The Snows of Yesteryear (16 page)

My mother considered the war, the uncertain postwar period, the disintegration of the old world and the dawning of the new (from which, up to then, she had felt excluded) as penal extra aggravations to her imprisonment in marriage. She now heard this awakening call of the new spirit of the age from the mouths of her younger sisters as a clarion call promising final freedom. These nestlings seemed to her to be taking wing like a covey of larks flying toward the sun. That her barely grown-up youngest sister was to become an artisan in the newly formed Wiener Werkstätte seemed to her as bold and spirited as that the next youngest professed herself a theosophist; that the third youngest was a pioneer of women's rights; and the fourth, the eccentric bluestocking in the family, went so far as to endorse socialism. All these fresh, confusing breaths now blew in unison into the horn of emancipation, particularly that of the liberation from the marital yoke. A sensitive, high-minded and physically frail woman had been deprived of her right to a fulfilled emotional life and to social evolution; moreover, a passionately self-sacrificing mother had been saddled by a mentally unbalanced (the woolen ski cap!), monomaniacal (the hunting!) and amoral (lack of respect for his father-in-law!) egotist and brutal sensualist.

My grandmother somewhat reduced the ideologically high-flown polemics against the fiend who held her oldest daughter under the yoke of serfdom, by declaring that, yes, she too never had liked him but that, as a Catholic, she had to exclude any thought of divorce. My grandfather, on the other hand, already then in the habit of commenting on events around him only with abrupt barks, his decrepit head leaning on the spastically clutched crook of his cane, asserted bitterly that in view of the present proletarization of the whole world and the general decline in manners and morals, “nothing matters a damn anyway,” and everyone should do whatever he felt like doing or not doing. This was the backing with which my mother sued my father for divorce. With great understanding, my father did his best to facilitate the proceedings. The marriage was annulled with the provision that both parents were to share equally in the rights to the children. My sister and I coped with the confusion ensuing from this arrangement in the years to come with the patience of the much tried and with, of course, occasional outbursts of laughter.

It would have been understandable if my mother had used her freedom to start an entirely new and, if possible, active life in Vienna. But Vienna was desolate for her in those years; her parents, distraught over the loss of their fortune and the proletarization of their world as a result of war and inflation, led a very secluded life. She had grown out of her own family and had become alienated both from her parents and from her siblings, who were trying to adapt themselves to the times to an extent beyond her own capabilities. Also, she may have had already some inkling of what, twenty years later, was to become bitterly evident—namely, that her family's vaunted cohesion was merely rhetorical in nature and the cohabitation of all its members under one roof did not go as smoothly as one would have hoped in the case of like-minded, devoted kinfolk. Just about everyone in the family had either inherited or acquired by imitation from the head of the tribe his inflexibility, foremost his eldest daughter, our mother. Although forever conscious of her inadequacy, she, after all, had managed her own household for thirteen years, and it was unthinkable that she might conform to the stiflingly conventional concepts and customs of her family; even less was it to be expected that she could adapt to the radical new notions inherent in the spirit of the times. On the other hand, it was also out of the question for her to live alone. All unmarried daughters lived as a matter of course under the guardianship of the family and under the parental roof; now that she was once again unmarried, she was counted among them: the independence of a young divorcee—she was thirty-two at the time—was considered as something shady, almost disreputable.

She got off the horns of this dilemma by returning to the Bukovina. An admirer, the same who years later told me of her peculiar fascination, placed at her disposal a quaintly but tastefully furnished peasant's house in the midst of a magnificent landscape an hour's drive from Czernowitz. It was distinguished by an attractive collection of Romanian folk art, leather and ceramics, roughly woven rugs and hand-carved wooden table utensils, and by a total lack of bodily comforts. Even today my bones ache from the unforgivingly hard bedsteads, and I still can smell the sharp fumes from the hearth and the sooty clay of the open fireplace, the odors of rancid mutton fat, charred thyme, and garlic, and I am haunted still by the fly-infested lapidary hole provided in a wooden plank over the cesspool. But to my mother the little house, with its thick straw-covered roof, its crooked whitewashed loam walls, the rural knickknacks in the three small rooms, may have appeared as something playful out of a fairy tale, maybe even as an expression of emancipation, given the newfound taste for folklorica.

