The Snows of Yesteryear (11 page)

Still, we children had that stereotyped experience of seeing Mother enter her bedroom, her deep décolleté glittering with jewels and she herself transformed into a movie star, followed by my father, who left it undecided whether the high color of his face was due to the tightness of the stiff collar he wore with his tails or to his rage at having to spend the evening on diversions he hated and in the company of people he despised. There existed in Czernowitz at that time a theater in which German-language plays were put on with “leading talents from the homeland,” as it was advertised, until Romanian students ended these performances with a violent demonstration. This chauvinist manifestation sufficed to prompt my father never again to set foot in that theater. But other social events tempted—or repelled.

The Gay Twenties were upon us. From the illustrated magazines arriving at the house, we received graphic instructions on the fashionably updated life-style models, saluted by popping champagne corks. Even our unworldly mother knew enough of the world to recognize the difference in quality between these glittering images and the true level of the locally available entertainment. Father's ruthlessly acerbic comments the morning after such nights of revelry left no doubt concerning their real worth. Still, some romance remained in preparing for the hoped-for enactments of the great dream-life, however inadequate these might turn out to be. Whenever we found ourselves in my mother's dressing room, Cassandra would rummage with monkeylike curiosity in the costly fabrics of evening gowns and wraps from a more expansive prewar era, the heron feathers, diamond clasps, silk shoes, brocaded caps and other paraphernalia. But the atmosphere of real or imagined festivities was felt most vividly when the baubles had been put away and left once again gently to gather dust. And this happened soon enough: Mother's fairy-queen appearances at our bedside became increasingly rare and eventually ceased altogether. My father, once more in the best of moods, set out on his hunting trips and stayed away for weeks, while my mother again wrapped herself in manically conceived maternal duties. We children were her only connection to reality, her sole life possession, and she claimed it for herself alone. The shell around us closed hermetically while the years bypassed her life dream.

Nevertheless, the no longer so young woman—she is past the “Balzacian age,”
la femme de trente ans
, after all—is granted a short, late bloom after she separates from my father. For me it is a difficult time, for I am away from home and suffer much from homesickness. On the other hand, I too am given a new life, for I am freed of my sister's affectations of superiority; she is with our grandparents in Vienna and about to go to finishing school. I am almost nine and I am sent to Kronstadt (now Braşov), in Transylvania, to begin my education at the renowned Honterus Gymnasium there. Among strangers and released from Cassandra's guardianship, I am faced for the first time by the question of who and what I am. There is no doubt in my mind who is the steadying keel that gives me at least some self-assurance, which from the start had been weak and had been shaken further by the loss of my parental home: I am in love with my mother. Whenever she visits me, she is followed by glances of admiration, respect, desire. I find her at the Hotel At the Crown, an exemplary establishment of the old-fashioned Austro-Hungarian kind. The lobby with the deep leather chairs I founder in, the restaurant with its black-white-and-silver table settings and tailcoated waiters, the coffeehouse with its marble-topped tables and gypsy orchestra, the winter garden with its tropical plants and the diffuse light from its colored glass windows—all bespeak the elegance of a period about to vanish: the legendary luxury voyages on international trains such as the Orient Express and at palace hotels. We are privileged guests. The way my mother is treated by the employees, the waiters and the reception clerk makes me proud to be her son. The high regard and courtesy shown her by the men and the assiduity displayed by the women extends to me. I am spoiled because I am her child. I observe her sharply and compare her with other women, including the mothers of my school comrades, and the result makes me arrogant. The assurance with which she gives orders and makes her wishes known in her clear French to a chauvinistic assistant concierge at the hotel who alleges not to understand German and insists on speaking Romanian (which my mother never mastered); her girlish blushing when a gentleman of the old school who chances to witness this unpleasant scene (a typical one, incidentally, for the successor states to the Empire in those early years) compliments her for her fine bearing by a wordless bow—these are lasting impressions. In photographs from that period I see her gathering a fur piece around her naked shoulders in a gesture that nowadays is frequently imitated by transvestites; with her, it conveys an inimitable grace, seldom seen in the fatidic stars of the society sheets and the movies (beginning to flicker with their omnipotent promise even in those remote parts), who forfeited in the theatricality of their gestures a good deal of their ladylike pretensions.

