The Snows of Yesteryear (15 page)

Yet there was often something deeply touching about these efforts. Decades later, as a grandmother, she still could not desist from her heartrending solicitude. She showered on my youngest son all her nurturing and pedagogic instincts, which his brothers had repelled as meanly as I myself had disdained them toward the end of my childhood. So that he would not sit on bare ground while playing, she had the carpenter of the village where we happened to be living at the time—once more as refugees — fashion a diminutive stool that she then carried faithfully after him whenever she could not persuade him to lug it himself. His playmates' derision may have strengthened his personality but certainly did not contribute to making it more affectionate. For my sons, especially the youngest one, she resurrected many aspects of her relationship with my father, and they were pathetically moving, for example, the darning of their clothes: she had always been shocked by the heedlessness with which my father wore his hunting clothes, and she would secretly weave and repair, as invisibly as possible and with her own hair, the rips in his rough tweeds and donegals. She certainly did not love my father, but this gesture of almost medieval marital devotion expresses her ineffectual conception of her supposed duties, even those she assigned to herself like a curse.

Ironically—if one cares to impute such literary subtlety to the existential drama—the years of her unhappy marriage and anxiety-ridden maternity may well be counted as her most fulfilled ones. She had not yet quite lost her girlish charm and she preserved something of that magic of vulnerability which disarms criticism. “She is ailing, after all,” it would be said. Or, “She just takes everything too seriously; she places everything in a tragic light; she is haunted by her sense of maternal duty''—all of which was true. Whenever she managed to loosen the desperate grip of her conscientiousness, when she was abandoned in thoughts of something outside her rage-distorted imaginings — especially if this something would bring pleasure to us children — her forlorn poetic inspiration would reappear. No one knew how to give presents as well as she, showing moving empathy for the most secret wishes, dreams and fantasies of the receiver, and each of her gifts was a truly treasured thing. Festivals like Christmas, Easter or birthdays were so blissful in my childhood they could never be reproduced in later years. Her benevolent spirit also carried over to everyday life: the memory of our nursery is filled for me with a sensation of freshness and luminosity, a fastidious cleanliness and restful quiet, broken only occasionally by happy or belligerent noise, a combined sensation which even today represents for me the incarnation of all desirable well-being.

In her lovable moments she was as seductive as the most supportive woman could ever be. Once, on one of our confused summer sojourns on the Black Sea—we were alone together, as my sister had been allowed to go with my father to the Moldavian monasteries—I found myself in Constanţa in front of a shop window that displayed the embodiment of all boyhood's longings: the model of a steamboat, accurate in all its details, with tiny life buoys hanging on its dinghies, innumerable portholes between the decks, a captain's bridge with lifelike miniatures of the rudder, binnacle and other technical sophistications—in short, perfection, the faultless reproduction of reality on a reduced scale. I was ready to give my life for it. I promised anything that would ever be requested of me: limitless consumption of Formamint and permanganate; ready acceptance of wool scarves and coats for the evening breezes; stringent respect for the prescribed limit beyond which I was prohibited to swim; even the renunciation of a white-bordered navy-blue blazer with brass buttons, the promise of which I already had wheedled out of my mother; generally, total future obedience if only I could call this model ship my own. Unfortunately it was not for sale; the display window in which it stood was not that of a toy shop but that of a steamboat agency.

The two Levantines who managed the agency—two olive-eyed gentlemen with remarkably heavy black moustaches and similarly luxuriant black hirsute growths on the back of their hands—had not counted on my own and my mother's persistence, however. For a few days I behaved like a howling dervish (I must have been a brat, incidentally), and for a few more days my mother exchanged telegrams with the steamship company. Shortly thereafter I paraded down to the pier, flushed with victory and clad in a white-bordered navy-blue blazer with brass buttons, the model ship clutched under my arm, accompanied by my indulgent mother, who allowed that for the price of the toy she could have bought herself a diamond ring. Held by her so as not to fall in, I lowered the precious model into the water—and watched with horror as it forthwith disappeared under the surface and sank like a stone, gluglugluglup, right to the bottom. When I straightened up and met my mother's eyes, something totally unexpected occurred: she burst into relieved and happily liberating laughter. Closely holding each other, we walked back to the casino esplanade to enjoy some ice cream. Decades later I tried imagining how different life for all of us might have been if only once she could have laughed like that with my father.

