The Snows of Yesteryear (36 page)

Bunchy discovered and promoted my talent for observation and humorous description, and opened the eyes of others to it. Whether this was of unqualified benefit to me, I cannot be sure; among my shortcomings — albeit more readily pardonable than many — is my predilection for amusing others with comical exaggerations tending to the paradoxical and absurd (though not always obtaining the desired effect). But in any case, Bunchy's encouragement was a balm in those difficult days of my final severance from the sheltering warmth of childhood, the age in which awakening consciousness urges one forward helter-skelter into life, however alarmed by clear-sighted foreboding and oppressed by puberty. With her acute sense for balanced measure, Bunchy did not encourage me in the monkeyshines I was wont to indulge in when not under her direct supervision. She limited herself — and me — to a cautious appreciation of the grotesque in life. This was achieved by nothing more than a rapid, almost clandestine glance exchanged between us whenever the situation threatened to tip over into the absurd, which in our household was not exactly a rarity. Her glance was swift and covert only in the first meeting of eyes, after which it resumed its steadiness, its studied indifference, as if the reciprocity of our silent concordance had been the result of mere chance. Thus it revealed nothing to the outside, least of all its intimacy. It was a glance denoting not complicity but, rather, acknowledgment of similar perceptions by two minds on the same wavelength.

Our congeniality began with Bunchy's requesting me to translate for her the German-Romanian-Ukrainian-Yiddish linguistic salad I had inherited from Cassandra. More than willingly, I exaggerated its humorous aspects. For her, I opened up the treasure trove of anecdotes that had accumulated around my exotic nurse over the years. I gloated over the mirth this incited in Bunchy and relished even more that she did not follow the earlier examples of Miss Knowles and Mademoiselle Derain in treating “the savage one” with even more condescension and contempt but, quite the contrary, showed her a heightened affection and consideration. Surely Cassandra clung to her like a neglected dog that finally finds its master, and Bunchy took her under her personal wing. I believe Cassandra owed to Bunchy her instruction in many of the household skills she later displayed to such advantage in running my father's home. As for me, I attached myself to Bunchy even more passionately, if possible, than I had to Cassandra, and I have felt all my life that I too owe what little virtues I may possess to Miss Lina Strauss. Among these I include my lifelong striving to overcome a fatal indifference, an innate indolence of soul. For the benefit of others and for myself, I have always pretended to feelings that in truth I experience only tepidly, if at all. The only wholehearted feeling I knew during my childhood and before Bunchy's appearance was hatred.

For it would have been anything but natural if I had not hated my sister. She knew how to keep my irascibility red-hot with the same mastery with which she knew how to throw the hourglass cone of her diabolo, catching it effortlessly on the string stretched between the sticks held in her skillful hands. For that, at times I hated her with an almost religious frenzy. I came close to murdering her when she made fun of me because she had somehow found out that I was enamored of a lady whose picture I had cut out from one of my mother's fashion magazines; or when, knowing that we were still dressed in identical outfits, she intentionally chose to wear a frock that she knew would torment me because of its girlishness; or when, behind my back, she changed a sentence I had composed laboriously in mirror-writing type, so that it would be full of sense-distorting words and ludicrous orthographic errors when, unsuspecting, I thought of proudly showing my product to others. (No one, incidentally, hit upon the possibility that my type box was meant to serve for the making of matrices from which the actual type fonts would be pulled. Probably Uncle Rudolf had somehow lost these. I continued undaunted to print my mirror writing, assiduously and passionately, and resented any interference in my hobby, which I concentrated on all the more intensely and ferociously.) Just as, earlier, Cassandra had known how to exacerbate the feud between us for possession of the chamber pots until it became absurd, tipping it over into the realm of play and blunting its sharpness, so Bunchy proceeded along the same strategic lines: she expanded the textual changes made by my sister into new and hilarious sentences and distorted the orthographic blunders into amusing monstrosities, then suggested that we recompose this nonsense into readable palindromes, unaffected by the reverse mirror writing. And before we knew it, my sister and I were sitting amicably side by side over the type box.

I was an affable child and, later, a notoriously good-natured young man. Once I overheard my mother saying to someone who had praised my patience, “He is not patient. He has a cold heart.” She was right. There were few emotions, however stormy their inception, that did not quickly perish in the cool climate of my inner self. Once I came close to admitting this to Bunchy. It was at the start of the winter of 1937–1938, long after she had left us; my sister had been dead for five years and childhood lay far behind in a mythical past. After some eventful years in Bucharest, I had returned to Vienna. Bunchy lived and taught there, a cult figure to her many pupils. We had not seen each other since my sister's death but were as close with each other as ever before; I felt no reluctance in telling her of the sordid quarrel that by then had erupted between my mother and Philip over the Odaya. I also told her about my last day hunting there with my father, and how I had felt that that lucky, almost random last shot of a hare marked the end of a phase in my life. “Maybe this was not the case for you alone,” said Bunchy.