It is difficult to reconcile this image of her with the last two-thirds of her life, when she increasingly distorted and coarsened herself. Two decades later she was so different that no one possibly could have recognized her, let alone have found in her the willowy girl with the grave and dreamy glance she had been prior to her ill-fated marriage. Perhaps someone might have realized, on the strength of faint signs—the claim to respect that betrayed itself in her bearing; a certain fastidiousness; her still well-formed hands—that what had occurred here was not only a personal decay but one of the countless individual destinies swept away and crushed by the eclipse of an entire world.

The surprising thing, given the rigidity of her character, was the pliancy with which she adapted to that fate. Her angry resignation somehow seemed like an act of revenge. She adapted to increasingly uncomfortable circumstances not only without resistance but almost with alacrity, as if she derived some perverse satisfaction from it. In her last years, she displayed a teeth-gnashing, reluctant submissiveness. By grimly bending under the blows that fate delivered to her, she could prove to the world the magnitude of the suffering for which she had been predestined. This psychological pattern must have had very deep roots, reaching back to her earliest days.

One of today's many overused words deriving from popular psychology is
frustration.
In the case of my mother this term is to be applied not merely in the figurative sense of bafflement but quite literally, as a castigation, a flagellation. In my mind rises a horrifying scene from her early girlhood that she once told me about, half in saddened forgiveness and half in awe of the pedagogic harshness it demonstrated with such naked brutality. The time is just after the turn of the century and she is thirteen or fourteen years old, on a summer afternoon bathed in a vine-green light that invades the house from the garden. She is doing four-handed piano exercises with her sister, younger by one year, and believes herself alone with her, for once unobserved, and so she begins to joke, to fool around, to laugh and to twattle—and is abruptly called to order by the biting stroke of a cane across her back. Her father stands behind her in all his mythic authority, as he towered all her life over her parental home, the embodiment of law and order in the entire world. When he punishes her he is not merely her idolized papa but the incarnation of universal law in all its inflexible severity. An irrevocable verdict has been pronounced: she is unworthy in her role as the oldest child and model for her five siblings, unworthy of the expectations placed on her, and of all those that will be placed on her throughout her life.... Never again will she regain full trust in herself. She was destined to fail, and she did not rebel against that fate but accepted it in smoldering rage and suppressed culpability, a self-lacerating readiness to suffer that she invested with the aura of martyrdom.

This anecdote did not make me fond of my grandfather. I did not at first understand how he could have been capable of so brutal an act. He was a man of the world with excellent manners and even a sense of humor. Photographs I preserve out of scientific curiosity show him in the smartly cut uniform of an officer in the reserves; as a culture-seeking tourist, clad in plaids and looking at some Near Eastern ruins; as imperial counselor in a frock coat. In all of them, a short-trimmed beard half conceals an ironic smile. He was known to be exceptionally stubborn. Molded by all the fatal preconceptions of the nineteenth century, he drew his overly developed conceit from contemporary ideas about one's “position in the world” and from related cast-iron moral and aesthetic principles, in particular those that were grounded in property. A pompous plush-lined Victorianism imbued him toward the end of his days with a cigar-smoking vulgarity in such sharp contrast with the elegance of his appearance that paradoxically—you see this in portraits of Edward VII as Prince of Wales—it became part of it.

He always impressed me as the prototype of the flourishing bourgeois at the turn of the century, during the so-called
Gründerzeit.
His well-to-do family was of Swiss origin; they had come to Vienna early in the eighteenth century and, together with cousins who also had emigrated from Fribourg, gained merit through their service with the then emerging Austrian tobacco monopoly. The cousins rose high in the world, they were made counts and married into the aristocracy. His branch of the family gained only a modest title of nobility, and whether there rankled in him some envy of those favored ones or whether the entrepreneurial spirit of his commoner forebears was reawakened in him is a moot question, but his life was that of an American-style self-made man. His admirers, especially his daughters, liked to retell with unquestioning adulation the legend of how, against the will of his family—but the why in this remains unfathomable—he turned his efforts to the lumber industry, how he became a leading figure in forestry circles and amassed a fortune that allowed him to marry the beautiful, well-born and well-endowed daughter of a general of Irish extraction. (That on her mother's side she had Greek ancestors who in the distant past had plundered some Wallachian fiefdoms increased her value—and thereby his reputation as a man who knew how to acquire the best on the most favorable terms.) This version of his triumphs, which surely in reality was not such a black-and-white thing, incensed my father, who never tired of stripping the mythic figure of his father-in-law of his nimbus; his scorn helped to set the seeds of my cordial dislike of my grandfather.

