Gregor von Rezzori: Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

I have no hat; my hair is tousled by the wind. Smooth as a seal, my dachshund Max sits at my feet, worshipfully gazing up at me. He is my sole playmate and buddy, my friend, my comforter, in whom I find if not instant understanding then certainly unconditional love and unreserved approval of anything I do.

This photo does not exist — I must quickly point out — for I kept to myself so completely that no one could have snapped it; the schoolmates I have spoken of were now far away. Max and I bummed around the countryside near Czernowitz like a pair of tramps. Morally, too, we were rather footloose. We had a tacit agreement that any guinea hen venturing too far from its home coop was fair game; likewise any cat caught mousing in the furrows. Felines were my special prey, for, much to my sorrow, Max, despite all his other praiseworthy qualities, was not fierce. He would quite eagerly, indeed hysterically, rush at his game, but if it stood up to him, at the slightest nick on his nose he would turn tail, retreat yowling behind my heels, and yelp ignobly from his refuge. I comforted myself with the thought that he was still young and I was probably asking too much of him. Anyway, I carried a good slingshot and a handful of lead pellets in the pocket of my nonpolitical windbreaker, and my aim was almost as good as that of a circus marksman. Even the most tenacious tom reeled off in a daze when the bean-sized bullet struck his skull. Max then had a much easier time of it.

Today, dogs and cats share my home peaceably. But in those days I regarded the enmity between them as a law of nature; and, being a dog-lover, I was of course a cat-hater. I was the son of a man to whom hunting meant everything; the necessity of annihilating prey was as established a fact for me as the categorical imperative was for my teachers; and everyone knows that in shooting grounds, cats are pests. As for attacking the guinea fowl, that was a deliberate iniquity, an act of defiance. Raised according to the strictest rules of sportsmanship, I found a painful satisfaction in being a chicken thief. I was flouting the etiquette of venery, thus to a certain extent sullying my father’s name. For the sheaf of thoughtfully severe punishments that were to make me conscious of my waywardness included, alas, the penalty of not being allowed to go hunting with my father. Every spring and summer since early boyhood, I had been permitted to accompany my father in the seasonal cycle of sporting joys: tracking woodcock and snipe at Eastertide, and, in my summer vacations, stalking bucks. Then, later, growing more robust, I had occasionally been taken along on the principal part of the annual hunt, during the rutting season of the deer in autumn and the wild-boar hunt in winter. But now I ran, straight out of Czernowitz and then on aimlessly cross-country, to escape the afflicting temptations that would have been unendurable at home: the nostalgic images of the mountain forests where my father hunted, resounding with the mating cries of blackcocks and woodcocks along the margins of the forests and, when everything was green again, the billy goats’ gamboling in the first summer heat, the air alive with dancing gnats. This year, I was forbidden these pleasures.

The stubblefields underfoot were still wet from snow that had only recently melted away. Buds were gleaming on the brookside willows, and you could count on your fingers the days remaining until spring: the buds would soon be breaking open into furry catkins, the sky would be blue again and striped with wet white clouds, the cuckoo would be calling everywhere. But I was chained to my guilt. My moral delinquencies were not the only sins I had to make amends for. I dragged around the syllabus I had missed and now had to make up as a convict the iron ball on his ankle. I knew — after all, it was droned into me every day — that if I passed the makeup exam in the fall, I would be reprieved: that is I would have one last chance for scholastic rehabilitation. Even though I knew this would mean nothing but one more year of boarding-school exile, far from home, far from my beloved country, from hunting, and from my dachshund Max, I was nevertheless resolved to do everything in my power to pass this examination.

My power was woefully dissipated, however. Outside, a thawing wind blew through tree branches which, still bare and transparent, were spun into the silky gray of the sky. I could hear the blackbirds panicking at twilight, drops falling, mice rustling in the dry leaves around the underbrush — all the small noises that almost startle a hunter when he listens for a sign of his prey.… I sat in my room, in front of my schoolbooks, absorbing not a word of what I read, not the simplest question. Seeking a surrogate for the missing hunting ventures with my father, I had plunged into hunting literature with all the passion of a starved imagination; soon, without quite realizing it myself, I was able to read in the original the classic French book on hunting by Gaston de Foix. But this achievement had garnered me no praise or even recognition. On the contrary: it was now considered proven that sheer wickedness rather than genuine slow-wittedness made me unwilling to fulfill my duties. This, in turn, embittered me so deeply that I gave up deciphering old French texts and did nothing but run around in the open air, with skushno in my heart.

The dynamics of such pedagogical quarrels are well known. The case histories are all too similar, and I need not bother to narrate mine in greater detail. Soon salvation came from relatives — an elderly, childless couple who put an end to the lamentations about me for the time being. They offered to take in the problem child for the summer.

Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie had been told about me early on, and about the progress, or rather problems, I was making. My parents were not without an ulterior motive: legacy-angling, I suppose, for these kin had no closer family ties than us and they were well to do. They lived in the country — more precisely, they lived as feudal lord and lady in one of those out-of-the-way hamlets with tongue-twisting names which, on maps of the European southeast, make the riverine regions along the Prut or Dniester seem like civilized territories. One should not forget, of course, the immensity of that territory, as well as the quite discordant and not always deeply rooted kind of civilization one finds there. East and West meet there unchanged in architecture, language, and customs, even in the smallest village. But I was born and bred in that part of the world, so I did not expect a walled town rich in gables and oriels, with arched sandstone arcades around the Roland’s fountain in the town-hall square. And I knew that my uncle and aunt were not to be pictured as the baron and baroness of an ivy-covered stronghold towering over such a scene.

The townlet in which my relatives lived and where they were the most important employers was a settlement in the marches of colonial territory on the European continent — it had sprung up out of windblown cultural sand, as it were, and would melt away again. Especially at night, when you approached it from a distance, its forlornness under the starry sky touched you to the quick: a handful of lights scattered over a flat-topped hill at the bend of a river, tied to the world solely by the railroad tracks, which glistened in the goat’s milk of the moonlight. The firmament was as enormous as the huge mass of the earth, against whose heavy darkness these signals of human presence asserted themselves with a bravery that could scarcely be called reasonable. The sight was poignant in a sentimental way, like certain paintings of Chagall’s. With skushno in the heart, one could experience it as devastatingly beautiful.

During the day, the town was generally stripped of such poetry. It consisted of a rustic depot and a few zigzagging streets trodden into the loam and lined with plain houses, some with gardens, as in a village, and some stark by the roadside and covered with sheet metal to eye level. Thistles and scrubby camomile ran riot along the verge of open ditches; swarms of sparrows twittered in the hazel bushes along the fences and scuffled over the straw clusters in the stable dung that lay randomly at farm gates. Wheel tracks of heavy carts, often drawn by oxen, cut deep into the dust or mire, depending on the season. At the point where the tracks ran together, in a square of chestnut trees around a thinly graveled marketplace, a building presented itself to the main road, its façade plastered with posters and announcements from the front steps all the way up to the gutters under the roof. This town hall was a stereotypical municipal administration building; its gable bore a stumpy tower from whose skylight window a flag dangled on national holidays. Three shops lurked around the square, waiting for customers; on market days, a tavern with a bakery was packed with peasants, who had driven their cartloads of pigs, calves, poultry, and vegetables in from the countryside; the apothecary’s shop announced itself by way of a hanging lamp, in the form of a glass red cross, within a stone’s throw of the street urchins.