At the moment, I didn't attach as much significance to her remark as I would only a few months later, in March 1938, but I was intent on speaking of the past. The magical sentence “Do you still remember when ...” was uttered in an ironic, melancholy mood, as we noted the various blind spots that prevented us from gaining a fuller and clearer view of what had once been present and was now the past. “Do you still remember,” I said to the old lady in black (in the fifteen years that had gone by with spooky swiftness since her blissful presence in our house, and during those last precarious years of peace between the two cataclysmic world wars, I never saw her again in a white summer dress, so that the image I kept of her in the Bukovina unconsciously was imprinted on my psyche as the impression of a sunnier world basking under an immaculate blue sky, in strong contrast to the actual pains and tribulations that this period had held for me. Bunchy in the earlier days was a festive and youthful figure, even though she was already of advanced years. The stately matron I faced in the early winter of 1937–1938 — she was living in a room crammed with furniture and memorabilia in the house of one of her benefactors in Vienna — belonged to the stormy, confusingly unsettled era of my growing up, but in her widowlike black two-piece suit, of a cut that was even more outmoded now than it had been earlier in the Bukovina, with her ramrod-straight posture and her snow-white hair over the high Ibsenesque brow, she conjured for me a Victorian epoch reaching back even further into the past than the turn of the century — now she had to be well over seventy; her mind was as alert and sharp as ever and she still had her ready laughter of earlier times), “do you still remember,” I said to her, “when we went to the Odaya for the first time? We were alone. Father took us and immediately left; he was going to fetch us the next day. You took me around the property and showed me everything and explained it all in detail — how it had been in my grandparents' time, how my mother and aunts and uncle had joined you there in the summer as your pupils, how my parents had been exiled there — as Mother thought of it: Father always away on assignments, Mother most of the time in Egypt or Switzerland, and my sister sole mistress of the house with her retinue of nurses and servants, a child mostly left to her own resources, growing up almost as if bewitched, happy, rich in poetic life, yet only a mere child, family offspring no different from myself.... That, for me, was deliverance from the trauma of not-being when my sister was already of this world. It's hard to explain why and how, but it somehow took away the bitterness of my envy of her. At a single stroke I saw that the wondrous four years that were my sister's advantage over me did not belong to her alone. There had been others too, and then they had been joined by me, a latecomer, yet one of them. I — how shall I say it? — had entered the flow of time. The world I had not been allowed to experience belonged to the same world in which I took breath. The Odaya was no longer a dead memorial to my sister. I had only to blow away the dust from the furnishings for the room to fill with life once again and for the specters lying in wait to be chased away. That mysterious part of my sister's life, which she so jealously guarded, henceforth also belonged to me.''

“Yes,” said Bunchy, “it had become history and was no longer myth.''

“But wasn't that precisely what my sister died of?” I asked.

“No,” said Bunchy, “though it might well be that renouncing her own myth ate away at some of her life force. But she had to do it. It is dangerous to venture too far into the mythic realm.''

“Anything is dangerous that you don't dedicate yourself to unconditionally. I maintain that someone who falls from a rock face can fly so long as he abandons himself completely to the falling.''

“Yes,” said Bunchy, “until he hits the earth.''

“What I always liked about Pomerania is its matter-of-factness.''

“You're right in this too. But let's talk about the Odaya.''

“Do you still remember how I told you that once I had been there with Mother and had a memorable falling-out with her? ... It was one of our truly intimate hours, we walked arm in arm, holding each other close, mother and child in heartfelt union, like that other time — was it earlier? was it later? — in Constanta, when my beautiful model ship foundered so swiftly and both of us just laughed and went on to eat ice cream, like a couple in love to whom nothing can matter.... That time at the Odaya, our harmony was even more intimate, if that is possible; we stole away from all the others; not even Cassandra stood between us. And I collected all my courage and asked her whether I could have a pony of my own; it would be so easy to keep at the Odaya, and even if I could come out only once a week or month, it would still be my very own pony. She shook her head angrily — you know well how she turns to stone once she's caught in her panicky fear. Of course I immediately understood. She feared to let me go riding: I would fall off and break my neck, the pony would trample me or dash off with me, never to be seen again — God knows what else she imagined.... So I said that of course I wouldn't ride alone, and only near the house, in the yard or park or whatever we called it. Maybe I wouldn't even ride at all, but just drive the little cart Uncle Rudolf used for his pony, which was in the carriage house. She became quite gruff and said, ‘No, it's out of the question, and that's that.' I was so angry that I ran off to the orchard, where she wasn't likely to look for me. I hated her as much for her obstinate refusal as for the disruption of the happiness, for her lack of understanding and her manic anxiety. I hated her for having soured our happy time together at the Odaya and for all those other moments when she envenomed our lives by her foolish aberrations, for every pill of Formamint stuffed into our apprehensive mouths. Do you still remember those delicious Calvil apples, with their paper-thin skins, from the Odaya orchard? They were just about the only thing we got out of the farm — that and our Christmas carp and your artichokes; but even those had to be washed in permanganate before we were allowed to eat them. Well, when I ran away from Mother, so full of hatred for her, a whole basket of those apples stood under a tree, and just as I was about to take one out for myself, a giant of a man jumped down from its branches — a kind of cross between Rasputin and Tolstoy, in heavy boots and a Russian-type smock and scraggly hair down to his shoulders and a beard reaching all the way to his belly. He cursed and bellowed at me with the voice of a bear.... He was one of those Lipovanians who came and bought up the fruit harvests in the Bukovina. I hadn't noticed him up there in the tree and had no idea that we had sold our fruit. Now he'd descended from heaven and was loudly scolding me — I was not only terrified and mortified for being thought a thief, but crushed to imagine that this was meant to be a heavenly punishment for my hatred of Mother. Do you still remember, Bunchy? I told you about it when we were alone at the Odaya, and then you asked me what I really believed in.''

