The Snows of Yesteryear (7 page)

Soon we harbored a common secret: during one of our walks (my sister was at home doing lessons), a noncommissioned officer accosted Cassandra. We already knew him by sight: in his squadron he rode a white horse that I especially admired. For several weeks we met him regularly. He wasn't much taller than Cassandra and at least equally unprepossessing, bowlegged, with arms hanging almost to his knees, a diminutive pitch-black moustache of exactly the same width as the nostrils under which it was glued, framed by two sharp wrinkles like two parentheses. Whenever he opened his broad mouth in a friendly grin, his big teeth shone white like an ape's. He could have been Cassandra's brother. But his tunic glittered with gold braids, spurs jingled on his boots, the spit-polished shafts of which were decorated with brass rosettes on heart-shaped cutouts below the knees, and it was with the unmatched verve of the experienced Lothario that he raised his arm to his shako in salute. I resolved to imitate all this in due time: this was supersharp and had true class; this was the right way to deal with women. I kept secret even from Cassandra that I exercised these gestures at home in front of a mirror.

The encounters were not limited to strolls along the so-called Nut Lane in the public garden—the name derived from the thick hazelnut bushes bordering the path, bearing to everyone's delight a profusion of fruit, almost always stripped bare before they could ripen to their full doe-brown, glossy hardness. Fairly soon our chaste perambulations ended with the three of us in our garden, into which a narrow door in the wall gave access and where a small pavilion, hardly more than a toolshed, invited strollers to rest. There the cavalryman, to my joyful delight—so overpowering as to make my temples throb—took off his saber and handed it to me to play with. I quickly withdrew to the remotest corner of the garden, where I could relish to the full the agonizing thrill of drawing the naked blade from its heavy, dull-metal scabbard, letting it glitter in the sun and then using it for nothing more martial, to my sorrow, than the beheading of nettles. My fantasy was excited even more passionately by the gold filigree of the saber knot, which in a most tactile way manifested the reality of the military world, making me realize all the more acutely the mere “as if” of the world of my games.

It was, alas, only a borrowed reality and it mocked me: I could not include it in the world of my games without feeling that I was deceiving myself—especially since I knew full well that I had been bribed by Cassandra and her corporal to get lost. I also knew that by letting myself be seduced so willingly, I was giving them time for their own games—games of factual reality, not make-believe ones. I did not have the slightest doubt that I had become their accomplice in something prohibited, though what this was I could imagine only vaguely. According to the degree of my enlightenment at that time, it could hardly be anything else than that these two were now squatting together to crap on the ground. After I had been called back and had returned the bribe and both of them had gone on their way, I felt impelled to return secretly to the pavilion, where I searched for the traces of their encounter. But when I failed to find any, my conscience was not appeased. The secret that separated the world of adults from my own make-believe one remained impenetrable, even though it seemed to be present, shimmering provocatively, everywhere and in everything.

The idyll was not to last long. One evening we strolled in vain along Nut Lane: our cavalryman did not appear, nor did he come the following day or the day after that, and so on for a stretch of one or two weeks. Then, quite unexpectedly, we met him once more. The verve of his salute was restrained. No, he could not accompany us to our garden but allegedly had urgent business in the opposite direction. A violent argument ensued between him and Cassandra, the words flying out so fast and vehemently that I did not understand any of them. Suddenly he hit her brutally across the face. I screamed. The impulse to throw myself at him lapsed in futility, for as he hit her he turned and walked away quickly, almost at a run. Cassandra loosened her hair and wrapped me in it. The jingling of his spurs was lost in the distance. She took me by the hand as I sobbed uncontrollably, and silently she walked me home.

Cassandra had no tears. She brought me to her little room in the attic, rummaged in one of her drawers and produced from under a pile of laundry a photograph of the cavalryman: it showed him in the traditional lady-killer pose, leaning on a rudimentary birch-lattice fence (the standard background of the while-you-wait photographer at the entrance to the public park), one arm bent akimbo, the sleeve embroidered with a filigree of gold braids and his hand nonchalantly holding a pair of white cuff-gloves, the saber hanging low in the belt. Cassandra placed the picture on a table, lit a candle in front of it, knelt down, crossed herself and started to pray ... at first in a murmur, then ever louder, first in deep seriousness and apparent piety, then ever more satanically, her rising rage driving her into demonic merriment, praying ever more wildly and interjecting into her prayers increasingly terrifying invectives and the most shocking gestures ... until she finally grabbed the picture, drew a pin from her hair and with it pricked out his eyes, drove it through his heart and time and time again at the juncture of his legs; then she tore the picture into small scraps with which, after lifting her skirts, she wiped her behind, finally burning each scrap separately in the flame of the candle.

