portion of disdain for this world.

Nor did I see much of my sister in those years. As long as we were at boarding school, we saw each other only on Sundays for lunch at Grandmother’s. Later, she attended the Consular Academy and spent every free moment with her subsequent betrothed, Fritz. As for me, there followed a confusing succession of diverse studies, listlessly begun and ingloriously broken off: three semesters of mining in Leoben, two semesters of snipping away at corpses at the medical faculty in Vienna, two semesters of architectural studies at the Technical Academy, also in Vienna. Then one evening, at the house of a girl whom I was courting, I met Bunchy by sheer coincidence. No one there even had any inkling that we knew each other. The fact that I had been brought up by Bunchy considerably raised my standing in the eyes of both the wooed girl and her parents. Here too Bunchy enjoyed the love and devotion that all her former and present pupils and charges gave her, and something of this also reflected on me; my documented antecedents so to speak ennobled me. Bunchy told of my grandparents, of my mother and her siblings, of my sister and me and our father, of the Odaya and Cassandra; it was a tale rich in anecdote, and everybody listened with all the more interest as Bunchy knew how to place me in the foreground of general attention time and again. I was allowed to pander to my weakness — as my sister would have termed it — for dramatizing Bunchy’s story graphically. Once more Cassandra’s linguistic blossoms shone forth in all their glory and entertained an audience who knew how to appreciate them: well-educated Jews seem to me to have a remarkable feel for language.

I took Bunchy home. In front of her door, the open wings of which were secured by a heavy cast-iron grille, we bid each other an affectionate good-bye. From then on I never let a free day pass by without visiting her, taking her out or driving her into the Vienna Woods or to the nearby hills, or going with her to the theater or concerts. She knew, of course, of the worries my family had about me. “Do you have any conception of what you really want to do in life?” she asked me one day.

“You know it as well as I and everyone else. I’ve been saying it forever and to anyone who wants to listen. I want to draw , and nothing else.’’

Bunchy had no telephone in the two rooms she occupied in her benefactor’s house, and she was reluctant to use his. “Get me to the next public phone,” she ordered. Once there, she dialed a number and explained my case to a person unknown to me. In silence she listened and then noted down a number and an address.

“Present yourself tomorrow morning at eight o’clock at this address,” she said to me. “It is an advertising studio. The gentleman I talked to is one of the managers of Siemens-Schuckert [a large industrial concern]. The owner of the advertising studio is indebted to him as a major client, so much so that he will not hesitate to take you on as an apprentice. He is being advised of your coming this very day. Woe to you if you disgrace me!’’

I did not disgrace her. The owner of the advertising studio, Karl Dopler, and his wife, a concert pianist, became my intimate friends. Day in, day out, I drew and daubed for twelve self-forgetting hours; we shared our evening meals, our personal and professional joys and woes, the worries for the success of the agency, the pleasure over newly obtained orders and the hope of additional ones, as well as the disappointments over those that eluded us; we praised each other for work well done and consoled each other over work we happened to have botched. Karl Dopler was not a great artist but a solid craftsman from whom I learned a great deal and who gave me the down-to-earth encouragement that had been missing from the rapturous praises heretofore thoughtlessly heaped on my natural gifts. Dopler too appreciated my talents, which he acknowledged ungrudgingly as superior to his own, and he promoted them in every way he could. All this was a double blessing. Not only did it put an end to the awkward period of my disorientation — the dawdling away of my time in trivial pursuits, nightclub-hopping and whoring around — and give my whole life a happy foundation; at the same time it relieved my family of the nagging worry about my dubious fate, while delivering me from their aggravating supervision. However, a much more serious calamity entered all our lives: my sister took ill and, inexorably, followed the agonizing path to her death.

This death put a sudden end to my career as a commercial artist. It also nipped in the bud another potential career as stage designer. The parents of the girl in whose house I had met Bunchy were giving a party for their daughter in their villa in Döbling, a garden district of Vienna, and they entrusted me with the decorations. One of the guests, the writer Sil Vara, much celebrated in the Vienna of that time for his play The Girlhood of a Queen , was so impressed with my decorations that he had me design the setting for a party in his apartment. Among those at the party were Luise Rainer, with whom I forthwith fell hopelessly in love, and the most famous stage designer of those days, Professor Strnad, who was as successful at the Vienna Opera as at the Metropolitan in New York. He asked me to become one of his assistants. Bunchy was exultant. “When I saw your sister for the last time,” she told me, “she talked about you. She hardly could speak anymore but said very clearly and slowly, ‘I always knew he would turn out all right.’’’