The Snows of Yesteryear (14 page)

Yet all the images I have from that period are of an incomparable well-being—not a corporeal and even less an emotional one: we were more frequently unhappy than happy and more often rebelling against repression than enjoying a feeling of freedom. But even our unhappy times were filled with a self-assurance that I cannot ascribe to any other source than the innocence of life—not merely the innocence of childhood, nor the lighter emotional freight of an era not yet so guilt-ridden as the present, but rather and in large part the innocence of my mother. Her restlessness, her volatility, her occasional unfairness and even her rage and her almost vindictive manner in meting out punishments were all the result of a desperate attempt to realize an ideal, namely that of the perfect maternal head of family (irrespective of the fact that the paterfamilias refused to play the obligatory counterpart role), so everything she did, whatever its surface appearance, stood under a kind of ethical blessing. All her actions, even the most aberrant ones, were undertaken with pure intentions and to the best of her knowledge and belief. While in other households likenesses of the Madonna might hang on the walls—or nowadays portraits of Che Guevara, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Pope John XXIII—our youth was dominated, so to say, by a lithograph of the categorical imperative. Our well-being was rooted in the security of ethical and moral incontestability, whatever objections may be raised to the methods used in our upbringing.

This sharp blade of pure intent was hardly ever wielded by my mother with unadulterated logic. Yet strangely enough, everyone submitted to her, even my father. Nannies and governesses were as powerless against her as we: they groaned and called on their maker to witness the extent of so much senselessness—her outlandish directions, her eccentric regulations regarding attire and nourishment—but almost always yielded to her. That one should not eat crawfish in the months whose names are spelled with an
r
is a generally acknowledged rule; but that in those months one was also prohibited from sitting on the bare ground or on a stone because vapors emanating from the soil generated infantile paralysis was a belief singular to our own family hygiene. Governesses with different notions about the physical strengthening of their charges either shrugged in resignation and conformed or were replaced by others who cared less for their own ideas than for gaining respite from their employer. To drink a glass of cold water when one was overheated was fatal. Melons and figs were the source of pernicious gastric fevers; we were allowed to eat them only when we had reached adolescence. Even when we thought of ourselves as grown-up, it would have been out of the question for us to drive even a short distance in an open car without wearing fur coats and hermetically fitting leather driving caps—and this too in the blast-oven heat of Romanian summers.

Little by little these quaint fancies, once seen merely as gratuitously imposed torments, began to erode the ethical and moral certainty of our world. In the face of one of my mother's extravagant fantasies, the commitment to the categorical imperative began to yield to a skeptical impatience bordering on cynicism. I recall a dramatic scene at one of the mountain lakes we used to visit for our “aestival recoveries.” I was almost thirteen and had taken the liberty—imagine it!—of renting a rowboat on my own and of rowing out alone on the lake. When I returned to our hotel, my sister, with bloodless lips, told me that my mother had locked herself in her room to commit suicide.

I have to confess that this threat did not really alarm me. It had been used in the past—once, for instance, when I had come home from ice-skating after dark, even though I should have known that the most baneful vapors rose in winter after the setting of the sun; and another time when I secretly had acquired a magazine that today would be considered a harmless family journal but was then regarded as the vilest pornography because it contained drawings of scantily dressed ladies and photographs of bare bosoms. So I sat down quite unconcernedly on the hotel terrace and waited for the return of my sister, who had hastened to my mother's room and surely would be summoning me for sentencing. Half an hour and then a full hour went by without anything happening, and the fear rose in me that this time the threat might have been carried out. I could not stand it any longer on the terrace, but when I reached the lobby I was stopped by the concierge: my mother and sister had departed, he told me.

The embarrassed expression on his face was hardly needed to make me perceive the hoax. I calmly returned to the terrace. My earlier experiences had made me callous. The only thing that hurt was that my sister had allowed herself to be party to these shenanigans.

