The Snows of Yesteryear (13 page)

It is but natural that nostalgia transposes this house for me into the perennial sunshine of a Bonnard painting. Yet I am certain the good taste of its furnishings favorably impressed our rare guests, who came at my mother's invitation. These were not just evening gatherings. We, the children, soon provided an excuse for these social events; our alienation from the world around us and our lack of contact with other children finally penetrated even my mother's consciousness and she recalled her duty to prepare us for life—though this too according to her own romantic notions. So as to bring us together with our peers, she arranged fancy-dress
fêtes champêtres
and pageants in which my sister, representing Titania, Queen of the Fairies, was drawn through the garden on a flower-garlanded carriage by some eleven-year-old maiden, both girls dressed in tutus and with dragonfly wings sprouting from their narrow shoulder blades, while I, together with two other boys (one of whom happened to be cross-eyed), led the cortege in page costumes, our locks crowned by wreaths, blowing on shepherd pipes. Such events were more entertaining for the mothers and governesses than for us, and they often deteriorated into brawls with my costumed coevals. Once my sister appeared as a
bayadère
whipped mercilessly with a cotton cat-o'-nine-tails by a fat man in a turban and Turkish breeches; this earned her such enthusiastic applause that she decided then and there to follow in Pavlova's footsteps and become a prima ballerina. When she glowingly informed my father of her intention, he commented dryly, “If your mother allows this to come to pass, I'll personally shoot you from the stage!” Eventually he brought a brusque end to those charades when he learned that because of them the whole town thought of us as wildly eccentric. (In Czernowitz, masquerades were thought appropriate, if at all, only at Purim.) At a house party where I enacted the role of sausage vendor, he doctored the sausages, generously offered to the assembled guests, with a potent laxative. The ensuing scenes of horror in the toilets and bathrooms remained a permanent obstacle to any further attempts to rescue his children from their isolation.

His other contributions to our social life were scant. All the men he brought to the house were rum birds: an alcoholic mathematics professor who was the only person with whom he could discuss higher mathematics (in which he was interested mainly in connection with ballistic computations); an old apothecary, expert in alchemical preparations, another of my father's wide-ranging, albeit almost exclusively hunt-focused interests; a painter and engraver who taught him the esoteric skills of dry-needle technique (he painted, drew and engraved dreadful pictures of mating capercaillies and rutting stags); or various of his hunting companions, who either were passionate ornithologists, botanists or armorers or lived reclusively in the forest, where they seemed to have grown mossy and, like Hamsun's Pan, exuded a pungent gamey smell. All efforts failed to awaken his young wife's sympathy for these cronies. To be sure, his attentions were directed not solely to these men. Quite the contrary, but the many more women than men who met with his approval did so in such an unequivocal way that Mother saw little reason to promote these friendships by extending the hospitality of her own house.

My sister was born on July 14, 1910. Partly to honor the coincidence of her birth with Bastille Day (though my father hated the French Revolution, he greatly admired French hunting traditions), and partly to accustom the newborn to the sounds of a huntsman's household, the newly baked father fired off a few shots under the windows of the young mother, whose delivery had been attended to at home. Mother suspected an attack by robbers and was close to fainting. A sympathetic physician declared her chronically ailing and toward the end of the year, when my sister could be entrusted to the experienced care of a nursemaid, prescribed a few months of rest in Egypt. The cure proved so salubrious that it was repeated each subsequent year until the outbreak of the war. Every year, after Christmas—a feast dear to my mother's family, celebrated with sentimental effusion, much to my father's distaste—my mother proceeded to Luxor, where she stayed until Easter. In July at the latest, she went to Montreux for additional recuperation. Whether these long absences had a salutary effect on her health may be doubted. I rather fear that the atmosphere of such resorts, so vividly described by Thomas Mann in
The Magic Mountain,
added to her remoteness; certainly they did not improve her marital life and her relationship with her infant daughter. All this was worsened by my own precipitate arrival in a coach in May 1914.

