The Snows of Yesteryear (5 page)

Naturally, I was not without libidinous stirrings. Thoughts of the feminine rose in me early. Even as a six- or seven-year-old, I was perennially infatuated: with a youthful aunt; an elegant lady who had come to visit; a pretty girl I had seen in passing; or merely a picture in some illustrated journal; the daughter of our physician, more or less of my own age; and many more. My imagination was replete with images of blissful embraces, tender kisses exchanged in fondly silent togetherness, even temporary misunderstandings between myself and the loved one, and the ensuing all the more delightful reconciliations, when all would be cleared up once more—to my own satisfaction, of course. But such emotions were purely “platonic,” in the parlance of that period—“chaste,” as my mother would have said. They had no connection with the signs of budding sexuality that my infantile body exhibited upon chance arousals—much to the delight of Cassandra, I need admit, who on such occasions, with loud praises, half derisive and half in earnest, accompanied by much laughter, was wont to show me off in my proud condition to the cook, the chambermaids and whosoever else happened by or readily could be called to witness the spectacle. This too I saw as nothing but a boisterous prank, all the more so since the chambermaids, almost all of them—like Cassandra herself—barely domesticated daughters of Carpathian shepherds, fled screaming with laughter from this exhibition. Nevertheless, adherents of Professor Freud may find some satisfaction in knowing that then my direst nightmare consisted in my sitting on the potty in an open passageway, exposed to all eyes and unable to flee since, on rising, my naked behind would be fully revealed. The feeling of self-inflicted distress in this dream was every bit as terrifying as the recurring nightmare of a treacherous murder I had supposedly committed, which frequently haunted me as an adult.

At that time, matters scatological played a paramount role in this world I shared with Cassandra. For Cassandra carefully watched over my digestion, expertly commented on its variable functioning, on the consistency and color of the excretions, further elaborating her diagnoses with many a homespun anecdote and earthy rustic proverb, regularly interweaving the matter of defecation into most of her stories. In almost all the fairy tales chronicling the adventures of two lovers—as, for instance, in my favorite story of the miraculous steed that always catches up with the princess repeatedly abducted by the Storm King, until the abductor finally manages to escape on the equally fast twin of the miracle stallion—the conclusion of such symbolically engaging yarns was signaled thus: “And then the two squatted down and together they crapped on the ground.” Cassandra always concluded her tale with this bald simplicity, nor was there any doubt that this function signified a ritual sensory expression of a happy ending, the consecration of a connubial union more pure, solemn, on a higher moral and even aesthetic level—because performed in the full possession of one's own individuality instead of in mutual abandon—than the rude couplings we knew all too well from our dogs and the other animal life around the house, couplings that we also called, in equally unabashed innocence, “marrying.” It would never have entered my head that animal copulation might have anything to do, or even be equated, with the blissful conclusion of the love romances in my dreams. The ritual of joint crapping—a shared and mutual catharsis—came closer to the idea of my fantasized epiphany.

All this might never have become known, for it occurred only in the intimacy of a like-minded world view, the exclusive twosomeness of Cassandra and me, sealed, so to say, in the piecemeal piebald gibberish I had learned from her, which we developed into a kind of secret idiom understood by no one else. Ever more frequently I had to translate word by word some utterance of Cassandra's for the other inmates of our household. The linguistic crudity and drollness that emerged in such endeavors amused my father and those others in the house who relished the humorous as much as it repelled and, at times, even horrified my mother. I was careful, of course, not to divulge any of the most intimate bond between Cassandra and myself—her fairy tales and the almost trancelike attention with which I listened to them. So the strange act of consecration that always concluded the conjoining of two lovers (comparable though not similar to two lovers in Indian folktales partaking a meal from the same cup) would have remained Cassandra's and my own secret if childhood's pressing urge to comprehend the incomprehensible had not driven me to unintentional treason.