Occasional vacations on the Black Sea also offered opportunities for my mother's threats of self-immolation, her sharpest pedagogical means. The beach at Mamaia, where today a phalanx of horrendous tourist caravansaries of crumbling concrete provokes nature (only meagerly favored, as it is, with a bit of sea and sand and dune grass there) to lament her lost innocence, then—I speak of the end of the 1920s—was an empty expanse, excepting two or three bathing huts and a wooden pier, of miles of golden sand and tiny pink shells. This fine-grained sand, several yards deep, was blown landward into high dunes behind which lay the then still deserted steppe of the Dobrudja, and on the other side sloped imperceptibly into the sea, so that one waded for miles through shallows before the water reached one's navel. My mother nervously patrolled the glittering edge of the sleepily lapping waves. Her kidney ailment forbade her to enter the water. Our supervisory Cerberus of the moment, usually one of the dubiously English governesses from Smyrna or Gibraltar who were supposed to enrich our linguistic knowledge (the subtle differences in intonation of the English o in the sentence: “O Homer, what homage do we owe you!''), was sent out to the end of the pier to watch our doings from there. It would have been simpler had she come into the water with us to carry out this supervision, but my mother did not trust these ephemeral guardians, usually replaced after only a few weeks, to be conscientious, and believed they might not watch us if they were allowed to indulge in the pleasure of bathing. Posted as lookouts at the end of the pier, they were obliged to scan the sea while my mother, intent on protecting our books and toys, the beach umbrella, the plaids, the picnic basket and all the other paraphernalia from the thievery of roaming gypsies, ran to and fro, calling and signaling, all the more frantically the farther we moved out to sea: “a hen who has hatched ducklings,” as she put it. Whenever she lost sight of us because we finally had reached water deep enough actually to swim in and when occasionally a wave covered our bathing caps, she alerted the miss or mademoiselle on the pier. If she was unable to obtain reassuring news of our condition forthwith, perhaps because Miss was engaged in a flirtation with a passing Lothario in bathing trunks, she sent the lifeguard to rescue us or, when he soon refused to pay heed to her repeated panicky alarums, the next-best complaisant bather.

In the weeks we spent at the sea, she surely must have become a locally well-known character, gently derided by all. Mamaia was anything but an elegant beach resort, yet she comported herself as if we were in Biarritz. She must have seemed a grotesque figure, running along the beach in her inappropriately elegant sleeveless bathing costume, between the puddles of seawater and the reeds, among the rinds of sucked-out watermelons and the spat-out sunflower seeds, protected from the burning sun by a parasol and a Florentine straw hat, legs singed to the same pink as the little shells crunching under her bathing pumps, in her arms a pack of magazines and bathing towels to have ready when we emerged. Years later an eyewitness described her for us, still shaking his head in wonderment: a maverick personality, indulging in bizarre gesticulations and signals, in calls, instructions and admonitions, in tweets and wails from a specially acquired marine whistle, in beckonings with bare hands, with a newspaper or towel, in the sounding of the ice cream vendor's bell—all in the forlorn hope of luring her brood back from the perilous watery element to the safety of solid ground. She made us so ashamed that we acted as if we did not belong to her. Ignoring her turmoil, we only increased it. We suffered from her ridiculous, irritating and pitiful appearance but could see in it only what was ridiculous and irritating without, in the cruelty of youth, feeling pity. The creature who was made to feel this most painfully was Bonzo, our mother's French bulldog, who could not console us for the separation from our own dogs. With his ruff collar of boar's bristles, he looked as pompously morose as a Protestant church deacon, and we baptized him in the highly saline waters of the Black Sea whenever we could get ahold of him.

At that time my mother was a fully blossomed and very attractive young woman, no longer slim and lissome, yet for all that the more feminine. This was the age of flat-chested flappers, smoking cigarettes in foot-long holders with their hair lacquered to their heads as tightly as our own rubber bathing caps; fads in Romania led to modish excesses only too easily imagined. She used to lament her own unfashionableness: “It seems my fate always to be out of fashion,” she would say. “When Wagnerian Valkyries were all the rage, I was a slim slip of a girl. Now, among no one but nymphs and amazons, I am a full-bosomed frump.” But she knew well enough that many appreciated this. I too found her highly attractive. I liked to be seen with her, for part of the flattering remarks directed at her fell my way. (“Who could have credited you with such a grown-up son ...?”) That she would make scenes worthy of the stage because of trifling occurrences; that she threatened self-immolation because I had eaten vanilla ice cream when everyone knew it was toxic; that she was oversensitive, neurotic, prone to migraines and capable of imposing severe punishments, all this I found natural. It seemed to belong to the image of “the lady.” A lady's original ethical qualities, as sketched by the medieval minnesingers, had long been supplanted by those nervously aesthetic ones defined by D'Annunzio (actually, their true prototype originated with Pitigrilli). Be that as it may, all kinds of pathos, exaggerations and idées fixes, emotional blackmail by means of ailments, suicide or at least expressions of deep grief, belonged for me to the vital signs of the species Woman; they probably had something to do with menstruation, which soon also became a concern of my sister. The concept of “woman” for me was synonymous with “crazy wrongheadedness,” and it may well be that this had something to do with why, later on, love seemed to me the very essence of irrationality.