At first, I was deeply frightened. Cassandra, the piously strict, for whom God the Father, Jesus Christ and all the saints were part of the world as real as the mountains, the rivers and the trees in the forest where she had been born, all of them as firmly grounded in her life as the walls of the monastery in which she, a sinner, had found refuge, she who never failed to make the sign of the cross before speaking the name of something holy, she who had led me into every church that happened to be on our way— she now celebrated right here before my very eyes a black mass, she sinned in the most blasphemous manner imaginable, she indulged in shamanic magic and invoked satanic powers for the lowest of purposes: to take revenge on one whom she had loved. It was so monstrous, so unexpected and so baffling that, irresistibly, it reverted to the comical. I ended up raked by laughter. I could not wait to tell my sister about it and I rejoiced in anticipation of that moment, even though I knew this would constitute a betrayal of Cassandra and our twin togetherness. Our family storehouse of anecdotes had gained another pungent Cassandra story—and I had lost one more part of my innocence.

Retrospective perception of the milestones of life, which tends to make you see existence as divided into distinct phases, leads me to see this episode as marking the end of my true childhood. After it I could no longer identify myself with Cassandra naturally and spontaneously. For the first time I “saw” her consciously and perceived her through the eyes of the others to whom I betrayed her. I had left the safe haven of her hair, in which I had been sheltered from those others, and I had switched over to their camp. We still lived in a time in which an almost unbridgeable gulf gaped between the so-called educated classes and the so-called common people. My family's situation, based on the abstract image of a once privileged position—mainly the myth of former wealth, which encouraged us to live beyond our true means and to indulge in expensive habits we could no longer afford—placed us absurdly far above the “common people,” who, for the most part, lived in abject poverty, a poverty borne humbly and with eyes raised in admiration to their “masters.” For the first time I thought of Cassandra as belonging not to my own lineage but to that other race of the poor, the know-nothing and the lowly. At the same time, there awoke in me a sense of the social pecking order. The longings for my putative milk-brother began to fade. Had I met him then, I would have felt separated from him by the same gap that set me apart from the neighborhood children with whom we were forbidden to play.

It may be that this event was preceded by another less spectacular one that had an even greater impact, an initiation of a different sort, the dark terror of which, though belonging wholly to childhood, at the same time presaged its end. My magpie died. One afternoon she lay dead in her cage. That very morning she had been hopping around as gaily as ever. I could not believe that this cold and rigid piece of rubbish that lay in the sandy gravel at the bottom of her cage was she. I trembled with sorrow. My sister was all eagerness to arrange a solemn funeral, but Cassandra with bewildering roughness forbade any such un-Christian nonsense and saw to it that the little corpse was discarded with the garbage. In so doing she was seconded by my mother, who thought the magpie had died of tuberculosis and might possibly infect us; this only increased my grief. For the first time, Cassandra was not my ally. My lamentations went for naught. Cassandra remained coarsely peremptory, as if, faced by the unavoidable fact of life and death, her unbroken peasant sense of reality revolted against citified fussing. “Dead is dead,” she said gruffly. “One day you too will be dead.''