She could have moved to the Odaya. The rural property, from the estate of her Phanariot great-grandmother, belonged to us all—to her mother, to her and her siblings, and to all the grandchildren—and thus to no one in particular. Because it was in a remote location on the left bank of the Prut River and was not productive—a few Easter lambs and some Christmas carp from a muddy pond were among its meager farm produce — it was despised as not worth the price of its upkeep. All the same, the house was there, on the estate that in 1909 had been intended to shelter my mother's new family and whence we had fled the Russians in 1914. In Romanian,
odaya
means “room,” and I did not know that the word derives from an older one meaning “estate,” or “property''; I didn't understand why such a fairly spacious building and the holdings around it had the name. Perhaps it was a term used only within the family, but in any case, the factual anonymity indicates how little pride of ownership was involved when we spoke of it. Even my father did not think much of it: as part of his bride's dowry, he had considered it almost insultingly puny, even though he liked to shoot hares and ducks in the wetlands of the Prut. Mother's hatred of it was unconcealed; for her, it represented exile, the scene of all the horrors of her first marital years, whence she had fled as often and for as long as possible to Switzerland and Egypt. It was there, in the Odaya, that, in danger of her life and under great pains, she had borne my sister and, in the attempt to avoid repeating that ordeal, had almost lost me. She had never thought it worthwhile to bother about its furnishings.

Nowadays interior decorators seem to be inordinately stimulated by the chance to modernize old barns, attics and warehouses. This was not yet the case either in 1909 or in 1923, at which time my mother—even though she was homeless—ruled out the Odaya as a possible residence. The building, originally constructed as a cloister and later converted into a rural mansion, stood like a forbidding fortress on the flat steppe, and it included stables, barns, granaries, carriage houses and living space all under a single roof. Before us, generations of predatory estate managers had lived there and only a few rooms had been reserved for the masters. Their furnishings may have been fashionable in the time of Cuza Voda, the first elected Prince of Moldavia in 1859; since then, mice had nested in the tasseled plush of the neo-Gothic furniture; moths swarmed from the sun-bleached taffeta curtains; the dried decorative flowers sprouting in discolored bunches from gigantic Manchu porcelain vases, edged in brass in the fashion of the Rococo period, were crumbling to dust; the mirrors were blind; the steel engravings on the walls were foxed by brown mold; and cracked oil paint flaked from the portraits of genealogically unidentifiable forebears. There was no plumbing of any sort: one bathed in tin tubs, filled with innumerable pails of heated well water, and performed one's other elemental needs in oriels, glued like swallows' nests to the building's outer walls, from which pipes led directly down to the dungheap of the stables. That my mother had preferred a house in town to such discomforts after our return to the Bukovina was readily understandable, and even now it was comprehensible that she felt little attraction for the place. Yet in a sense it was her ancestral home, and it seemed astounding that now she would swallow her pride and accept an even more primitive shelter from friends.

It was the first of a series of undertakings that were acknowledged by those who wished her well, including my father, with an uncomprehending and somewhat ironical shaking of the head; but the motivation was fairly transparent—they were attempts at ultimate liberation, trial flights to escape the cage of convention and lead a life according to her own notions. Unfortunately, the fact that she had no self-evolved ideas and that she merely adopted others'—usually the most prevalent and hackneyed— soon brought her enthusiasms to a halt. At the same time her maneuvers camouflaged some quite purposeful strategies: she managed to rid herself of my sister, as well as Cassandra. Without any objections on my father's part (he favored a German education for us), my sister was placed in a boarding school in Vienna while I was to be sent, at the end of the summer vacation, to the German-language
Gymnasium
in Kronstadt. I was removed from the care of Cassandra and yet remained within my mother's easy reach.

At school I was entrusted to the guardianship of the father-in-law of one Dr. Viktor Glondys, then municipal vicar of Kronstadt and later bishop of all Transylvanian Saxons. My house warden, the long-retired Court Counselor Meyer, was a wiry little man of some seventy years, spartanically tight-lipped and of patriarchal sternness. I have carried in me for a lifetime the gloominess of the untold hours I spent behind the gray walls of that massive vicarage, but Kronstadt itself was another matter: it seemed to have emerged whole from a toy shop, a fairy-tale German enclave in the elemental Romanian countryside, spanned by a cupola of boundless blue skies.