I cannot be certain whether Mother herself or someone else who was privy to such family secrets told me that I had not been entirely welcome. Because of her kidney ailment—which by then had become a devoutly believed fact not only for herself but also for all those around her—it was alleged that several efforts had been made to abort my burgeoning life, efforts which, however, I withstood with the toughness I may have inherited from her. One thing is certain: I had not been a child of love. She was more unhappy than ever in those years; and since she believed that the cause of this unhappiness resided not only in her marriage but also in my sister's increasing refractoriness, I soon became for her the most appropriate object on which to lavish maternal selflessness. Had I not been shielded by Cassandra during the early years of my life, her possessiveness would have smothered me altogether.

To some extent I played into her hands, inasmuch as from the very first I was a problem child. When, a few months after my birth, we had to flee the advance of the Russians, we were ambushed by a group of beggar gypsies at the top of the Bargău Pass. An old witch wished me a happy life, emphasizing this benevolent augury by spitting in my face, a politeness I acknowledged by developing a pink rash, whereupon Cassandra bathed me in an icy torrent. From Bistrice we continued by train to Vienna, where I arrived with pneumonia. My grandparents showered my mother with reproaches for not having taken better care of me and for having left me in the hands of “the savage one,” thus starting a kind of battle between the two in which I served as the unfortunate shuttlecock.

When the Italians joined the war and we had to decamp from the shelter of my grandfather's summer house near Trieste, we stayed until 1918 in the house of friends in Lower Austria. It was located on a pretty patch of land but in what is known as a foul-weather corner: sudden storms made the aestival peace treacherous. In the middle of a storm that surprised us during a walk in the woods, I was soaked to the skin and came down with my second pneumonia. Then, at an unsupervised moment when I had scarcely recovered, I fell into a cattle trough. (Cassandra fished me out after my sister casually informed her of this mishap.) But pictures from those days show me as a robust boy: my mother's cannibalistic solicitude was probably motivated more by psychological reasons than by any frailty of mine. In a manner of speaking I was her only child; my sister rapidly outgrew her reach. Also the deprivation of our refugee life conferred a legendary aura on her maternity. That my boyhood was played out around the cow stables of Lower Austria with peasant yokels was due solely to the intrusion of the forces of history: in “normal” times, the scenery of this phase of my life would have been Luxor. The Madonna-like tone of her chosen role naturally also included a future
mater dolorosa
's concern over the possible loss of this gift from heaven.

It would be hard to say who suffered more under this state of affairs, she or I. Her anxiety over me became manic and her concerns obsessive. My two pneumonias grew into a
menetekel
, warning of the ever present threat arising from her imagined wanton defectiveness. A doctor had told her that a third pneumonia would be fatal to me, and so everything possible was done to prevent such a recurrence or the onset of any other such life-threatening disease; eventually everyone got rather bored, when the intensely awaited catastrophe failed to materialize and I continued to exhibit red-cheeked vitality. Something of this disappointed expectancy always remained: when I had grown up and myself had become the head of a family, one of my aunts once asked me absentmindedly: “Weren't you a bit stunted as a child? or epileptic? How are your own children?” Though it may be perilously close to the bounds of good taste to say so, it seems a bitter irony of fate that not I but my sister died of a pernicious disease in the prime of her youth.

Thanks to the zeal, then spreading epidemically, to invest every moment with eternity by means of the camera, the early phases of Mother's maternity are fully recorded pictorially (an unfair advantage over Cassandra). The threesome always appears as the same little group in fashionably changing attire: my mother's hats draw in their broad rims, shrink in size and finally cling snugly to the head. The tight lacing at her waistline loosens gradually, and the skirts, instead of following the body's spindle form, are tucked up full in the seat and then fall to the instep of the high-heeled shoes. What remains unchanged is the young woman's countenance, looking straight at the camera: the eyes are of someone not entirely present in the here and now, of someone eager to recover reality. The plumb-straight posture indicates clearly that she is more than ready to present herself as the proud creator of two successfully produced children. I appear at first, cradled in one arm, as a truncated cone from which, as from the cotton of a Christmas-tree angel, emerges a crest of blond locks; soon I descend to earth, and my baby clothes are succeeded by sweet little sailor suits and folkloric costumes. My sister is ever the showpiece: almost too pretty to be true, her doll-face animated by a fresh awareness—open, trusting, precociously coquettish. In her sober school dresses she becomes grave, more maidenly, all the more lyrically beautiful, as if emanating an intimation of her latent frailty. My sister, of course, was embraced by Mother's neurotic and often domineering solicitude, but in contradistinction to my own experience, she was not used to it from the very beginning of her life. Father saw to it that she was allowed much greater freedom, but this did not make her relationship with Mother more tender.

