The Snows of Yesteryear (22 page)

While he proceeded with the complex ritual of his shaving, he would talk. Dreams made him voluble: he would impart droll, drastic and scurrilous excerpts from them. His dream life was as filled with fanciful imaginings and humor, as illustrative of his shrewd cleverness as his way of grasping reality when awake — again I cannot think of a better term to describe it than “bright,” even though occasionally this could darken and shift to ill humor, irritability and even rage. His moods were all of a piece, never equivocal. I could not imagine him losing himself in daydreams, as my mother so often did. He experienced the given moment too wholeheartedly, though never prosaically. His lyricism was of another kind than hers, more Dionysian, to express it in Nietzsche's terms (whom, incidentally, he considered his great brother in spirit: in this he was wrong, as he generally was with respect to himself).

His dreams were a vivacious, topsy-turvy farrago, and usually most amusing. Occasional nightmares did not seem to frighten or oppress him. He spoke of them as if they were performances he had attended: they might be exciting but, after all was said and done, were merely fantasies. He was vastly intrigued by a dream in which Miss Strauss, Bunchy, appeared to him as a man, even though as our governess she had always comported herself in a most feminine manner and dressed in the dignified fashion of a turn-of-the-century matron. To find out her true sex, he—still in his dream—had thrown an apple at her lap, for, as he explained, “to catch something thrown at them, men will close their knees, so that it won't drop through their thighs, but women open their thighs so as to catch the object in their skirts.''

As he told these stories, his shaving brush would whip up rich bubbles of white snow from the English soap in its wooden bowl, which he then applied, carefully and with much skill, on his cheeks, chin, throat and the space between lips and nose. All my life I regretted that with my many resemblances to him I had not also inherited his full lips. My own have taken after my maternal forebears: thin and with the tendency to become pinched, particularly with age. In a photograph taken a year before his death — he had grown a short badger-gray beard toward the end—his lips protrude as they did in those far-off days from the snowy foam of his shaving soap: carnal, sensually joyful, firm without being grim, and closed with an expression of reliable virility.

I always enjoyed watching how his expression changed as his razor scraped off the foam from the delicate spots on his upper lip and in the corners of his mouth, the dimple in his chin, and the throat above his Adam's apple. It wasn't merely a full catalogue of his mimetic abilities but a manifestation of the eloquence of the mute mouth per se—from bacchanalian amusement through mild benevolence, serenity and humility, to arrogance, derision, contempt, fury, horror, and then bitter disappointment and deep sorrow—all this magically produced in reaction to the sharpness of the blade, in lightning-quick changes that flitted by like a play of shadows.

Like everything he did, the shaving every morning was of a ritual regularity that could have been called maniacal if it had not also been so obviously playful. It always started with the selection of the blade. He had seven of these in a leather case, ordered from London in conformity with the Anglophilia of his generation, each of them engraved with the day of the week on which they were to be used:
MONDAY, TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY
and so on to
SUNDAY
, the handle and back of which last blade was gold-plated to distinguish it from the others. Though the choice could, therefore, hardly be arduous, he first tested the sharpness of several blades with the tip of his thumb before removing the one scheduled for that day from the dark purple velvet of the box and stropping it with a few quick slapping strokes. The blades were profiled concavely from the back to their cutting edge, a mattely mirroring, dangerously sharp steel that I was forbidden to touch as a child. I cannot say what more vividly remains in my memory: the mixture of the various smells of soap and leather, the delicate fustiness of the velvet lining of the case, the biting sharpness of the alum stone and the aromatic essences with which he rubbed his skin afterward; or the foamy crunching sound, testifying as much to the toughness of his stubbles as to the sharpness of the blade with which, after first setting it delicately and then drawing it down resolutely, he bared broad bands of suntanned, leathery, manly skin from the snowy richness of the shaving foam.

