The Snows of Yesteryear (3 page)

More especially for Cassandra, the encounter with an alien world was not an enriching experience: she—who relished the anecdotal and raised any occurrence, however banal, to the level of an event and knew how to embroider and enrich it with fantasy, so as to incorporate it into the never ending garland of cameos that gave our life story (and thereby her own) glamour and drama—was incapable of telling us anything about the time near Trieste. Whether her memory was blurred by the homesickness she may have suffered there, or whether the sullen patience, legacy of an old line of slaves, with which she bore any dispensation of fate (a condition of psychic torpor similar to the physical rigor that certain bugs or birds assume at the approach of danger) prevented anything memorable from even dawning on her—this remains a moot question. That she had no eyes for the beauty of the landscape was but natural: as my father used to say, primitive people have no grasp of the abstract concept of beauty in nature, since for them, sensory perception of nature flows together with love of the ancestral soil; anything else is merely alien. Whenever I asked Cassandra whether she hadn't liked the sea, she remained glum and taciturn. I had the impression that her sullen reticence had to do with some unpleasant occurrence she didn't care to think about. Through some kind of spiritual osmosis there rose in me an image, somewhat in the Art Nouveau style of that period: a young woman in silhouette, like a figurehead on a galleon, stands on a foam-sprayed cliff by the sea, and in her I seem to recognize my mother; sitting before her, in a half-adoring, half-masterful attitude, is the dark-clad figure of a man combining all the traditional attributes of the southerner, the artist and the lover in a single epitome—dark hair, a flowing black lavalliere, a black slouch hat carelessly held in his hand. I have an inkling that the fierce antagonism between my mother and my sister, which arose originally between an obstreperous child and an authority who asserted herself too late and never self-assuredly, at some time had assumed the form of an arch-female enmity, the true motive of which resided in jealousy over a man. That something of this sort also might have colored the relationship between Cassandra and my mother seemed to me too abstruse a fancy to be worth thinking about, and yet in the end I came to believe it. Both my sister and Cassandra idolized my father. To them, the stay in Trieste dimmed his image as husband and sole master of the household—and thus as the safeguard of that family unity which alone bonds a home in togetherness.

For me all this experience dwells in the golden haze of the mythical. Conscious recall sets in only after we left Trieste and found refuge in the house of friends in Lower Austria. Here it is a different landscape: a valley rich in meadows, embedded between the wooded slopes of hills. This is more enticing and gives much more evidence of the human imprint than the Carpathian land that remains my true home; nevertheless, this Austrian landscape is an intimately familiar part of myself. For my mother, the church and the tiny village nearby were merely admonitory markers of our bitter existence as refugees, but for me they signal my awakening to the world. I can see myself on a meadow, its grass not yet mown and so high that I cannot see above it. I raise my arms to Cassandra so that she may pick me up. To me she represents the mediator of the reality all around, she is the embodiment of all security, of the safe assurance with which I experience the world. The miracle of my discovery of the world occurs under her protection and with her encouragement. For anyone else, she is but a barely tamed savage. My mother could never get along with her and would have sent her packing, had she not understood intuitively that without her I could not exist.

I loved Cassandra dearly, and it was due only to constant hearsay, both within and outside the house, that ultimately I too came to believe that she was inhumanly ugly and primitive. Her large simian face, heartwarming and protective, grotesque and impishly comical, presides over everything that the memory of my childhood days transforms from that inexhaustible pool from which I draw my confidence in life. Cassandra was the standard-bearer of the mood that made those days fair and bright and full, somehow, of desperate merriment—a merriment boldly militating against the prevailing tension and exploding any impending drama into absurd humor, shattering it in laughs. As I realized later, Cassandra, in all this, was the distorted funhouse-mirror image of each of us. She imitated, paraphrased, parodied and derided not only the flickering yet imperturbable jolliness of my father, whom she adored with doglike devotion, but also the often hysterical boisterousness of us children. We followed her in her comical exaggerations: she led the procession of clowns, harlequins and Punch-and-Judy characters that we mustered each day to counter the tensions within the household, to resist and balance my father's eccentricities and my mother's ever more uninhibited nervous susceptibilities, her irritability, her panic anxieties, her inflexibility and her artful enticements.

