The Snows of Yesteryear Read online

  I know better. Not only because I felt all my life that, nursed by Cassandra, I had suckled the milk of that soil, with all its light and dark powers, from which she, Cassandra, but not my mother, had sprung; but because the myth of my mother’s boundless maternality was inconsistent with the hardly more credible but steadfastly maintained other myth of her delicate health. Until proof incontrovertible emerged, toward the end of her life, of the remarkable toughness with which she endured the vicissitudes of existence, she managed to convince almost everyone that, as someone in constant poor health, even the simplest life tasks were beyond her. Before I was born she had spent most of her time in health spas, allegedly to recuperate from the birth of my sister, which had occurred four years earlier.

  Her supposed delicacy was aggravated by historical events, which drove us for the first time, though then only temporarily, from the Bukovina. I was born in 1914; the First World War broke out in August of that year. The Bukovina borders directly to the north on Galicia, where, right from the start, bloody fighting took place and the Russians advanced almost unopposed. Because someone claimed to have seen their flat caps—in truth, he had mistaken the visorless field-gray caps of our German comrades-in-arms—panic broke out among the population. My mother, left alone, as my father had gone to war, allowed herself to become infected by the general hysteria, and so we too fled more or less helter-skelter. Our objective was a summer house near Trieste belonging to my paternal grandfather, who had died shortly before.

  Obviously I remember nothing of this flight, which occurred soon after my birth. My sister, who was almost five, spoke of it as a darkly shadowed experience; sometimes it recurred for her in anxiety-ridden dreams. My mother avoided talking about it. My father maintained that she was ashamed of the rashness of our flight, which he dismissed with a shrug as “headless.” But ultimately events confirmed that she had been right: Czernowitz (now Chernovtsy in the Soviet Union), the capital of the Bukovina, repeatedly fell into Russian hands during the ever changing outcome of the ensuing battles. At best, we might have chosen a more favorable moment and a more comfortable means for our flight.

  As to the route we took in our flight, I also know about it only vaguely and through hearsay. I was told that we had to cross the Carpathian Mountains in horse-drawn carriages and over a rather arduous pass, by night and in a blizzard, so as to reach Bistrice (now Bistriţa), in the district of Marmorosh, then still belonging to Hungary, whence the railway was to carry us to Trieste by way of Budapest and Vienna. This mountain pass can have been only the Bargău, where, according to legend and Bram Stoker’s novel, the castle of Dracula once stood. To reach it and Bistrice must have taken us several days by carriage, all during which Cassandra acted as our protective genius.

  Our mother neither spoke nor understood any of the local languages. Although German had been the official idiom in the Bukovina during the Austrian era, that language became increasingly mangled and incomprehensible, both to us and to the variegated nationals, the deeper one penetrated into the Bukovina. Cassandra, on the other hand, who spoke no language correctly, expressed herself in snatches of Romanian, Ruthenian, Polish and Hungarian, as well as Turkish and Yiddish, assisted by a grotesque, grimacing mimicry and a primitive, graphic body language that made everyone laugh and that everyone understood.

  What this kind of flight is like, we now know well, at the latest from the days at the end of the Second World War when the tide was turning in 1944–1945, if not sooner from the time of the defeat of France, when populations of entire regions were in headlong flight. Among the hand-drawn carts and open rack-wagons on which children in rags are starving and freezing, the closed barouches with their fur-clad passengers and yapping terriers, their attendant vans loaded with mountains of luggage, are an object of scandal and inspire hatred rather than respect. Resentment against us could not be mitigated by the finishing-school French and nursery English to which my mother resorted when she couldn’t make do with German. The decrepit old coachmen, my sister’s frightened, indignant and frozen governess, the Bohemian cook and two peasant girls barely trained as maids were of no help. But Cassandra was at home in the Carpathians and to her the sharp air was as balsam. Had she heard the howling of wolves, it would have sounded to her as a familiar melody. She spoke to the people as her own kind and in their own idiom. Her strange garb invested her with authority. When it was a question of finding quarters for the night or a place close to a warm oven, a pitcher of milk or merely some water for tea, it was she who negotiated and sought understanding, it was she who called for mercy and sympathy, and she did so with the impish, weirdly droll vivacity that was her very own and that no one could withstand. Much later my mother, still resentful, and unaware of how this contradicted her description of Cassandra, used to recriminate over the remembrance of how Cassandra, a barely born infant at her shamelessly bared breast, exploited me as a means of sentimental blackmail when expatiating on our wretchedness as refugees.

  Of the house near Trieste where we finally found refuge I have no memories either, unless it be subconsciously in my feeling of intimacy with Mediterranean landscapes, the homelike ambience which for me pervades those stony shores, scanned by the black obelisks of cypress trees, that ocher-colored coastland over which the Adriatic blue fades into the barely more translucent azure of the skies. No telling whether this familiarity is not derived rather from some early impressions of postcards. We stayed in the little villa near Trieste for less than a year, until the entry of Italy into the war against us Austrians required that we flee once more, this time much less dramatically and in greater comfort—specifically, to Vienna and in three sleeping-car compartments.

  Whether for Cassandra this stay in the Karst region around Trieste, a region totally different from Bukovina’s wealth of fields and forests, was like an exile, she never told. Among Italian-speaking people she became mute, although she might have achieved at least some measure of understanding in Ukrainian with Slovenes or in German with some of the German-speaking Triestines. Not only must she have seemed, in that motley mixture of Slovenes, Friulians, Greeks and Jews, like some exotic specimen from the sideshow of a traveling circus, but the opportunities for such encounters would have been rare. We lived a very secluded and cloistered existence; even my mother, mindful of her role as refugee and of her perennially fragile health, hardly ever drove into Trieste. Later, my sister told me that she almost died of boredom. Apart from endless hours of instruction with her governess, her sole distraction consisted in the game of diabolo, in which a rotating hourglass-shaped spool is balanced and spun on a string stretched between two sticks, then thrust into the air and caught again on the string—a game Proust had already described as obsolete at the turn of the century. Thanks to untiring practice, she managed to acquire a mastery of diabolo with which she often used to humiliate me later on. Photographs from that period show her, flowerlike, among gigantic agaves in a rock garden, clad in a white summer frock and a large linen hat to protect her against the Mediterranean sun. The strange plants, appearing to have originated in some other geological era, look like a stage backdrop, and this invests the figure of my sister with an air of artificiality and precociousness. At home—our home in the Bukovina, which she was to come to hate—her blossomlike appearance was natural. There is another picture of her in the garden of our true home that shows her at eye level with her stubby-haired setter, Troll, the dog my father had laid as a puppy in her cradle shortly after her birth—much to the dismay of the still ailing mother, the nurse and all the other females in the household. The dog and the little girl are as organically harmonious in the cheerfully overgrown garden as its trees and shrubs and lawns turning into meadows rank with wild flowers. The picture, taken no more than a year and a half before the one in the garden near Trieste, epitomizes an irrevocably lost period in my sister’s life. That childlike innocence, the existential oneness with all living creatures, the deep embeddedness in the ever astounding richness of all nature bec
ame a thing of the past and ceded its place to the realization of the complexity of being.

  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 d
enied. 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.