The Snows of Yesteryear (30 page)

The opposite seems the case with my mother: a typical example of a failed attempt at adaptation. The angry piety with which she endeavored all her life to “go with the times,” first in slavish observance of Victorian rules and regulations, and then in an uncritical acceptance of the shallowest modernizing reform trends and emancipation efforts, always along well-trodden paths, always only halfheartedly and yet with total self-abnegation—all this led her into an unrelievedly prosaic existence, an ever closer adherence to prevalent commonplaces and current platitudes, an ever more confining entanglement in the allegedly necessary and supposedly beneficial, and ultimately in the merely material. By the end of her life, she had erased, denied and canceled out all traces of her beginnings, so that finally nothing remained of her that could recall the era of her girlhood, neither a cogent content nor a recognizable outer shell, neither she herself nor a living document of her time.

Of my sister I know that she died early because she could not take her time into the present. It was not the brutal breakup of the idyll of her infancy that destroyed her capacity for the poetical and, together with it, her will to live. Quite the contrary: the Odaya's house and garden, which she had had to leave in such a headlong rush at the outbreak of the First World War, in her inner self she turned into the myth of an incomparably lofty existence, truly her due, her secret distinction. Until our parents' separation, her girlhood was spent being reprimanded by her mother and spoiled by an all too often absent father, and in the conceit of being a princess in rags. Only when a further decline in our circumstances forced her to realize what a fairy-tale delusion she had been living did she reconcile herself to the prosaics of reality. And this broke her. Even more heroic than my mother—and unfortunately also more clear-sighted and disillusioned—she too tried to adapt herself, but none of the realities that offered themselves to her could make up for what she had lost.

One can preserve the treasured moments of the past as one would a hidden jewel; or one can be dragged down by them as by a convict's ball and chain. For sensitive natures, these alternatives are very close. If there is any resemblance between my sister and myself, it is little else than our shared innate knowledge of the essence and value of renunciation. Our spiritual development proceeded along entirely different lines. Hers was fed by books; mine thrived on dreams. She was educated more or less systematically by halfway qualified governesses; I struggled in vain to catch up, never content with what I was assigned, which seemed like crumbs fallen from the table of the rich (encouraged in this by my sister, who spitefully denigrated what little I learned as inferior dross). All the more avidly I took refuge in Cassandra's fairy tales, peasant anecdotes and picaresque stories. My big sister bore herself with the self-assurance of a privileged birth; I was the late-born offspring of an unglamorous, restless and plebeian era. I envied her for being our father's favorite; she despised the blind infatuation my mother showed me, suffered maternal injustices with mute pride and devalued her mother's preference in my own eyes. She was a graceful girl, when I was a small oaf; she was a precociously exemplary young lady while I still was a lout. Only in a single matter did we feel an identical, close affinity: in the perceptive handling of unavoidable losses. We knew the fabric that fed the poetics of our life; we knew the value of those myths into which lost realities are transformed. But my sister lacked the strength to hold on to them all the way through.

One example: When I was sent to school in Kronstadt, feeling as orphaned as only a homesick nine-year-old can feel, I was granted the blessing of the friendship of an eighteen-year-old. Here too I must warn against any assumption of sexual connotations: nothing could have seemed more absurd, ridiculous and insulting to either my protector friend or me. It never even entered our minds. What happened between us was nothing more than that he treated me, quite naturally and without the slightest condescension, as someone on the same footing. We chatted in the recesses between classes in the schoolyard; we walked home together; once I went with him into town when he bought a new pair of gym shoes; once we went to the movies and together doubled over at a Fatty Arbuckle film; another time he took me to his boxing practice and once to a philosophy lecture of which I didn't understand a word. If all this was quite natural, in no way extraordinary, I nevertheless awaited our encounters with a trepidation I rarely felt later on when expecting to meet some lady-love. He was just about to take his final exams and spoke with me of subjects he felt weak in, explaining the difficulties involved as if he were speaking to a comrade facing the same problems. No one else saw anything out of the ordinary in our companionship. When I was with him, I felt nothing of the gap that in the rigidly hierarchic world of adolescence usually separates a little squirt from someone about to enter the university. My mother came to visit me in Kronstadt; I raved about my new friend and she invited him together with me for dinner at her hotel. He behaved in exemplary fashion and left her with the best possible impression. The school year drew to a close; he passed his final exams and I returned home for vacation (more accurately, I took up my shuttling between the houses of my parents, by now separated). A few weeks later I received a postcard from him: Best regards, he was about to continue his studies in Paris, this would be his address there ... My mother urged me to write without delay. “Never!” I exclaimed, “I never want to see him again.” My mother was outraged by this incomprehensible mulishness. But my sister understood and said, “He is right.” At thirteen she knew as well as I with my nine years that to preserve something valuable, one has to know how to renounce it in good time. I only wish she had stuck to her guns.

