Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

I too, the foreigner, clearly recognizable as such by clothing and comportment, aroused no interest. No curious glances were cast my way and no sign gave me to understand that I might in any way be conspicuous. It was as if I were transparent or simply did not exist. The feeling of on the one hand being very much and undeniably at home in this place, and on the other being half a century and a whole world removed from it now intensified into the irreal density of dreamed reality. I was there and yet I was not. I dreamed while fully awake — I dreamed not only this tangibly real town but also myself in it. Thus removed from my usual placement in either space or time, I started out to search for the house of my childhood. Let me anticipate right away the outcome: of all the houses in Czernowitz, of which not a stone seemed out of place, my house was the only one missing.

The house of a childhood lying half a century in the past in any case is a mostly airy structure. It consists more of views in and out of it than of solid walls: of partial views of corners, nooks and crannies, certain pieces of furniture, foregrounds and backgrounds — in short, something fragmentary, like the disparate sets in a film studio for a movie shot from the perspective of a knee-high nipper. Nevertheless I well knew — and still know — that our house had been just beyond what had then been the outermost periphery of the city, set in a large garden and giving out on three sides to open countryside. I knew — and still know — that like innumerable other neoclassical villas of its kind, its façade was supported by columns with a narrow terrace crowned by a tympanumlike gable, and that a glassed-in porch at the back looked toward the depth of the garden. It had been reached by a long street bordered by many gardens, Garden Street, in the so-called villa district of the town. I found the street without difficulty. It too was unchanged — at least for most of the way. Of dreamlike surreality, just as I had left it fifty-three years earlier, it ran between two rows of prosperous one-family houses of the kind that had incited Karl Emil Franzos to compare them to cottages in the Black Forest. Some of them greeted me as fond memories; some others, lining the street where in my own time there had been vacant lots, upset me: I knew they had not been there before, but I could not deny their factual presence. They showed no stylistic characteristic, no particular newness or lesser degree of wear and tear to differentiate them from their neighbors. No historical feature distinguished them — neither a nationally emphasized particularity denoting Romanian sovereignty in architectural terms, nor any signs of fifty years of Communist housing precepts. Back of the lilac bushes and mulleins in their front gardens, these houses, in all the idyllic romanticism extolled by Franzos, ivy-clad up to the gables, oriels and bartizans, challenged my presumption that they could not have been built in the same global period of irreality as the rest of Chernovtsy. I began to lose the unerring determination with which I had been seeking my objective. This Garden Street had become longer by a third, just as in a dream a familiar path lengthens into endlessness. And when I finally did reach the end, there, before my very eyes, rose row after row of twelve-, fourteen- and sixteen-story high-rises blocking the view of what had been open country.

I should have expected this. It was logically consistent: when considering the steep slope down to the Prut River valley which encircles much of the city, this was the reasonable and indeed sole direction in which it could have expanded — and that it would have expanded in fifty-three years I had anticipated. In any case the city had grown with an astounding mindfulness of what had been there in the past — in a spirit of such careful preservation that the results transposed me to a no-man’s-land in time and into a state somewhere between dreaming and the most acute wakefulness. Not only did everything from my own time remain untouched, but the additions made to it were heavily reminiscent of that period. All the harder was it, therefore, to accept that only the house of my childhood was omitted from this reverential preservation of the past. I clearly remembered that from our southeastern windows one had a view of the poplars lining Transylvania Avenue, leading straight through the open country all the way to the airy blue horizon: the path of my childhood’s deepest longings. And the road still existed, although its length could no longer be encompassed at a glance. No longer was it lined by poplars, their branches swarming with birds, but instead by residential blocks and shopping centers (in which only paltry goods were for sale). Between these and the squadron of high-rises, untidy tracts of land remained partly vacant and partly built up, haphazardly — here a student colony, there an orphanage (looking typically Romanian), here a home for the blind among some remains of tree groves, there some one-family houses of a size more appropriate for weekend cottages. In between, in front or behind, our house had once stood. But it was no longer. It had disappeared without a trace. It did not help to inquire after it. Everyone was as helpful as could be imagined, but no one knew it: they were too young or had come here too late or simply could not remember that far back. The more intense my search, the more hopelessly did I lose my way in the thickets of the unknown. After two days of unavailing inquiry and search, the house of my childhood had become a specter that haunted only my own mind.

To test whether I was not simply the victim of schizophrenic hallucination, I once more took up my search — but this time a search for my own self, and in the center of town. I looked for the town house where my mother had lived after separating from my father, with its big garden, unique relic of Czernowitz’s small-town and even rural past. And this house was still there. It stood, with gaps to its left and right, across from a quite substantial apartment house; but what once had been its garden now unfortunately lay under an expanse of concrete. What was more — and this seemed to defy logic — it somehow appeared to have shifted closer to the street. Its roof was covered with rusty sheets instead of shingles, and its walls, once hidden behind jasmine bushes, were naked and painted a horrid coffee-brown shade. The porch had disappeared. Here too, new buildings had materialized that had not been there during my time: all kinds of cozy little small-town cottages, as well as an already dilapidated factory built of yellow clinker bricks and a whole enfilade of cavelike dwellings reaching to the depth of the erstwhile garden. Again, there was not the slightest indication that all of this had not always been there, for the architectural styles were the same; everything seemed to have originated in the small-town past of Czernowitz and showed the same degree of shabby wear and tear.

I thought I was losing whatever remained of my mind: if anything had been built here since my own time, surely it had to be something more substantial than this proletarian colony! Even in the 1920s this piece of ground had been the object of lustful greed on the part of many real estate speculators and builders, all of whom my mother had heroically resisted. Since my mother’s “expatriation” in 1940, the ground had been ownerless. An impressive block of apartment houses could have been built in its place, something exemplary of Communist progress; there even would have been space for some greenery around. Whatever had prevented this? It couldn’t have been a historically preservative piety that saved the space for these dumps, which merely marred the neat image of the city. I could have sworn that they had not yet been there in 1936, but all appearances contradicted this sworn assertion. I could do nothing but affirm something completely implausible.