“And?” asked Bunchy. “What was your answer?''

“What could I answer at that time? What can I answer even today? What do I believe in? In everything and nothing. Today — maybe with a bit more awareness — less than everything, more than nothing. You know what our religious education was like. You always called us the happy pagan heirs of Christendom. Cassandra never missed the chance to drag me into Orthodox churches, and I supposed it was there that I felt most comfortable in the lap of God, enclosed in that mystic twilight, with the worm-eaten wood, polished dark brown by much handling, and the crumbling gold and ancient red of the icons: a firmament of long-faced saints with the glittering disks of their halos crowning their carefully combed heads; lulled to sleep by clouds of incense and the honeyed scent of beeswax candles, gently cradled by the fluctuating voices of bass, baritone and tenor priests with their beards, their greasy robes and their stovepipe hats. But the most sensually intense faith — if I may put it like that? — I indulged in was the Catholic devotions honoring the Virgin Mary in May, for that was my mother's childhood faith. Not much remains of it now except a breviary bound in red velvet, which she probably opened for the last time at her wedding and never looked at again, and a similarly unused rosary. Of the Ten Commandments she probably retains only the fifth, though even there she excepts Father. Remember her indignation over his antipapal slogans from the Break with Rome movement, which he had adhered to during his Storm and Stress period? Yet when all is said and done, I'm more than willing to let myself be wrapped in the heavenly deep blue of the mantle of our Blessed Virgin with her starry crown, and I've always tried to identify myself with the infant in her arms (though the discrepancy in age always bothered me: either the sweet child seemed too small and precocious or he already wore a beard and lay dead in his mother's lap).... Polyphonic bells also aroused emotions encouraging me to surrender to the nameless; the gold in the saints' halos, glittered as brightly in churches of the Sacred Heart, where guardian angels stood ready to spread open their swan's wings to guide and protect me on the narrow path over the abyss. Long before all this petrified into the spectacular splendor of Gothic and Baroque cathedrals, which nowadays only evoke art-historical awe in me, it invested my soul with a basic emotional tone that set me off to advantage, mainly over Jews, I thought, although I couldn't say exactly how. Later on, in Kronstadt, I sang in the Protestant church choir, most gloriously in the
St. Matthew Passion:
See Him! Whom? The bridegroom see. See Him! How? A lamb is He. O sacred head sore wounded, defiled and put to scorn. O kingly head surrounded with mocking crown of thorn. And soon after that, Nietzsche's observations on a God who weeps ... But we weren't that far yet, that autumn, how many years ago? — fifteen, sixteen? — it was before our parents separated and before you left us, before I was sent to Kronstadt to the house of the subsequent bishop of Transylvania: impressive man of God, neo-Platonist, with a finely developed Adam's apple and a preacher's baritone.... A rigid world in the shadow of the Black Church: black robes closed with silver clasps like knights' cloaks, limp clerical berettas and philistine double chins squeezed in dignified probity into collar bands and ruffs ... And also the singsong of pious Jews emanating from the prayer houses in Czernowitz, and their apostle heads with long side-locks under the fox tails of their rabbinical hats ... All of that passed through and over me, leaving traces but no impression in depth. Never mind the hodge-podge of Plato, Hinduism, the cobbler Böhme and shamanic magic that the spiritualist circles around Aunt Hermine infiltrated in my brain the year my sister died. What impressed me in all that — probably because it's so comforting — was the doctrine of transmigration of souls. How soothing a distance it provides from one's present life! How long ago was all that? A mere five years of eternity ... Well, I make fun of all of it, and yet surreptitiously I cross myself and pray that Our Lord may forgive my heresies; even though I do not believe in
His
existence, I send my fervent prayers to
Him
in heaven whenever there is danger of anything going wrong in my life or when I truly wish for something. This, my beloved Bunchy, is the reply to your Faustian question, which back then I couldn't give you.''