I saw him only seldom, though. My maternal grandparents no longer lived in the Bukovina. They too were part of what my father liked to call “cultural compost'': envoys of the civilizing administration of an empire that no longer existed. Even before the First World War, they and my mother's siblings had returned to Vienna, whither we, who after 1919 were Romanian citizens, visited them at most once a year for a few days—usually when passing through on our way to the Carinthian lakes, where my mother dragged my sister and me for summer vacations, hated by both of us and clouded by homesickness for our house and our dogs. Eventually we came to understand that these “fresh-air resorts''—as if the Carpathians were lacking in fresh air and the fragrance of pine woods!—were a pretext for Mother to see her family and to afford one or another of her sisters a few weeks of relaxation. For those sisters had by then become impoverished and had to work for a living: the war and subsequent inflation, as well as some ill-advised speculations, had reduced my grandfather's legendary fortune to nothing more than its zeros.

So I never saw him in the fullness of his life, but only as a sick and broken man; and on the strength of my father's denigrations of the family myth, according to which he was the sole proprietor and protector of all civic and paterfamilial virtues, I thought of him as an unpleasant, despotic, petty, hidebound old man. He gave no evidence in his last years that contradicted this impression. He would sit immobile on a sofa in the drawing room of his apartment in Vienna, filled with heavy baroque furniture, family portraits, bronzes and layers of dark Oriental carpets, chin supported on his hands and lavishly beringed fingers clutching the ivory crook of an ebony cane. I fancied that this stick was the same with which he had thrashed my mother's back when she was a little girl. I was certainly not the only one who breathed a surreptitious sigh of relief when he died in the icy winter of 1927. In triumph my sister showed me one of the rings that had made his large pale hands, worm-streaked by thick blue veins, so especially repellent to me. It was given her as a reward for her skill in countering his temper tantrums with the slippery smoothness of her good manners. Strangely enough, an heirloom also fell to me, who was not endowed with such diplomatic skills: an intricately worked gold pocket watch with a dial in Arabic numerals which he had brought back from one of his trips to Turkey. It disappeared, like so many other things during my student days, at the pawnbroker's, never to be seen again.

I also have a picture of the young girl driven by that cane stroke from childhood ingenuousness into the baffling quandary of her being, to a realization of inadequacy in the face of the tasks with which life would confront her. In this photograph she stands, straight and lissome, in a high-necked summer dress in front of a bench in the parental garden—a large garden of the kind that even grandchildren, when told of its splendors, will dream about. Something of its freedom-promising green glory can still be seen in her eyes, but already it is tainted by the nostalgia of leave-taking. She is every inch the young girl brought up according to her social position—and at the same time she betrays the bedevilment of a young being imprinted by the stereotypes of convention. Her comeliness cannot conceal a puzzled consternation that has become second nature to her. She knows what's in store for her, as the saying goes: she foresees her future and the impossibility of coping with the demands that will be addressed to her—without conceiving for a moment that she might be able to change anything. The “grand life” belongs to the world of dreams: it may happen, but this will change hardly anything at all in her preordained fate as a woman. These are the sober facts: she will be married as well as possible, to a man in comfortable circumstances and not below her own standing; she will have children and will try to educate them according to the same stereotypes that marked her own education—verbal stereotypes, which she may even recognize as such but to which she has bowed without demur. She must live in accordance with the rhetoric of her caste and era, and if she does not succeed, her failure is her own and not due to the emptiness of the phraseology.