He may scarcely have known that facet of her nature—and, if at all, only in fugitive moments; the futile hope that these might occur more frequently could serve only to accentuate her less attractive qualities. Because his constant high spirits and his playfulness irritated her, her behavior with him emphasized her worst traits: harshness, triggered by mimosalike sensitive pride; intolerance, jaggedly sharpened by her grinding subterranean rage; jitteriness, grounded in her obsessive assumption of responsibilities and simultaneous dread of failing them; rigidity. I enumerate these features as if they made up a single, coherent character bundle. But this was not the case. It was rather as if, in response to a given irritant, she recovered one or another response from among the broken pieces of what once had been a homogeneous whole, an otherness shattered by a misspent life. Her harmonious and pleasing moments were its far-off echo; her harsh explosions stemmed from despair over its loss. At times, when she sought to take revenge—that is, when she punished—there emerged something truly diabolical in her.

The experience that made me callous enough to bear with pretended stoicism her suicide threat and the subsequent make-believe scenario of an alleged departure from that hotel in Velden, in Carinthia—a situation more likely to occur between lovers in the dramatics of D'Annunzio—that experience had occurred much earlier. She had experimented with this shock treatment on me in the first years after the war. In those days her anxiety for her children was at its peak, and she incarcerated us in the garden with corresponding severity. One time—and only this one, fervently enjoyed time—I found myself there without supervision. My sister was inside for lessons and even Cassandra was not close. I had been playing with an especially beautiful ball, decorated with circus scenes, given to me for my birthday. As a result of a clumsy throw, it rolled through the bars of the garden gate.... Outside stood a boy, older than I and—so it seemed to me—with the seductive mien of the street-wise urchin, holding the ball in his hands. It was useless to ask him to return it to me through the bars. “Come and get it,” he said, “then we'll play together.''

What he expected of me was monstrous. Was I to leave the garden and go out into the street to play there with this stranger, unkempt and so obviously irreverent? No doubt his games would be wilder—and more temptingly adventurous—than my own tame hopping around with a colored ball. But to give in to this temptation would be not merely to transgress a rigorous prohibition, but openly to rebel, wantonly to disavow the authorities safeguarding the laws of the universe. I felt my pulse hammering in my temples.

Derision glittered in his eyes. He doubted I could muster that much courage. I flung misgiving to the winds and slipped out. Immediately he dropped the ball and kicked it some hundred yards down the road. We ran after it. Of course, he reached the ball long before I did, and kicked it even farther away; when I finally caught up with him, only because he had waited for me, he dribbled the ball over my feet and sent it flying away in a flat curve. Thus we played—if one can call this a game—until we reached the edge of the city proper and its more populated streets. He continued to “play,” and soon I had lost all sight of him. I went on running desperately. I loved my ball: its vivid pictures of clowns and trained poodles, acrobats and jugglers inspired my fantasy, and it had been my mother's birthday gift to me. I dreaded to lose it. Almost worse was the disillusionment that I could have been betrayed so blatantly—for the first time in my life and obviously as punishment for my disobedience. In vain I searched for my treacherous playmate among the crowds and in the flow of vehicles. Soon I found myself in the center of Czernowitz on the Ringplatz, my heart filled with all the bitterness of the world: grief over the loss of my ball, dread of the evildoer weighing on me, and now, in addition, the fear of having lost my way without hope of return.

I must have been a pitiful sight. My long locks and velvet suit with lace collar—my much hated daily attire at the time — together with my tears, could not remain long unnoticed among the Jews in caftans, the coachmen slouching against their fiacres, the spur-jingling Romanian soldiers, the colorfully dressed peasant women with baskets of eggs on their heads, the rabbis and solid ethnic-German burghers in their stiff shirt-collars worn, according to local tradition, with wide knickerbockers and Tyrolean hats. Czernowitz was a city in which everyone knew almost everybody else. A gentleman who saw how obviously lost I was rescued me by putting me in a hackney coach and sending me home.