This used-up foam, accumulating on the blade, was then stripped off with his left index finger and proffered to the dogs assembled around him. Shuddering with disgust, they licked it up to the last smear. They seemed greedy for it each morning and would fight each other for the privilege of getting the biggest balls of soap from the master's stubble. He laughed heartily when the dogs shook in revulsion, and he laughed even more when they nevertheless scrambled for the suds. He would have laughed still more if one of them in greed and anger, forgetting his slavish adoration of his master, had attacked him—and he probably would not then have hesitated calmly to cut the dog's throat with the blade. His temperament was as bright as the sky over Naples, but just as that sky always showed some threads of smoke from Vesuvius to remind one of other, more primeval subterranean forces, there were reasons to believe that in him too something deep down lay in readiness over which he himself had no control. And this threatening plume of smoke was perceptible even in the usually unperturbed serenity of his matutinal hours.

Meanwhile I managed to disengage myself from the comfort of my lair and also repaired to the bathroom. While I opened the faucets of the tub and drowsily tested the temperature of my bath, I would be struck by the blue flash from his eyes in the concave shaving mirror. Only a single eye would appear in the circle of the mirror, as he brought the various parts of his face close to the magic concavity to ensure that not the slightest hirsute remains had escaped the blade; there was no doubt that this monstrously enlarged eye searched only for singular hairs and did not apprehend me at all. Yet to me the eye appeared as if it belonged to a resident of Brobdingnag, ironically observing his dwarflike toy through a hole in the little box in which Gulliver was held prisoner.

My father would begin to sing as he turned to the plethora of his other toys. After he had washed the remaining foam from his face with a large sponge and rubbed his skin with shaving lotion, the well-being of his body drove him to other activities beneficial to the state of his soul. Of these there were many and various, beginning with pistol-shooting practice (after which one could be certain that no one in the house was still asleep), and proceeding, by way of floriculture, watercoloring, the filling of his shotgun cartridges, etching and photographic work in his darkroom, to the mixing of poisons and the training of young dogs. And in none of this was there a system or regularity. One activity superseded the other or was simply interrupted and postponed to the next day, while others were begun or resumed. He did not lack for time. It was six-thirty in the morning and he was several hours ahead of people who started their day at nine or ten o'clock. His singing filled the house until noon.

This house changed when my mother moved into town. The garden went to seed but, in exchange, gained in romantic appeal. The so-called reception rooms, which had seen so few receptions, turned into storage rooms for hunting trophies and related paraphernalia. My mother had had a loathing for walls decorated with stag antlers and stuffed grouse. Now antlers, horns, pelts of stags, hunting knives, pheasant tails, shooting sticks, cartridge boxes, dog leashes, bird snares, spring-traps and cleaning utensils for rifles were stacked high between and on top of the furniture. Our old nursery rooms were now the realm of his own games. On easels stood canvases and aquarelle papers on which he painted rather mediocre wildlife scenes and occasionally produced quite attractive architectural studies. His lack of self-criticism surprised me until I understood that he was interested much more in the process of painting than in its result. He stretched his canvases himself and mounted the Japanese papers with masterly skill on the drawing board; I admired, even envied, his knack in sharpening his pencils. No doubt he would have liked to grind his own colors. He was anything but a hobbyist, but he cherished craftsmanlike thoroughness and the excellence of select materials. In his search for the best in everything he was uncompromising: just as his shotguns had to come from Purdey and his custom-made rifles from Mauser, he bought his brushes, colors and papers from the most expensive suppliers in London and Paris; this fastidious insistence had been the despair of my mother. In addition, he bought everything in stock quantities, as if he feared that in so remote a corner of the world as the Bukovina he might be cut off at any moment from his sources of supply.

There were towers of boxes with mealy-greasy pastel crayons from which a whiff of the eighteenth century seemed to emanate; different oil brushes bundled in dozens, the bristles attached neatly and very firmly by metal clamps to elongated, top-flattened handles; other bundles of watercolor brushes made of marten hair, generously heart-shaped at their bases and tapering to thread-thin points, tied with red-lacquered silk yarn and attached so painstakingly to quill holders as to suggest the expert hand of a Chinese master. In between, on top of and next to piles of all kinds of hand-laid papers rested the small windowlike frames, meticulously lined in thin green felt, in which his photographic plates were exposed to light to make prints. He was a passionate photographer, and during our childhood he subjected us to all too many trying sittings. But for these I found myself amply compensated by the cavernous mystical experience of the darkroom, where, bathed in the blood-red shimmering obscurity, the yellowish coating of the glass plates slowly began to darken in the shallow rectangular pan rocked gently by Father's skillful hands, releasing both acidic and basic fumes, magically to reveal, in the gradually separating depths of lighter and denser mist grays, the emerging pictures.