It happened one night in my sister's and my bedroom, when Cassandra no longer slept with me. The lights were out, but my sister went on babbling as if to herself—something that always annoyed, excited or frightened me. This time she was embarked on a description of my clumsiness as a toddler still learning to walk, breaking whatever fell into my hands, putting anything within reach into my mouth, bawling, dirtying my pants and so on. She harked back to our exile near Trieste. Spitefully my sister embroidered on my helplessness at a time when she already knew how to behave like a young lady and was chattering in Italian—all of which was even more tormenting since I had no memory of that phase of my life and no remembered image with which to test the truth or falsity of her allegations. I had to accept whatever she said, as if my impotence of those days was extended to the present and into all future time still to come: I would always remain the latter-born, the less developed, the underdog, and she would always have an advantage over me in a world of exquisite experiences and superior knowledge and abilities. The only thing that remained for me from that time near Trieste—and even this merely as a blurred image, picked up I could not say where—was that female figure standing on the cliff by the sea in whom I seemed to recognize my mother, and the man I did not know. Naively, I told my sister about this image in an anxious murmur and asked her—my heart throbbing in hope that the old puzzle would now finally be explained to me—whether she thought that then these two had squatted down together to crap on the ground.

Many experiences with my sister, who was bound to regard me as an unwelcome interloper, should have told me she would not pass up this opportunity to use such a compromising utterance against me. I was eventually subjected to a third-degree inquisition which, while it made clear from whom I had gotten this unspeakably vulgar and obscene metaphor, did not convince the inquisitors that I had no inkling of its true meaning. I was suspected of knowing only too well the real facts masked behind the offending allegory. That alone was shame enough. Even worse, I had credited my own pure mother with being capable of this debased act, not to speak of the ignominy of the denunciation itself, which, were it ever to be brought to my father's attention (and my sister saw to it that it was), would direct his wrath not on the putative wrongdoers but on me, the slanderer.

Cassandra too was hauled over the coals. But the effort to obtain additional damning evidence from her or to wring from her a confession of further pernicious influences failed by reason of her total incomprehension. This was not merely for linguistic reasons: she didn't even grasp what was being talked about. Yet I began to understand, intuitively, though by no means fully, something of the underlying implications. Henceforth I suspected complex hidden meanings in the most innocent figures of speech, the intent of which was not immediately obvious to me. I would have kept my innocence much longer had I not been suspected so early of having lost it.

It never entered my mind to interpret my sister's spiteful and malicious acts as expressions of a spiteful and malicious character. She simply followed her impulse to pay back in kind whatever bothered and annoyed her; and what bothered and annoyed her was purely and simply my existence as her brother. Understandably so: a talented and imaginative ten-year-old girl, happily busy on her own, is bound to view a willful and irascible six-year-old who constantly invades her world of games and dreams as a hateful troublemaker. I have often wondered that she didn't take advantage of some chance to wring my neck. For my part, I considered her a natural given of life, to be likened to the variable and sometimes hard weather of our country, its white-hot summers and bone-freezing icy winters, also its heartrendingly beautiful springs, as well as its autumns ripening in blue-golden splendor; also to the enticing yet cannibalistic love of my mother, with her lures and bribes and increasingly monotonous reminders, warnings, proscriptions, prohibitions, threats, condemnations and punishments; and generally, to other predicaments of childhood—the helplessness, the impotence, the groping, urgently stressing and distressed existence in unenlightened ignorance.