Love also appeared to me highly fickle and unreliable, not to be trusted, since it might be forfeited at any time by the slightest offense and bestowed instead on someone worthier. I once confessed to my mother that, until quite late in my life, I interpreted any love shown to me in this way and as a consequence had never been able to love in return, except in a provisional manner, revocable at any moment. And when I attempted to link this to the fact that in my childhood the usual punishment for misbehavior consisted in the instant withdrawal of love, she was deeply hurt—not because of the implied reproach but because she saw it as a degrading of her pedagogic ethos. Indeed, her way of punishing was infinitely more serious than the usual petty “Shame on you, you're a bad boy, Mommy no longer loves you!” Catholic as she was, she punished with a puritanically severe conscience. The emotional freeze into which even the most tender harmony could metamorphose from one moment to the next as the result of a childish misdeed was much more than feigned abnegation: it was the bona fide sentencing of a reprobate, the final verdict, like the stroke of the stick across her back in her youth. Behind it stood not only herself as mother and authority figure, but her own father, embodiment of all the ideals of family, caste and civilized human society.

Whatever wrong I did—a disobedience, an impudence against a governess, an assault against my sister or a failing in school—I was made to understand that a human being capable of such ignominy no longer could count on the indulgence of his fellow beings; he was to be expelled from their community. One of the worst offenses of which I became guilty also made me deeply ashamed of myself, albeit not as expected. Precociously engrossed in erotic dreams, I had been writing love letters to myself, as if these had been addressed to me by various girls. My mother, who felt duty-bound to check on everything, managed to find the letters in their hiding place and was outraged. She believed me capable of leading the double life the letters suggested, in which I indulged—God alone would know how, when and where—in lively sexual activities. As to me, I was mortified by this revelation of my secret inner life. She had found me out as an ignominious fraud. I do not exaggerate when I declare that, barely ten years old, I already was considered a failure and felt myself as such; I was all the more crestfallen since, even as a monster, I could not achieve anything so remarkably wicked or loathsome to warrant a
real
suicide.

As children and even more so as headstrong adolescents, my sister and I were of course unable to grasp that what, between us, we bluntly called Mother's “nuttiness” was in reality the tragicomedy of an obsolete pedagogic principle. The strictness of her own upbringing had established for her a world cast in primer-like simplicity, which contained no real human beings but merely standard roles whose comportment was assigned irrespective of individuality, character, temperament or nervous disposition. It was the world concept of a stable social order, a world of stereotypes: a peasant was unmistakably a peasant, a sailor a sailor, and a privy councillor was forever nothing but a privy councillor; any deviation into the specifically individual was a step toward chaos.

Especially in the picture of the family, which was known to be the germinal nucleus of all civilization, the stereotypes stood in firmly ordered rows. What a “father” or a “mother” had to be, or a “sister” or a “brother,” or a “husband” or “wife,” was rigidly determined; it had its own costume and certainly its own prescribed text, just as in a stage play. Whoever deviated from this predetermined role, a role reduced to its most essential or trivial elements, or whoever went so far as to forget the assigned role altogether, was not merely reprehensible but downright evil. This was the case with her own husband, who refused to play the role of the competent and kind, affectionate and considerate paterfamilias, and therefore took on for her all the characteristics of an egocentric and inconsiderate, beastly and lustful proprietor of a conscripted slave wife. Paradoxically, this nonconformity extended to herself, for she recognized her own failings. She felt only too acutely that she was no match for my father's full-bloodedness and consequently that she was a failure as his “life partner,” as much as in her hackneyed notion of the role of mother, in which no one, least of all we children, took her seriously. The harder she tried to embody the image of the heroic mother (heroic pediatrician sacrificing herself to shield her brood from the diabolical perils of disease, death and moral decay), the more piteously her efforts miscarried.