Had she said what surely I had heard before—“You too will have to die one day” —it would have remained in the abstract. When hearing such sentences, comprehension glanced off from the purely verbal, but “being dead” meant what was clearly manifest by the bird's corpse on the garbage heap. I understood. Terror struck at me like a dead weight. I saw myself stretched out on my bed, rigid and cold, rubbishy in my cerements, rotting underneath, something to be discarded as quickly as possible, like the dead magpie. Around me stood my sobbing family. I saw the hearse carrying me away and, behind, my sister in black veils, triumph in her eyes dutifully red from crying. I saw my grave and my dog refusing to leave it. All that was unavoidable, inescapable. It could happen tomorrow or many years on—but it had to happen, and against that no revocation or merciful exemption was possible. I was overcome by great fear. Clouds like black cinders stood over cooling embers in the scarlet evening firmament. I felt like fleeing—but where? Wherever I might go, this fear would go with me. This death fear would henceforth be with me, inextinguishably and forever, and it would hollow out my whole being: even if fleetingly I might forget it, it would rise in me at some moment and gnaw at my happiness or joy, or be ready to sink down to the bottom of my soul like a heavy stone; henceforth I would always know what it meant when someone told me that I too was mortal. In utter despair I asked Cassandra whether this was truly so, whether it had to be irrevocably so. Cassandra was incorruptible: “Everything has to die!” she said. “Your father too, and your mother and your sister, and I too, we all have to die one day!” And I knew she was telling the truth: Cassandra, the seeress.

I cannot dissociate the memory of Cassandra from that of the landscape that produced and nurtured her, the land whence she had come to us: the melancholy spaces of a landscape peopled with peasants and shepherds through which the silver band of a river meanders lazily, edged by hills and mountains shaded by forests. The view from the windows of our nursery carried the eye over the green humps of the treetops in our garden, out to the two rows of poplars bordering the big arterial road which led straight as an arrow to the pallid blue remoteness where the great forests stood. It may well be that the apelike sorrow in Cassandra's jet-black eyes originated in her longing for the stillness of those forests, filled with the drumming of woodpeckers and the scent of waving grasses in the meadowed clearings, and that her impish merriment was meant only to shield this incurable homesickness. Whenever her glance happened in that direction, it clung there, stretched out to the vague faraway somewhere, which, like an incontrovertible fate, exerted a steady undertow on our own souls as well. Cassandra could not turn away from that perspective without a deep sorrowful sigh, as if she saw herself as a wanderer on the wide dusty road between the poplars, forever drawn by her own inescapable destiny. And each time she would clasp me in her long simian arms only to thrust me away abruptly, as if pushing me out of her life. Even I—that God-sent gift replacing her own child, the sweetly restored core of her life — even I she saw merely as a short-term wayfaring companion on her road through life, the road that ultimately she had to travel alone. And because I sensed this in my innermost self, I also took up life as if it were but a succession of leave-takings in the course of a long journey.

In the image I hold of her in my mind, she is part of the prospect from the window of our nursery. She moves in front of it in all her scurrilous and farcical animation, haunting and weird even when sad, angry or moody, reminding me of a figure in one of those Turkish stick-puppet shows: the female counterpart of Karagjös, the jester. We never were able to determine her nationality with any degree of certainty. Most probably she was a Huzule—that is, a daughter of that Ruthenian-speaking tribe of mountain Gorals, who, it is said, are the purest-bred descendants of the Dacians who fled before the Roman invaders into the impenetrable fastness of their forests. Yet Cassandra just as well could have been a Romanian—that is, a product of all those innumerable populations who coursed through my country during the dark centuries of the decaying Roman dominion. She spoke both Romanian and Ruthenian, both equally badly—which is not at all unusual in the Bukovina—intermixing the two languages and larding both with bits from a dozen other idioms. The result was that absurd lingua franca, understood only by myself and scantily by those who, like her, had to express themselves in a similarly motley verbal hodgepodge. Even though it may be questioned whether I was actually fed at Cassandra's breast, there can be no doubt that linguistically I was nourished by her speech. The main component was a German, never learned correctly or completely, the gaps in which were filled with words and phrases from all the other tongues spoken in the Bukovina—so that each second or third word was either Ruthenian, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Armenian or Yiddish, not to forget Hungarian and Turkish. From my birth, I heard mainly this idiom, and it was as natural to me as the air I breathed. Just as naturally, I repeated guilelessly everything I heard from her, at least at first, and only when I was constantly corrected, when some of my expressions brought on irrepressible laughter while others were greeted by an uncomprehending shake of the head and yet others severely prohibited, did I begin to realize that Cassandra's and my way of expressing ourselves was something out of the ordinary, a secret idiom within the general means of communication, albeit one with so many known patches that confidentiality itself was somehow full of holes without, for all that, being readily decodable.