Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

At the end of the main road, the vanishing point of its short perspective, lay a fenced-in plot; behind boxwood boskets, neglected for decades, where dozens of roving cats napped, loomed an edifice built of delicately assembled bright-red bricks. Startling, crazy — turreted, merloned, and orieled — it had a sheet-metal roof with edges serrated like a doily and dragon-head gargoyles at each eave, and it was richly decked out with pennons, halberds, and little weather vanes. This was the “villa” of the physician Dr. Goldmann. A showpiece of architectural romanticism from the 1890s, it was proffered as a curiosity by Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie to anyone visiting for the first time. Next to the down-to-earth toy-brick box of the Armenian Catholic church and the plain domical synagogue, the only other sight worth seeing was the lovely old onion-tower church of the Orthodox monastery, set in a grove of spruces on the gentle hilltop. All these buildings stood shamelessly, as it were, under a sky that, heedless of human vanity, stretched eastward to the Kirghiz Steppe and way beyond to Tibet. On weekdays, the place was almost lifeless, if we disregard the straggling gangs of lice-ridden Jewish children who romped among the sparrows in the dusty roads.

In the summer, the sun burned mercilessly upon the bare rooftops, and the air over them quivered blurrily. In winter, biting frost took the world into its white tongs, icicles barred the small windows of the houses, and in the river meadow the trees stood as if spun out of glass. At times — mostly unexpected — something picturesque erupted: a Jewish funeral, for instance, when, like dark, bizarre flowers, male shapes in long black caftans and red fox-fur caps suddenly emerged from the ground among the skew and sunken gravestones, under the pale birches and weeping willows of the small, out-of-the-way Jewish cemetery. Some of these figures were slightly hunched, with speech as soft and hoarse as if they were about to clear their throats, and they had long earlocks and white or chestnut beards; others had gaping eyes and heads thrown back, framed by the blazing fox-fur caps, and protruding abdomens and loud voices. Or, on the anniversary of the saint who lay in an embossed silver coffin at the Orthodox church, the monastery courtyard and the grove in front of it filled with male and female peasants wearing gaudily embroidered blouses, lambskin jackets, and laced sandals, with carnations behind their ears or in their strong white teeth. The polyphonic chanting of the monks alternated with the droning of the Talmud students at the synagogue.

Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie’s house lay like a baronial manor at the edge of the village. Although the entrance could be locked, the huge wrought-iron gate was usually open and the driveway lay free under huge old acacias. A spacious courtyard, framed by lindens, separated the house from the farm buildings and stables and a small brewery that was operated along with the farm. In back you could hear the rustling of the beeches and alders, the spruces, birches, and mountain ash of a spacious park that merged imperceptibly into the open countryside.

I had known this estate since childhood, and I felt as much at home here as in my parents’ house and garden in Czernowitz, or as in the Carpathian hunting lodge where I was no longer allowed to visit. I especially loved to stay with my relatives because I had been allowed to spend vacations here, sometimes even for several months when my mother’s physicians diagnosed her as needing rest — exceptional periods, in any case, which in childhood are always taken to be festive. For my relatives, my sporadic visits were just rare and brief enough for them to enjoy me. When the problems of my upbringing arose, Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie were downright astonished, not without a gentle suggestion that perhaps one should take into account a certain inadequacy in the educational methods, if not in the educators themselves: “Why, that’s absolutely incredible. The boy is so sweet and merry and well behaved with us, such a sensible child, so good-natured and obedient. This sort of thing could never happen in our home.”

No wonder, then, that for me, Aunt Sophie’s exceedingly ample bosom, tightly laced and covered by dependably sportive blouses and rough tweed jackets, signified warm maternalism far more than did my mother’s elegant and poetically sentimental, unfortunately all too high-strung, untouchability. And Uncle Hubert, too, represented in my early years something incomparably more stable, more focused on concrete things, hence more calming, than my father’s increasingly gloomy, increasingly disillusioned day-dreams, as he fled deeper and deeper into his monomaniacal passion for the hunt.

Of course, Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie themselves inhabited a disunited world. The remote spot in the eastern borderland of the former Habsburg — and hence ancient Roman — Empire where they played the role of virtual cultural viceroy was located at a meeting point (or chafing point, if you will) between two civilizations. One, the Western, had not endured long enough to bless the land and people with more than an infrastructure (as it would be called today) geared to technological colonization; it had then promptly girded itself to destroy what little there was of the indigenous culture. The other, likewise at the defenseless mercy of the steppe winds from the east, opposed the Western in the spirit of a fatalistic resignation to destiny; but along with that it had, alas, a propensity for letting things go, run to seed, degenerate into slovenliness. Still, both Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie were of a piece — prototypical provincial aristocrats such as can be found in Wales or the Auvergne, in Jutland or Lombardy: by no means narrow-minded, much less uneducated, in some respects even surprisingly enlightened; yet an easygoing life in secure circumstances and natural surroundings, a life of clear-cut duties and constantly reiterated tasks, gave their thoughts and emotions, their language and conduct, a simplicity that might easily strike a casual observer as simplemindedness. The very next look would suffice — at least in the case of my relatives — to ascertain a discreet warmheartedness and a deeply humane tact, which in more sophisticated types are not necessarily the rule.

It was taken for granted that not a single word would be spoken to remind me of my duty to cram for my makeup examination. My uncle and aunt tacitly assumed I would do this of my own accord, with my own common sense — and my own ambition. When and how was left entirely up to me. For the moment at least, I was officially on vacation; I could sleep as long as I liked and loaf about wherever I wished. I had been given permission to bring my dachshund Max, and Uncle Hubert spoke with such lively and joyous anticipation of the annual quail and snipe hunt to take place later in the summer that no doubts assailed me as to whether I would be allowed to go along. There was only one thing that I could take as a gentle admonition — and it only heightened my bliss: instead of putting me near Aunt Sophie’s bedroom, as they had in earlier years, they put me into the so-called tower with Max. “You’ll be more undisturbed here,” they said, without the least suggestion of a hint.

The tower, naturally, was no tower. This was the name for makeshift quarters located over the brewery office and accessible from the garden by way of a steep ladder. During the great winter hunts, out-of-town guests were housed here, especially Uncle Hubi’s most intimate bachelor friends: sportsmen who could drink anyone under the table. For the rest of the year, the tower normally remained empty. Its three garret rooms strung out under the eaves, where a dusty smell of disuse and infrequent ventilation lingered, enjoyed a legendary reputation. There was talk of events that were better merely hinted at in the presence of children, although, of course, everyone knew these were mostly humorous exaggerations. Yet they kept popping up over and over again, if only as jocosely cited proof of Aunt Sophie’s sympathetic and comradely tolerance and her model teamwork marriage with Uncle Hubert.