Kronstadt lies in a hollow surrounded by steep hills, still medievally walled in and clotured, its little gingerbread houses and ancient trade manses angled narrowly around the church and town hall square. The Transylvanian Saxons had become Lutherans during the Reformation: in front of the massive Black Church—so called because it once had caught fire and some of its Romanesque brickwork still bore the blackened traces of that conflagration—stood the bronze statue of the churchman Honterus, in Faustian pleated frock with ruff collar, capped by a floppy hat shaped like a champagne cork, and pointing an admonishing outstretched arm to the old vicarage, where I, under the laconic supervision of Court Counselor Meyer, had ample opportunity to ponder what ill wind had blown me into this confining, hidebound community, which seemed to have retrenched in an act of stubborn self-protection against scimitar-swinging, slit-eyed, rattail-moustachioed Mongols.

Court Counselor Meyer's pedagogic qualities resided solely in his persona and not in any educational method. His entire being breathed discipline. He was so small that even when I was nine I already equaled him in height: a ramrod-straight old gentleman whose head, with its spare bone structure, short-trimmed gray hair and neat short beard, bore a striking resemblance to Joseph Conrad's. Indeed I found in his library bound issues from the 1870s of the periodical
Über Land und Meer (Over Land and Sea
) from which, it seemed to me, emanated as from a whiff of tar all the romance of the Tall Ships. When I later read Conrad, it was as if on the bridge of every one of his ships a youthful Court Counselor Meyer were standing in full command.

I had plenty of time to spend with books. In the mornings, while Court Counselor Meyer, who was by no means ready to resign himself to idleness, labored at some honorific bureaucratic activity at the municipal consistory, I went to school—first a year at primary school, then two years at the Honterus Gymnasium. Both of us returned home for lunch, washed our hands at a foldout washstand as thoroughly as surgeons scrubbing up for an operation and sat down to our meal. This was served by a Polish housekeeper, who occasionally would teach me some Polish words by the tersely rhymed method favored by the Court Counselor (whom she worshipped): “
Koza
—goat;
suknia
—coat;
krzeła
—chair;
włos
—hair.” At table she served wordlessly, and neither the Counselor nor I uttered a word; we mutely faced each other, he sitting bolt upright and handling knife and fork noiselessly and with a minimum of motion, I trying desperately to imitate him. As we ate the simple but filling dishes, we both would sip from glasses of water. After the meal I thanked him with a formal little bow, and then we walked in the garden in accordance with the dictum “After dinner walk a mile—or be sure to rest awhile.''

The garden was a tiny square squeezed in between ivy- and vine-choked walls, with beds of leathery purple and yellow pansies and sky-blue forget-me-nots edged by miniature boxwood. A narrow gravel path crossed the flower beds diagonally in both directions and ran along the four sides of this diminutive horticultural plot. That is where we paced our postprandial “little mile,” the Counselor ahead, I following, both straight as guardsmen, arms crossed at the back, audibly breathing in through the nostrils with the mouth closed during three strides, and then breathing out through lightly parted lips during four strides. Every hundred paces or so, the Counselor would voice without further elaboration some gnomic adage, as for instance: “Cool the head and warm the foot, stomach full but empty gut!” Or: “One single friend is better than the many you may lose; therefore be careful whom you see and wary whom you choose!''

When we had done our “little mile,” Counselor Meyer would rest for half an hour—a concession to his age which, he said, I too could expect after another sixty years, but for now I was left with my homework. Once it was finished—it wasn't very hard usually—I was free to do what I wanted. And what ordinarily I liked best was to scan through the old and crumbly issues of
Over Land and Sea.
There wasn't much else for me to do. I had trouble adapting to my new environment. I had no friends. My all too solicitous upbringing had not accustomed me to unconstrained intercourse with coevals: I was timid and felt awkward. In addition, I suffered much from homesickness.