Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

In this connection I tried to reconstruct a scene from the past in my legendary Czernopol: a youth from the Junimea, the Romanian Youth Movement, steps from the Casa Poporului wearing the well-known costume of short, sleeveless and colorfully embroidered sheepskin jacket, and coarse linen shirt over linen trousers tightly belted in blue-yellow-and-red; there’s a suggestion of a whiff of pine needles from the Carpathian forests in his hair and his eyes shine with the pride of the Dacians (whom Trajan’s cohorts could never subdue, though they managed to overcome them in battle). As chance will have it, a German student passes by, a member of the folk-German fraternity Arminia, in its usual uniform: stiff collar, kepi worn at a snappy angle, fraternity colors displayed across the chest on a broad ribbon. At the sight of the Romanian he snorts contemptuously through the adhesive plaster covering a recent saber cut — an unambiguous signal that he considers the Romanian a lumpish yokel and potential adversary, even though both sit in the same lecture halls at the university. Such an encounter might all too easily lead to blows. But this time both are distracted by the appearance of a Hasidic rabbi in black caftan, with the pale skin of a bookworm and long corkscrew side-locks under a fox-pelt hat, an apparition that forthwith unites the former opponents in the happy recognition that the newcomer is the natural target of their aggression. For the time being, they content themselves with jeers and taunts, obscene gestures and curses. For the time being — I was writing of the year 1930. The great signal had not yet been given that would produce all its evil consequences.

In the Chernovtsy of 1989 such a scene is unimaginable. It haunts my mind but not those neatly kept streets. What now moved through the streets before my confused and astonished eyes was utterly uniform and obviously homogeneous, nothing provoking any particularizing pride. People strolled about at all hours of the day like a mass of workers streaming from factories at the end of their shift. Despite the occasional colorful getup, the ready-to-wear mass clothing seemed mostly to be a uniform gray. The faces were — as the saying goes — all of the same stamp: of Slavic broadness and angularity with coarse skin and light-colored hair. These were Ukrainians. In the old days we called them Ruthenians, one of the many minorities in a place where there was no majority. In all the Bukovina they did not make up more than a third of the population, in the Czernowitz of old Austria even less, and a smaller proportion still in the Romanian Cernăuţi. Now they were the only ones left, those people’s comrades of the Soviet Republic of the Ukraine, which, as the former “Little Russia” enlarged by the annexation of Galicia and the northern Bukovina, now accounts for more than half the European territory of the Soviet Union. Nor were these people different from other Russians. The women were almost without exception plump, the men stocky and puffy, a people of cabbage eaters, not in dire want, not dissatisfied but inclined to submit resignedly to God’s will, serious and well behaved. Very well behaved, it seemed. Femininity found its expression solely and ostentatiously in a petit-bourgeois motherliness — and perhaps also in a fatal predilection for dyed fire-red hair. Only very young girls wore slacks; and only a few teenagers made weak attempts to imitate Elvis Presley hairdos. But this was mere modishness and not an expression of a sociopolitical essence.

All in all, this certainly was not a world of ease and plenty, and it was entirely free of the mad waste and squandering that is the hallmark of late Occidental consumer paradises. There was no sales talk, no urging to buy this or that, nor did anything irritate by junky superabundance. The moderation was pleasing, whether or not it was voluntary. I felt no obligation to purchase or become the user of anything, and this circumstance may have given me the deceptive impression that the people here were possessed of the dignity of those who voluntarily do without and content themselves with little. I could not help thinking that they would have been to Hitler’s liking.

Nor was Chernovtsy entirely without color, as I had thought at first: the sounds of a military band were heard from what was once called Austria Square. In the past, this had been the great downtown market square, whither the rattling peasant carts all converged on Mondays for the week’s market, where — under a fragrant cloud of garlic, freshly tanned sheepskins, sharp cheeses, the smoke of machorska tobacco and cheap rotgut, cooking oil and cow dung — everything under the sun was sold and bought, from cowhides and calico kerchiefs to rusty padlocks, coachmen’s whips, embroidered linen shirts, mouth organs, chickens bundled together by their feet, butter on coltsfoot leaves, baskets of eggs, sandals (the heavy opankas of the region) made of cut-up rubber tires, pocket knives, lambskin caps and innumerable other things of the greatest variety. Under the blue of the open sky, this motley, multifaceted scene resembled nothing so much as one of those drip paintings by Jackson Pollock and, at the same time, the wildly confused swarming of an anthill. There Jews haggled for used clothing, Armenians bought corn, linen rolls and skeins of wool by the carload, while Lipovanians hawked their beautiful fruit and shoemakers vaunted their while-you-wait services. Huzule women would get into a violent squabble with a gaggle of Swabians from Bistriţa; drunks beat up on each other; the blind, lame and leprous went begging; gypsies fiddled, while crafty monte players, shuffling two black aces and one red ace with hypnotizing speed from one side to the other and back again, extracted hard-earned pennies from gaping rustic simpletons as easily as did the ubiquitous pickpockets hustling in the thick of the crowd, always anxiously on the lookout for the police who, at any moment, could arrest them or extract horrendous bribes from them. It had been a place of the most intense life, teeming and full of pungent ferment, the navel of that cosmopolis which Czernowitz was in a much more literal sense than many a world capital.

At present this civic rectangle is a concrete-covered parade ground, wide, empty and painstakingly scrubbed. Yet not entirely gray on gray: one of its narrow sides, where the square slopes down toward the suburb of Klokuczka, has been taken over completely by a gigantic, glaring red billboard. Jumping out from the crimson background in richly golden yellow is a huge, severely stylized portrait of Lenin, dwarfing the four- and five-storied houses on the long sides of the square. A few dozen marching paces in front of it, a handful of notables were sitting at a long table, half of them in uniform, their epaulets glittering with stars, the women among them with blond hair permed in aspiring-Hollywood-starlet fashion. Another two dozen marching paces in front of the rostrum, three military bands had taken up position, each under the command of a bulbous drum major, and one after the other competing in the performance of jaunty marches and musical favorites both cheerful and solemn.

I was told that I was witnessing a competition among garrison bands. Any number of regiments and various branches of the armed services were represented in their parade uniforms. It was a colorful scene, and each band, in addition to playing its regular program, sought to distinguish itself by some optional virtuoso piece, from the Radetzky March by way of the Andreas Hofer tune all the way to the overture of Der Freischütz — in a word, Russian popular music. This had already lasted all morning, a Sunday morning to boot, and I would have surmised that such a performance was bound to attract a fair crowd of onlookers. Yet only a few passersby stopped briefly to look and listen — even when, toward the end, some battalions paraded by in historical uniforms, soldiers of the imperial army that had triumphed over Napoleon, and — less colorful but eerily scary in aardvarklike camouflage — of the forces that had subdued the armies of Hitler. The performance concluded with groups of dancers in regional costume, but these so obviously came from the property department of the local theater that in this place where only a few decades ago such brightly variegated garb could be seen every day and everywhere, they aroused no interest at all.