Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

To hold these private séances, we drove to the woody hills outside Czernowitz, which in times past had been the scene for our childish games of hoops and diabolo. I now squatted on the edge of a blossomy green meadow, in the midst of which the two sisters sat down; I soon saw them in close embrace, the dark-haired one, her face lifted to heaven, apparently speaking in tongues, and the red-haired one helplessly sobbing her heart out on the former’s shoulder. After they broke away from each other and we returned to the car, my mother’s eyes, reddened by tears, reflected total emptiness; my aunt, on the other hand, showed her everyday cheery mien, as if nothing at all had happened. I had seen lovers returning in a similar way after indulging in clandestine copulation.

Soon my aunt returned to Vienna. Her presence seemed to have had a beneficial effect on my mother — she calmed down, but after her departure fell into an apathy of dull despair. I myself was as if boneless. I idled the days away and rampaged through the nights with my newfound friends, Romanian students with the typical characteristics of their species: proud and touchy, romantic and foolish, glowing with chauvinism. The tensions between my mother and Philip made staying in the house unbearable. I hardly ever saw my father; he came only rarely from Transylvania and tormented me with suggestions for studies I had no intention of undertaking. I was besotted with a girl whose mind and soul had been bleached to a pale blue cloudiness by Armenian clerics; I quarreled with her constantly about religious questions and she deeply resented my blasphemies. As a means of quelling my cynicism, I looked for some charitable mission and hit upon the crazy idea of replacing my aunt in her transcendental role with my mother: if my will to help her were only pure enough, why shouldn’t I too be granted the privilege of being the messenger between her and her dead daughter, particularly since my sister was surely eager to provide solace from the beyond?

I sat in front of a mirror and stared fixedly into my eyes, intent in utmost concentration on emptying myself of my own being so as to be nothing but a vessel for another spirit. And then something truly uncanny happened: I felt an icy flow rising through my nostrils and into my brain… and I was suddenly terrified and too weakhearted to take the next step — whatever it was. I stood once again as an ordinary self, my heart pounding in my chest, abashed by my craven withdrawal from the threshold of an unimaginable adventure that might have cost me my life or my mind but probably would have enriched me by a new and unknown dimension. Yet I knew it had been my sister’s wish that I should not go further. It would have established an intimacy much more indiscreet than the one I sought by kissing her at our encounter after our first separation. A short time later I broke away to Bucharest, and for the next few years all my passion was centered on horses.

This was how things stood when, finally, back in Vienna in the early winter of 1937–1938, I met Bunchy once more. Those were turbulent days when politics impinged on life everywhere in the world. But since hardly anyone I knew took any of this seriously and since grumbling about prevailing conditions was part of the everyday Viennese atmosphere, I did not grant the events any more scope than that which they occupied on the front pages of the dailies I didn’t read, or in the hurly-burly of the rabble screaming slogans in the streets. I was repelled by all of it. Fortunately, this turbulence had its own tide, and so there were hours, especially in the evenings and during the night, when one was not molested by it. Bars and nightclubs thrived. The ranks of Bunchy’s Jewish pupils and friends were swelled by emigrants from the German Reich, who told of horrible things happening there. One could only hope fervently that these would not occur also in Austria.

The new year began: 1938. I took Bunchy to the theater. After seeing Molnár’s Liliom we were in such a fine mood on the way home that I linked arms with her in the fashion of Liliom, swinging her to and fro and singing: “Come, Louise, my love, come on my swing, there’s lots of pleasure to be had, of our everlasting love we’ll si-hi-hing!” and she almost collapsed with laughter. When we arrived at the door of her house, she coquettishly slipped behind the grille and drew it closed. For the sheer fun of it, I rattled the grille as if I wanted to be taken in — and to my incredulous surprise saw that she took me seriously, that this woman well over seventy actually assumed that I, her pupil of twenty-three, had the intention of bedding her. It amused me to no end, filled me with shame and, at the same time, much affection. I would have liked to tell her that I loved her all the more for this disclosure of the archfemale and all too human bondage to the flesh. So I pretended that I really wanted nothing more than to join her; she laughed until the tears ran down her cheeks, but saw to it that the grille was well closed, threw me a last kiss and then also closed the gate, winking at me through a gap, giggling madly, excited and flattered. Only then did the lock click shut.

Then came March 12, 1938, and Germany’s annexation of Austria. A few days later Bunchy disappeared to parts unknown. It was said that she had moved to the house of friends in the country. Her benefactor in Vienna had been Baron Frankenstein, Austria’s last ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, who refused to serve Hitler and had sought political asylum in England. Bunchy was no longer safe in his house in Vienna, with all her circle of Jewish friends.

She remained in the country all through the war, and I had no contact with her until 1946. Then a long letter reached me that told of her circumstances and also contained the confession to a “failing.” The manor house in which she had survived the war was now in the British zone of Austria. The owners, who would have been unable to produce proof of their unblemished Aryan origin, had escaped before the war, just in time. Bunchy represented their interests and continued to do so. With the end of the war, swarms of refugees arrived to whom she provided shelter and care. She was assisted in this by the British occupying forces, who supplied her with essentials. They had great respect for the old lady speaking fluent English, who now received testimonials of love and gratitude from all her friends and pupils around the world who had been able to save themselves (unfortunately not all of them, by any means). One day the British regional commander ordered all the inhabitants to assemble in the manor yard. In front of the intimidated assembly, he disclosed that among them an SS leader was hiding who was being sought for having committed major crimes. Of course he was using another name, but Bunchy was presumed to know who it was. If she were to refuse to identify him, all the subsidies would be canceled and the improvised refugee camp would be dissolved. She wrote to me that she had been left with no choice. The fate of too many unfortunates depended on her. Her conscience had to be relegated to a back place and she had to reveal whom she suspected of being the person sought. She didn’t forgive herself for this denunciation and could not sleep.

A year later, came another letter: “… In the matter that has so heavily burdened my soul, I have finally found relief. It has come to me now how I should have behaved. I should not have denounced the man, but I should have appealed to his honor: Mr. So-and-so, step forth! That I now realize this does not absolve me of my failing at the time. But it reestablishes an ethical order: I have learned from it.’’

Another year later, I received the news of her death.

Of Bunchy too I have kept this weird instrument that technology has placed in our hands with which to conjure the dead back to life: a photograph. I cannot look at it without remembering something she told me about long ago on the occasion of our visit to the Odaya, her account of a recollection by my sister from the childhood days she spent there: It is a morning in early winter with no snow on the ground yet, but biting cold has settled in overnight and the world is choking in dense fog. A thin sun fights against the fog and slowly manages to consume it, so that it condenses as hoarfrost on everything; each branchlet of each bough of each tree and shrub, each bush, each blade of grass still standing, each thistle at the wayside wears a white fur that glitters under the sky, which meanwhile has become immaculately clear. My father fetches some skates and drives with my sister down to the river. The river is frozen stone-hard and black, since no snow has dulled the ice. It is transparent down to the bottom of the river, and one can count every pebble lying there. My sister is not much more than four years old; it is the first pair of skates she has ever worn, but guided by her father’s gentle hand, she skates with him down the river, an endless trail, bordered by shores scintillating with rime, the reeds furry and the birches as if spun of glass, and above it all a sky of deepest blue, like the one that soon spread for her over the Adriatic.