Thanks to my father's happy disposition, the ever shorter spans of time he spent at home always felt like vacations, only occasionally torn by the storms of his choleric outbursts. When he was gone again on one of his so-called assignments, which usually and in fact were hunting trips, my mother's migraines and changeable moods hung over the house like a curse. Yet nothing could equal the effervescent charm of her smile and cajoling voice when she thought to persuade us, in a sudden spurt of maternal dutifulness, to wear a warmer jacket or eat another spoonful of spinach, just as nothing could better rupture the fine mood of a carefree hour than the cold haughtiness with which she might reprimand Cassandra or my sister's mademoiselle if either of them dared to contradict her and assert that, after all, the day was too warm for heavy clothes or that we had already eaten enough spinach. Then we had to bear not only her own ill humor but also that of those she had rebuked.

It was probably between 1916 and 1918 in Lower Austria, during the last years of the war, that Mother's exaggerated solicitude for me and my sister turned pathological. The times were somber and threatening. The rural environment heightened the sense of remoteness into claustrophobia. The distrust of the peasant neighbors toward foreign strangers who had come from the city to escape the urban scarcity of food, the unheated apartments, the riots and possible epidemics were bound to suggest to a young mother that she adopt a circumspect domesticity, irrespective of how little she was cut out for it. Mother's highly susceptible pride generated in her a totally abstract sense of duty, an a priori bad conscience that dictated certain rules of conduct to be followed with iron rigidity—often in patent disregard of contradictory evidence. Thus motivated by notions of some obsolete and outlandish behavior pattern, she was prone to interfere in securely established traditional relations and to disrupt them.

Our old Bohemian cook, who had accompanied us faithfully wherever we went, turned rebellious and threatened to give notice because Mother suddenly thought of determining not only the already skimpy menus but also, on the strength of some “thrift” recipes picked up in the newspaper, how the dishes were to be prepared. Her relationship with my sister, who during her first years had grown up unhampered under the care of her nannies, had been a neutral one that in the course of time could have developed readily into mutually acknowledged independence, but it now became openly antagonistic under the impact of this newly asserted Victorian maternal authority. Cassandra, with her simian ugliness and nunlike vestments, speaking her higgledy-piggledy garble of incomprehensible foreign idioms, was bound to appear as an open challenge to the village peasants with their age-old customs. If they tolerated her at all and had not driven her out with scythes and flails, it was only because they admitted her as the not fully human guardian and mascot of me, a three-year-old lad; she was like the sow on whose cringle-tail the youngest of a farmer's sons clung when he let her guide him to the pasture each morning and back home at night. When my mother started to insist that she henceforth would accompany us on our walks and supervise our games, she trespassed a subtle, irrational borderline within which the master's privileges were either acknowledged or denied. For the peasant women in the village she was confirmed now more than ever as an idler. And from then on, Cassandra's clowning seemed even more sharply parodistic. It began to undermine my mother's authority even with other members of the household.

Was it because of excessive perspiration due to overly heavy clothing or because of cooling off too abruptly at the onset of a rainstorm, or perhaps on account of psychosomatic reasons? In any case I contracted pneumonia in August 1917—for the second time, at so tender an age! To measure my fever, my mother put a thermometer in my mouth which I promptly crushed between my teeth. Fearful lest I swallow a splinter of glass, she scrabbled on her knees around my bed until she had recovered all the glass slivers from the cracks in the flooring of the old house. This strenuous effort—it was alleged—together with the exertion in carrying me home at the unexpected outbreak of the storm, added to her previous chronic kidney and nervous disorders, as well as her heart defect. It compelled us in later years to tiptoe through the house during many anxious hours, and it was used against us as a terrifying means of blackmail whenever our own idea of what to wear or whether to go on a sledding party in winter or a bathing excursion in summer (both in Mother's eyes detrimental or even injurious to our health) clashed with the maternal view.