Our childhood was befouled by two disinfectants: permanganate and Formamint. The first consisted of small purple hexagonal or octagonal rodlike crystals of hypermanganate acidic potash which dissolved in water to a kind of red-beet slop in which everything we came into contact with was washed: our toys, door handles that might have been touched by outsiders, all the table silver and any uncooked fruit—even from our own garden. My mouth still puckers whenever I am about to take a bite from an apple, in the unconscious anticipation of the insipid, tartly acidulous taste of permanganate.

The second disinfectant, Formamint, was a leftover from a pseudo-English governess (whose blessedly short stay in our house I memorialized episodically in a novel). It came in flat white lozenges with a sweetly sharp, somewhat alkaline taste. These were placed on our obediently stretched-out tongues like the host at Holy Communion, so as to guard us prophylactically against aspired or licked-up pathogenic organisms. Especially when we happened close to any gathering of people or, worse, when we passed a funeral procession, a Formamint was instantly slapped on. To be able at least to speak without obstruction, I was in the habit of storing my lozenge hamsterlike in the pouch of my cheek, where it dissolved not only itself but also my teeth. The enamel of the first tooth that I had to have filled and, eventually, pulled—in dentist's parlance the third right mesial—had been eaten away in my childhood by innumerable Formamint tablets.

The fright of the disorders that occurred in the Bukovina after the breakdown of the Austrian monarchy and before its occupation by Romania in 1919 remained with my mother for long after. She did not feel happy in a country whose languages she did not understand and to which she no longer had any ties after her parents had left it. She felt that she had been relegated to this exile by my father's passion for hunting, and she saw the deeper motive it expressed: his resolve not to return to a shrunken Austria and to her own family. She failed to bear in mind that he was being paid a salary in a relatively stable currency which would have been devalued by inflation in a matter of days had he returned to Austria and which, despite everything, assured us of a comfortable livelihood. The cheapness of food and services in Romania in those days, which appears today almost like a fairy tale, allowed her an incomparably more luxurious life-style than what she could have afforded in Austria after the loss of her own fortune; but she thought of herself as destitute and déclassé, and she transferred to her children the vulnerable pride generated by the myth of a grand and lost past. (No wonder that one of the favorite books of my sister's childhood was Brentano's
Gockel, Hinkel and Gackelaia
.)

Mother's arrogance, occasionally erupting from the constantly smoldering fire of her repressed rage, paralyzing her at such moments into a mute and rigid statue, did not improve her dealings with the people around her in a setting that was going to seed. Ever since the pillaging bands in the first weeks after the breakdown in 1918, she suspected the entire population in both city and country of waiting only for an opportunity to turn into marauders, to slit the throats of their betters, to skewer the children. It was obvious to her that this ragged and unwashed populace, coughing and spitting and pissing against the next-best fencepost, was composed of militant carriers of infectious germs. Any and all occasions for us to come into contact with ordinary people were restricted to an absurd minimum.

I know of no children who might have grown up in comparable isolation. We were never for an instant without supervision. When we played in the garden, the fence of which we were strictly forbidden to trespass, there was hardly ever another child present, and the colorful outside world was known to us merely through the images, rapidly flitting past our eyes, of animated street perspectives: an exotic travelogue through which we were transported in hasty processions of coaches, dogs, nurses and governesses from one enclosure to another, from the city to the country and back again to the city, shuttling between watchfully secluded confines. When a child did chance to penetrate our isolation, grotesque precautions were taken before and after its visit: Formamint and permanganate were lavished on us in extravagant profusion. Once an unfortunate pair of siblings borrowed some books from us and soon after came down with scarlet fever, whereupon the books, on their return, were placed in quarantine and we were not allowed to touch them for a year. I still recall my welcoming joy when once again I opened one of them, outside in the blazing sun, so that the sharp black print on the white page suddenly appeared grass-green to my eyes—and my ensuing alarm, for I imagined that the scarlet fever had poisonously discolored the lettering.