But primarily my sister was unable to put up with me because I lacked everything that fell under the concept—broadly inclusive in her understanding—of being domesticated. For the crude familiarity with bodily functions and the lack of physical taboos which I owed to Cassandra contributed to widening the distance between my sister and me, a distance set by our difference in age, until it became an unbridgeable one of principle, indeed of culture: we belonged to two different civilizations. She had been born before the general proletarization of the postwar era, in a world that still believed itself to be whole, while I was the true son of an era of universal disintegration. The foundation of her good breeding lay in the self-assurance, however deceptive, of an imperium basking in glory and resting on a punctilious system of rules of comportment and behavior. In contrast, I grew up in the dubious shakiness of one of those successor states described, rather derogatorily, as the Balkans. That this would give me the advantage of a more robust psychic makeup, which greatly facilitated my adaptation to our changed circumstances, in due time received dramatic proof. But in the days of our childhood together—later we saw each other only sporadically, when home for vacations from our separate schools—we expressed our differences in our own ways: she in the sovereign consciousness of her superiority, with her books and her precocious knowledge; I with a feeling of marked inferiority, in suppressed and impotent outbursts of rage, my fists raised against her, more brutish in every respect but, on the other hand, more natural, less inhibited, more free of illusion and closer to the raw realities of nature, less in jeopardy of fancies and abstractions. Only Cassandra knew how to effect temporary conciliations between us. With diabolical slyness she managed to bring out what was still genuinely childlike in my sister, a regression to a more primitive and infantile phase which she then magnified into the comically ridiculous, thus reducing her precocious pretensions to their proper proportions. I know of no better example of this than what we termed our “potty war.''

In accordance with Mother's instruction (who once had heard something or other about a “kidney shock''), whenever some small mishap or alarum occurred—which was often enough—we were first of all set on our potties. What we called “peepee” thus became a kind of purification rite to be performed devoutly, posthaste after some fall or injury while still swallowing the last tears, or routinely at night before going to bed and entering the dark world of sleep, and then again in the morning on awakening from the weirdness of dreams. The vessel receiving these offerings became a symbol of well-being. Each of us had our own and guarded it jealously as an emphatically personalized property; if one of us, in haste or by mistake or in mischief, happened to lay hands on the other's potty, wild screams were heard. Cassandra was in the habit of stirring up these feuds by exchanging, seemingly by chance, the hardly to be confused receptacles: my sister's classic, spherically rounded and handle-equipped one and my own more masculine, beaked and cylindrical one, or she promoted our own confusions, so that all too frequently the nursery was rent by outraged scream: “He''—or she—“is peeing in my potty!” Fueled by demonic Cassandra, the emotions then rose to the level of murderous intentions, and often things got so noisy and boisterous as to reach the rest of the house, until the governess of the moment would profit from the opportunity to intervene and put “the savage one,” Cassandra, in her place. (This relation, in any case, was never a good one. It was conflict not between personalities but between different classes and different worlds.) Finally the hubbub reached the earthly proximate Olympus, so that either Mother would come rushing into the nursery like an angered swan and, instead of soothing our boiling emotions, would conduct fidgety interrogations, meting out punishments that diverted our wrath from each other and directed it instead against the despotism of adults and our own impotence; or my father himself—rarely enough, when he happened not to be away hunting—stepped in and staged some humorous “divine ordeal,” a race for the potties or a “noble contest,” challenging us as to which of our toys we would be ready to sacrifice to buy back the usurped right to use the contested vessel. What until then had been a deadly serious conflict, fought with a ferocity all the more embittered as it centered, in truth, merely on the agonizing “as if” of childhood, then resolved into a game, became irrelevant and lost its sharp-edged reality. In return, I gladly accepted any outcome, even though I said to myself that my father patently favored my sister because she was closer to his heart than I.

I could always be sure of one consolation: behind the black silken curtain of Cassandra's hair, in the baking-oven warmth of her strong peasant corporeality, I found refuge at all times from whatever pained me. I was so obviously her favorite that she was often denounced to my parents and then chided for her undisguised preference for me. The more my sister outgrew the nursery and came under the thumb of a succession of more or less neurotic, pretentious governesses—neurotic because they lacked a man and were unattractive and poor, pretentious because, with their semieducated Occidentalism, they presumed they had been relegated to a Balkanic backwater and degraded to the level of domestics—the more Cassandra made me exclusively her own. I was the apple of her eye.