The vegetative calm with which Cassandra bore these household turbulences (to which were added, after our return to the Bukovina, marital conflicts between our parents) she managed to camouflage behind crazy parodies by which she distorted into farce any imminent tragedy. By magnifying everything grotesquely, she reduced the trifles at the bottom of most of these commotions to their true size; as my father used to say, she “pricked the soap bubbles of our family squabbles” and burst them, thereby opening our eyes to the absurdities of an unreflected life, hidebound in rigid patterns. More than anyone else, she taught us the healing power of laughter.

Today I appreciate the strength that she needed to withstand the vicissitudes of fate and that she communicated to us for the rest of our lives—a feat all the more remarkable when one remembers that war overshadowed each hour of our everyday life. The smell of blood and steel pervaded everything, even places where these had not yet had a direct impact. No one could believe any longer in the possibility of a victory by the Central Powers. Its defeats threw the discouraged into gloomy despair. It was not just an empire that broke apart: a whole world went under. And it was as if, with the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a light was extinguished that until then had bathed the days in a golden sheen. This struck not us alone: a new era had begun.

We grew up with the myth of a lost bygone world, golden and miraculous. By 1915 we were already what later hundreds of thousands of Europeans were to become: refugees, exiles, leaves tossed by the storms of history. Toward the end of the war we were forced to leave the village in Lower Austria that had been our refuge; it became even more inhospitable than it had been from the beginning. Vienna, with the dimming of its glory, had become a gray and squalid slum. My mother's relatives who lived there recommended that we return to the Bukovina. My father, whom I saw for the first time when he returned from the war, agreed. Although the future of this former crown land was still entirely unsettled, it seemed a more promising place to live in than any of the other splinter states of the dismembered monarchy. We went home.

This too was not accomplished in unmarred serenity. In Galicia, the stretch between Lemberg (now Lvov) and the Prut River, marking the border with the Bukovina, was bordered by the simple wooden crosses crowned with the helmets of fallen soldiers. Swarms of crows dotted the gray skies. The closer we came to the Prut, the more frequently we could look through burnt-out window frames into houses through whose torn roof timbers one perceived storm-swept clouds and from the floorings of which nettles were growing. Czernowitz, on the other side of the Prut, had become restive and shabby, peopled by a wretched species of individuals, hitherto encountered only alone or, at worst, in shady twosomes or threesomes but never before in such compact exclusiveness.

We had fled the Bukovina from a house in the country my mother had never liked. It had been my sister's birthplace. That I, too, had not been born there I owed to her panic-prone disposition. My sister's birth had been a difficult one, and my mother did not want to face once more the risk of perhaps bleeding to death in the hands of some rural midwife, far from medical assistance. When she went into labor, she had herself driven to the city by horse carriage—a distance of some fifty miles. I was born before she reached the clinic. The experience may well have contributed to her hatred of that country house. Now, after four years of rural seclusion and with the disconcerting uncertainty of the times, it was decided to stay in Czernowitz.

But uncertainty also yawned all around our new house: it was located at the outermost edge of the city, where, beyond the villa gardens and small farm holdings, the views broadened to open country. The East was threateningly close. The great trees of the public park, adjacent to our own, were denuded. Impacts of howitzers had opened craters at the bottom of which rainwater formed murky pools. The monstrously swollen corpse of a horse lay by the roadside a hundred meters away. And yet this was to become the house of a merry, happy childhood, though all too short and filled with tensions that were alien to what is commonly understood as cozy and homelike.

Visitors may have thought it comfortable and even elegant. The furnishings that had been destroyed or plundered were soon replaced by new acquisitions. For this my mother had a deft hand. Jubilantly, my sister and I moved into the large and airy children's rooms. But before the beginning of that span of my life, which I recall as my true childhood, threatening storms once more overshadowed our life.