There was a great deal of medieval craftsmanship in the instrumentarium of his manifold hobbies. The sunlight that had once fallen on our dolls and toys was now reflected richly in the copper plates used in his (unfortunately rather amateurish) etchings, and all about were strewn—as heretofore had been our building blocks or my tin soldiers—his bottles of chemicals, his printing rolls, his scrapers and his palette knives. With the difference that all this paraphernalia of his playful enthusiasms was invested with the solemn aura of art utensils, just as his hunting weapons and implements were witness to adult occupations that were to be taken even more seriously. The very abundance of all this equipment, bought in quantities of dozens and lots, made it awe-inspiring. It was as if the bohemian atmosphere of the artist's studio were transposed to a higher level by the very costliness of the materials, each of which had the select character of a bibelot. Furniture, on the other hand, was expendable unless its immediate usefulness was obvious, though he loved the clublike comfort of deep leather armchairs. With maniacal care he watered and cultivated his plants in the many-shaped planters, species that seldom blossomed but were all the more luxuriant in their verdancy: asparagus ferns spilled out from their stands and crept along the floor; cacti achieved monstrous sizes.

He attended to his matutinal activities unclothed, covered merely by a bath towel girding his loins, a liberty he indulged in after my mother left. Once, when his faithful friend and professional colleague Paul H., who came to fetch him each morning, impatiently demanded at around ten o'clock: “Finally, would you go and get dressed?” he sheepishly donned his pith helmet, which had hung unworn since the days when he had gone to Egypt to visit my mother.

When finally—after many an interruption—he was dressed, there followed the great ceremony of his departure for the archiepiscopal residence at the other end of town, where his office was located. As architect and art historian, he had been reassigned from the former Austrian civil service to the so-called Religious Fund—which administered the estates belonging to the Orthodox Church—with the special task of looking over the monasteries of the Bukovina.

It was never revealed to me in what exactly his duties at the office consisted. No doubt some desk-job activities, though it remained unfathomable how and when he accomplished these. His desk was littered with photographs, drawings, periodicals, watercolors, catalogues from weapon dealers and safari outfitters, but never any documents. No one could have been more unsuited to be a functionary. Yet it would seem that he attended to this part of his daily labors with his usual assiduity. He was highly respected in the spiritual hierarchy of the church-estates administration, in which he held the rank of a councillor of the consistory. Yet he certainly was not liked, but rather feared, for his sharp tongue and total lack of respect for any form of authority, especially that claimed by the representatives of God on earth. Unabashedly he called them “frocked vultures” and never hesitated to denounce publicly even the most hushed-up scandals in their state-within-a-state. Somehow he disarmed opponents by his rigid sense of duty, developed under the old Austrian monarchy. His daily trip to the archiepiscopal residence was a demonstrative act.

All of us had to accompany him on these expeditions in a solemn procession: Paul, his colleague; my sister and I; and all the dogs—though the dogs were sent home with a magisterially sweeping gesture once we reached the edge of town. The image of their happily wagging tails sagging sorrowfully between their hind legs as they trotted homeward at this mute but commanding gesture will stay with me to the end of my days; nothing illustrates more tellingly how our own moods dampened whenever my father was ill-tempered, packed up his things and disappeared from our lives for weeks or even months.

Officially, these disappearances were announced by the sentence: “I have to go on assignment!” This left no doubt as to the importance of the undertaking, since it sanctified it as a fulfillment of professional duties. The “assignment” meant inspection trips to the historic monasteries of the Bukovina and on the upper Moldau, the structural condition and maintenance of which it was his task to supervise. Why he had to take along his rifles and shotguns was an open secret. The Religious Fund owned enormous tracts of forest. My father, who was on equally good terms with the abbots and the local forestry administrators, was granted free shoots in hundreds of thousands of acres of largely virgin Carpathian forest.