I found the garden empty and the house closed. All was silent; there was no sign of life. I knocked, I rattled the main door and hammered on it; all in vain. I ran around the house several times: all the doors were closed, the shutters were shut, and the Venetian blinds on the porch were lowered. I stood before each of the windows and called and called. For an instant I thought I saw the pale mask of my sister through the blinds of the French doors on the veranda, but it disappeared in a trice and must have been only an illusion. Desperately I called for my mother, Cassandra, the housekeeper Mrs. Hofmann, the maids and my dog Rauf. Silence. I was in a panicky sweat. Any neighbors were quite far off, and of those I knew only a Polish surgeon by the name of Dr. Buraczinsky. For some time I had been allowed to play with his son, but our friendship had fallen apart over a toy: a tin armored cruiser that ran on wheels. That something that belonged in the water should move on dry land by means of small concealed wheels as if it were on the high seas seemed to me as running against nature and worse than a fraud. Miroszju—the name of Buraczinsky junior—declared I was merely jealous. This was what had caused our breakup and since then we hadn't seen each other.

It was true I was jealous, though not of his fraudulent ship but rather of the freedom he enjoyed. He was allowed to play with other boys in the gardens of our district without having to fear that this would mean the end of the world. Yet he was well brought up and always kept within calling distance from his house: when, in the evenings, Mrs. Buraczinsky would pop out her head from the dormer window of their small villa and let a long-drawn-out “Mirooohszju!” reverberate in the smoky turquoise of the darkening summer skies, an obedient “
Proszju!
” (“Yes, please!'') could be heard from far away in reply, an exchange that, in my loneliness, always left me forlorn. The dutiful answer to the call for homecoming seemed to attest to a day's work done; I heard it as one condemned to idleness, excluded from the world of connecting activities and affectionate relationships that find expression in the interplay between a name and its echo. It was this that now came to mind in my moment of dire need. I ran to the Buraczinsky house, pushed Madame B. aside, scaled the stairs to the top floor, stuck my head out the window and yelled all the names of my missing family into the countryside. In my innermost core, I may have known, of course, that their disappearance was make-believe, but greater still was the fear that it was otherwise and that they had actually left house, city and country, forgetting me. I was only six years old. Madame Buraczinsky took me by the hand and led me back to our house, where she energetically rang the bell at the entrance; when it was finally opened, she delivered me to my mother with the strong recommendation not to play such jokes again at the expense of a child.

But my mother did not mean it as a joke; it was a punishment that was supposed to teach me a never-to-be-forgotten lesson. She achieved that goal—though probably with corollary effects that invaded my whole nervous system with fine-webbed ramifications. My father never heard of it. If he had, he surely would have dampened, in this one case, the jocularity with which he generally commented on my mother's pedagogic measures.

They separated after thirteen years of marriage, in 1922. It happened rather precipitately. One day our mother packed up her things and her children and brought us all to Vienna. Those came with us who, in any case, had been eager to leave the household in Czernowitz: her erstwhile and presently our own governess, Miss Lina Strauss; Mrs. Hofmann, our housekeeper, who for reasons of age returned to her native Bohemia. Cassandra remained behind, for my mother intended henceforth to keep me for herself alone.

My father let us leave in good faith. He expected us home after a few invigorating weeks at the Carinthian lakes and after some spiritual regeneration at the hands of our Viennese relatives. He was to be proven wrong. The choir of my mother's kin, which had always provided the tonal background for my mother's tribulations, as is traditional in tragedies (“exile under the yoke of slavery''), was jubilant: her sisters, whom the war and the hard years thereafter had made independent and self-sustaining, notwithstanding their consonance with the collective spirit of the family, had adopted the rhetoric of the new era. (Most of the catchwords so freely used by feminists today had already been hatched at that time.)