The Snows of Yesteryear (2 page)

For Beatrice

with love and in unending gratitude

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

—François Villon

S
warms of waxwings have settled in the ripe clusters of rowanberries. It is said that they come only every seven years from high up north, from Lapland or Siberia, and only when the winter threatens to turn exceptionally severe. They're also called plague birds, even though they appear rather pretty: plump and colorful, with a saucy crest, velvety black heads and throats, white-banded wings on scarlet pinions and tails edged in lemon yellow. Their fluffy breasts, of a rosy mother-of-pearl hue, crowd against the spiky gridwork of the cluster stems as they busily pick the red berries. A sudden detonation: someone is shooting with birdshot into the swarm, which rises like smoke above the crowns of the rowan trees. But a good dozen of the birds tumble from the fruit
clusters down into the snow amidst fallen berries and drops of blood. Who can tell whether the survivors will ever return? The clusters are torn to shreds and the denuded twigs show as a rigid pattern against the pale winter sky
.

When she joined the household, it was said, she was hardly more than a beast. They had peeled her out of her peasant garb and had instantly consigned the shirt, the wrap skirt, the sleeveless sheepskin jacket and the leather buskins to the flames. But clad in city clothes, she looked so utterly absurd as to be frightening. People would say in rude jesting that if a pregnant woman encountered her, she might well miscarry. Forthwith they dressed her once more in her traditional costume, though a somewhat stylized version, devoid of the many-colored embroideries on shirt and skirt, without the vermilion sash and the saffron-colored kerchief: a nunnish garb in subdued black, white and gray shades. “They turned a goldfinch into a sparrow,” she would say of herself. It had not been anticipated that she would be even more conspicuous in this contrived costume than in her traditional clothes, notwithstanding which she wore it with great and dignified pride, as if it were a monastic vestment.

No one ever found out how she had come by the name of Cassandra. Under no circumstances could she have been baptized under that name. The godforsaken hamlet in the Carpathian Mountains whence she had come—she still knew its name but no longer where it was located, in any case, “way back in the woods''—consisted of a handful of clapboard hovels whose inhabitants slept with their sheep in winter, while in summer the plangent sound of their shepherd pipes mingled with the wind rushing through the pine trees of their mountain fastness. To what name she answered there she stubbornly refused to reveal, nor did she divulge who first had called her Cassandra. Probably it was someone at the monastery where my father had found her, but even that seemed doubtful: no one but the abbot himself would have been likely to bestow on her, out of the bevy of maidservants—perhaps by reason of some evil-boding prophecy?—the name of the seeress from
The Iliad.
The monks in their black frocks, the stovepipes of their rimless hats on their shaggy-haired heads, shy, wildly ecstatic or half mad in self-absorption, were no less ignorant than their village brethren. Anyway, she came to us as Cassandra and took care of me from the day of my birth—as my nanny, my mother said; as my wet nurse, Cassandra claimed.

It is typical of my mother's misguided pride that no photographs of Cassandra have come down to me. When the northern part of the Bukovina where we used to live—formerly a crown land of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and after 1919 a province of Romania—was ceded to Russia in 1940 as a result of the pact concluded between Stalin and Hitler, or more accurately between their lackeys Molotov and Ribbentrop, the authorities in charge of Interests of Germans Abroad “repatriated” us and all other former Austrians “of German blood” to the German Reich. Each person was allowed to take fifty kilograms of belongings. My mother had a Russian colonel quartered in her town house in Czernowitz who gallantly permitted her to take with her twice as much, of which at least a third consisted of memorabilia of the family. Among the hundreds of photographs, all those showing Cassandra were eliminated. Not because of her ugliness, although she must have looked, with me in her arms, like a female gorilla costumed as a nanny kidnapping a white infant. That Cassandra had been in our service, first as nanny and later, when I was growing up and my parents had separated, as my father's housekeeper, my mother could not help admitting. But that the “savage one,” as Cassandra openly was called in the household, had also been my wet nurse—this my mother resolutely denied. To have nursed me with her own milk was a distinction she claimed for herself alone.

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 became a thing of the past and ceded its place to the realization of the complexity of being.