I also understood why, after our return to the Bukovina, she balked at visiting the Odaya. The old manor house on the Prut vouchsafed for her the imagined survival of those years she had spent there as a fairy-tale princess. There were times when she even pretended to be sick to avoid going; later, she simply refused—and in this found the support of her father, who also seemed to have an inkling of why she behaved this way. Anyway, it was not as if other people were wildly enthusiastic. Nothing impelled our mother to go to a place that held nothing but painful memories for her. To reach it, moreover, was complicated, since there was no rail connection, and the roads were impassable by car in winter and even more so after the melting of the snows in the muddy season, while in summer one choked in dust; by horse carriage, the fifty miles were a trip of at least two days with no accommodations for spending the night. Once at the Odaya there was no distraction, the landscape hardly invited one on walks, the park had grown wild, the farm was run sloppily and brought in hardly anything; there were quarrels with the manager and mutinous threats on the part of the field hands whose wages he stole. When my parents lived together, my father would go for some shooting in the Prut wetlands, and sometimes he took me along. I looked forward to these rare occasions with the same trepidation with which I anticipated my meetings with my friend in Kronstadt. I loved the Odaya. What drew me there was the secret concealed in the period when my sister already had been born while I had not yet arrived.

That after our return to the Bukovina she no longer spoke of that period made it all the more impenetrable—and all the more alluring. Earlier, in our refugee days in Austria, when I had grown up enough for my sister to be able to make fun of me, she never tired of teasing me by vaunting the legendary glamour of those early days. No day passed without her itemizing the number of dolls she had had, how many horses had stood in the stables and what a great show was put on whenever our grandparents came to visit. Against this, not even Cassandra could offer protection: she too had not yet been “of that world.” But all these boastings ceased as soon as we returned to the Bukovina and moved not to the Odaya but to the house outside Czernowitz. My sister's refusal to visit the Odaya, her silences and her frequently abrupt and noncommittal answers whenever I asked for details about life there made me envious: I saw that her reticence concealed something she begrudged me. I did all I could to eavesdrop on her secretive myth.

Whenever I went with my father to the Odaya, I searched in every corner for a clue to the magic world I fancied she kept for herself. My imagination was powerless to reproduce that past. I closeted myself in the dusty rooms, where curtains and upholstery fabrics were moldering away and pale reeds and straw flowers, as ghostly as if they had been plucked from an ossuary, proliferated from tastelessly opulent Chinese vases. I tried to imagine my sister in her animated games, surrounded by grandparents and youthful aunts; I stared as if hypnotized at the crumbling oil portraits of heavily moustachioed men in beaver caps and laced-up velvet jackets, of women with towering powdered hairdos, of spruced-up children—all of them supposedly our forebears. I listened to the heavy silence which, when not interrupted by the noisy quarreling of jackdaws in the trees or the rattling of a wagon on the far-off road, would grow to terrifying proportions ... until I had to escape out into the glaring daylight. The yard was bare; manure heaps lay untidily about; the few head of cattle were out in the fields; the two old horses whom I loved slowly drew the carriage, on which my father sat with his guns and his dogs, over the tracks of the marshes; nothing could be seen of the farmhands and stable maids. I fled into the garden behind the house, where cabbage rotted on the stem in poorly kept patches. This was timeless, rural, everyday reality, nothing else. And nothing of all that yielded anything that brought me closer to my sister's secret.

Nor did I find her in the so-called park, growing into unchecked wilderness behind the strip of vegetable garden. Only the rotting rowboat in the pond—and of this merely the convoluted wrought-iron backrest—spoke of those dimly apprehended days ... but this it did with such force that each time I stood before it, it struck me as with a blow. And yet it was indescribable. I trembled with impatience at the notion that a simple object could be charged like a Leyden flask with the very essence of an era— and that, after it had discharged itself on me with a shock, I should find myself unable to clothe the suddenly recognized unknown in words, unable to express what so intensely had affected me, what sphere of mysteriously innate or inherited knowledge had been touched and perturbed, this something known from all times and yet forever lost.

