Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

My mother would not be misled by such auspicious constellations. She had staged her bereavement over my sister’s death so dramatically that everyone feared for her health. She could not be left alone in Czernowitz; her life with Philip had become intolerable; the quarrel over the Odaya was festering; and her sisters, who theoretically at least were its co-owners, made themselves parties to the dispute. Her almost daily letters demanded with ever greater urgency and with increasingly energetic force that I come to join her. She wrote that the thought of Christmas was driving her out of her mind; we should not be surprised if she were to do herself some harm. This time it sounded convincing. My aunts escorted me to the station in order to ascertain that I really took the train to Czernowitz. As I was taking leave of Bunchy, she gave me as a Christmas present for my mother Franz Werfel’s Barbara . “It is not meant to comfort her,” she commented, “and even if it were,” she added — and for the first time I detected sharpness in her voice — “it wouldn’t help her. For she belongs to those whom the hard words of the Bible are meant for: For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath . Don’t worry. It’s merely for Christmas. You’ll be back right after.” It was not merely for Christmas. It took me a full five years to get back to Vienna.

This had been in December 1932, when I was almost nineteen. At twenty, I was to do my military service, and the Romanian authorities, who suspected any member of an ethnic minority of readiness to commit subversive acts, particularly desertion by those liable to serve in the armed forces, refused to extend my passport before I had done that service. I was trapped in Czernowitz. Moreover, I was told that my Austrian high school diploma would not assure me of the status of volunteer officer candidate, who served only one year. As a drafted recruit I would have to serve a full three years; the only way to avoid that was to return to the school bench and get a Romanian diploma. What I then learned of Romanian history was a rightfully earned gift from the Odaya: I had legitimate roots in the country. But this was a gift like the one in Cassandra’s fairy tale in which the beauteous king’s daughter requests from the enamored shepherd, “Give me something that you fail to give me.” He obeys the order by giving her a swallow that flies away as soon as he opens his hand.

Soon after my homecoming, my mother showed me an apricot tree she had planted years before, which had forked and grown into two strong trunks. Its health was close to her heart, for she had symbolically transferred it to the well-being of her two children. One of the trunks had now withered but the other one was all the stronger in its sprouting greenery. I was somewhat leery of this parable, for nothing could make me believe that I was anywhere near thriving. Bunchy wrote that Professor Strnad had unexpectedly died. The news left me cold; I had given up my ambitions and no longer drew. To learn Romanian as well and as quickly as possible, and to have as much fun as possible at the same time, I had surrounded myself with Romanians of my own age with whom I carried on, with wanton lack of inhibition as I had prior to the happy, salutary interlude at Dopler’s studio, pub-crawling and chasing girls I also lost myself in pseudo-religious speculations and practices.

My family had been struck by death — not in the abstract but concretely and in shocking immediacy, and my mother saw to it that I would not repress this experience. Her mute despair continued to scream for the dead child; she would have liked nothing better than — as the phrase had it — to scratch the departed from the earth with her fingernails. I did my best to keep her company in this fruitless rattling at the irrevocable. The no-longer-being-of-this-life was for me as inconceivable as the not-yet-being-of-this-world had once been. In vain I tried to reawaken that dark terror which, in the remote days of my childhood and with Cassandra’s gruff warning (“One day you too will be dead’’), had made me realize the significance of death. It was a weightless knowledge, and lacked the stony heaviness with which earlier it had sunk into my heart. Soon the thought of my sister’s death left my soul as empty as it did my brain; I neither felt anything nor thought of anything in this connection. Mother’s attitudinizing like a latter-day Niobe irked me, and I suspected that she was casting a sidelong glance at her audience, while at the same time I was troubled that with my notorious coldness of heart I might be doing her an injustice. I accused myself of insensitivity and could never have dared admit that my sister’s death had brought her closer to me than she had ever been in life — a thought that to anyone would have seemed absurdly perverse.

In those days I would look endlessly into the mirror until my face was no longer my own but some strange living organism entirely surrendered to the passage of time — a mechanical toy, the driving motor of which whirred relentlessly while I remained timeless in another dimension of my being and beyond the image in the mirror’s depth. There my emotions were no longer my own, nor did I miss the heart I lacked.

While my sister was wasting away, one of my aunts, who headed a number of spiritualistic circles, had arranged several séances for her salvation in which I was allowed to participate. Although no medical help materialized from the beyond, there had been some manifestations that were astounding because of their inexplicability: voices spoke of circumstances that could not possibly be known to anyone unfamiliar with intimate details; admonitions and warnings made themselves heard concerning potentially wrong decisions that, indeed, did have calamitous consequences later on; but most of all, there were jubilant descriptions of the euphoria of all those who had shaken off the burden of earthly existence and now resided in the beyond, where, while not enjoying all the blissful delights of heaven, they were at least spared the tribulations of purgatory or, worse, of hell, finding themselves between reincarnations in an ecstatically timeless, weightless waiting condition, at the end of which stood that most longed-for of all goals, the promised nirvana.

Attempts were made to comfort my poor mother. Residual Catholic doctrines allowing that since my sister had died a virgin (as my mother proudly maintained) and therefore was more likely to reside in heaven than hell were inadequate to reassure her; she required certainty and, consequently, inquired in Vienna whether proof of her child’s well-being could not be obtained from the unknown realm of the defunct; the spiritualistic circle headed by my aunt was fortunately able to fulfill her wish. Since it would have been onerous to travel from Vienna to Czernowitz with the whole staff of the circle, including its leader and mediums, the otherworldly committees that purportedly were in charge of determining how the over-there was to make contact with the here decided to empower my aunt with the required medial qualifications to establish a transcendental communication between mother and child.

My aunt arrived. She belonged to the dark and rather thickset type of my mother’s sisters, my mother being one of the long-limbed, reddish daughters of my ethnically checkered grandparents. In accordance with her pyknic constitution, my aunt was robust, cheery and full of joie de vivre, so it was hard to imagine that she had such intimate relations with the departed that they selected her as their mouthpiece for communications from the realm of the shadows. Yet this was apparently the case. Since I was allowed to witness her mediatory services only from a discreet distance, I cannot tell whether it actually was my sister’s voice that spoke through her or whether it was her own in substitution for those who had conversed with the deceased. I preferred to believe the latter, for when I had seen mediums fall into a trance (so as to lend the empty shell of their body to an astral spirit) it had been anything but an edifying sight; it was bound to frighten my mother, were she to see her sister fainting away unconscious, her eyes rolling upward until only the whites showed, raising herself up after tormented moanings and stammerings, foam on her lips, like a corpse emerging from a coffin, the glance now rigidly directed into nowhere and hands groping as if blinded. Whether my aunt had also been empowered with the ability to transcend into the astral zones, I am unable to say. My mother remained mum on the subject, as well as on the essential portent of the messages she received.