With our parents' separation, so much that was new and strange intruded in our existence that earlier experience seemed to have been removed into a background so far away as to border almost on the legendary. While I, homesick in the animated toy-box world of Kronstadt, was dreamily looking for a key to myself, my sister in Vienna seemed to face the changed circumstances with a fresh vigor that was as sober as it was confident. We did not see each other for more than a year—and that was a year in which I grew into a darkly mulish adolescent, while she was transformed into a rapidly maturing young lady. I realized this the instant I was about to clasp her in my arms in the stormy joy of seeing her again; she restrained me with composure as she told me firmly, “We'd better dispense with this from now on.” She had become untouchable.

This was not merely a reprimand that, disconcertingly, reminded me of the sexual difference between us, in the social as well as the purely physical sense. After all, it may indeed have stood for the cut with which she wished to eliminate my little boy's penis, a cut now performed, appropriately enough, with the weapon of the taboo. She thereby destroyed at the same time the wellhead from which springs boyhood's most beautiful taboos. She made me realize that the great farewell had begun from the world of dreams in which helpless maidens are saved by chivalrous protectors.

Among the episodic events that hitherto had united us as siblings, one stands out in my memory: It is the summer of 1919 and the Romanians have only shortly before occupied the region around Czernowitz. My sister and I are on a stroll through the People's Park under the supervision of some bored governess and Cassandra. A boy, slightly older than I, son of a Romanian colonel who recently had come to live not far from us, is also walking in the park, accompanied by a soldier who probably is the colonel's orderly. Suddenly the boy approaches my sister and, with a swift gesture, loosens the black-red-and-gold bow in her hair, throws it on the ground, spits and tramples on it with his boots. He starts to turn away with the contemptuous exclamation “Dirty Germans!” I throw myself at him. My mother had given me a toy saber—secretly, for my father hated anything connected with the military—a pitiful stand-in for the dangerously genuine saber that Cassandra's feckless Hussar had brandished, but one of my most passionately treasured possessions; this saber I now fiercely swack over the boy's head. Blood runs over his forehead; the soldier tries to attack me but is warded off by the governess; after confused pushing and pulling, the fray breaks up in great excitement, each goes his own way, with the boy screaming bloody murder and the handkerchief on his head getting redder by the minute. Needless to elaborate on the severity of my punishment. I am reminded forcefully that my rash action could result in the undoing of our entire family, if the Romanian colonel is of a vengeful disposition. My toy saber disappears, never to be seen again, which distresses me most of all. But I am proud of myself, for I showed myself worthy of my future role as a grown-up: a knight, entrusted with protecting the frail and vulnerable weaker sex.

My sister now suddenly repudiated all this. She dissociated herself from me; she had no need of me; she stood more secure alone and on her own feet. Henceforth we were brother and sister in name only, though in our world names stood for a whole program. As “the older sister of a teenage boy” she was granted authority over me that exceeded the actual age difference; my behavior, however, supported such prejudicial assessment. Her educational progress advanced smoothly and successfully; the model child grew into a model student; her cheeky precociousness dissolved into reserved, forthright, appropriate comportment; she managed to gain a firm foothold in the adult world. Meanwhile I showed myself obstreperous and intractable, in a word, puerile. I had to change schools (just as at home my mother's perennial nervous dissatisfaction led to the constant changing of servants). In so doing, a miracle happened and I caught up with my sister by two years, but this was hardly noticed by the family. Nor did it attract special attention when she chose a curriculum that I—not being allowed to attend the Academy of Fine Arts, my first choice—had selected for myself: the Consular Academy in Vienna. This already had been an early fancy of mine, for its original name, Academy of Oriental Languages, had appealed to me; I saw myself as dragoman of the Sublime Porte at the court of the Peacock Emperor, or on the trail of Stanley and Livingstone at the sources of the White Nile. But these romantic notions were squelched by the sober reflection that as a member of a minority I had little chance to advance in the Romanian diplomatic service. My sister, however, could submit a clear-cut plan for her future: she aspired to become a secretary with an international commission, if at all possible the League of Nations in Geneva. There is no doubt that she would have reached this objective had she not been stricken by that pernicious disease. She had already taken the first step: as the best graduate of her class by far, she got a job with the International Danube River Control Commission in Galatz.