The Snows of Yesteryear (20 page)

The question at the heart of the matter was whether the Odaya could be sold to make up for the loss they had suffered. This old rattletrap, set where the Prut's murky waters flowed most sluggishly through scruffy stands of trees, spookily denuded and whitened by the guano of thousands of herons that bred in the endless marshes, impassable because of the shoulder-high nettles—this place suddenly gained an importance, as if it were the ancestral seat of some historic dynasty. Its sale would have been complicated in any case, since consent of all members of the family would have been required, with the unforeseeably awkward discussions as to how and to what extent each would be compensated. I, as the sole male descendant at the time, was called upon to defend this common inheritance against Philip.

My efforts were lame. All my life my ties to property have been very loose, and Philip made it hard for me to develop stronger ones at this juncture. He could not have acted more generously, particularly when I found that I could not defend my mother's cause with any true conviction, though loyalty prevented me from taking his side openly. He showed an understanding so delicate for my dilemma that I count it among the most edifying experiences of my life: the revelation of a humane, considerate magnanimity that hitherto I had not encountered or to which perhaps I had been blind. My mother was not receptive to it. I, now her only child, was no longer her ally. She regarded me as her enemy. The insidious tragedy of our alienation had begun.

In those days, however, dramatic events took place also outside the private sphere. Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany— an occurrence that occasioned many ardent though tragically futile prayers at the Fieles Court. We ourselves did not share in these at the time. From our viewpoint, the developments in Germany were welcome: a profusion of optimistic images of youth bursting with health and energy, promising to build a sunny new future—this corresponded to our own political mood. We were irked by the disdain with which we as the German-speaking minority were treated, as if the former Austrian dominion in Romania had been one of Teutonic barbarism over the ancient and highly cultured Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks and Wallachians, as if these had freed themselves from their oppressive bondage in the name of civilizing morality. The bitterness of the defeat suffered with Germany rankled in us, and we felt good when we saw that in Germany, a new self-reliance refused to accept that a people vanquished was a people despised. At the same time, the threatening, even criminal aspects of socialism seemed to be averted; socialism confronted us at all times in the frightening mask of close-by Communism. “Reds” were the enemy per se, throughout the world, and the Germany of the valiant Brownshirts stood as our protection against them. Nor were we alarmed by the adjective
socialist
in the name of the National Socialist German Workers Party. The commonweal objectives of the National Socialist movement did not fade into abstract ideologies, we thought, which in international Marxism ended up in a general disintegration of values, but instead bound the nation together on behalf of the people's welfare. This could be equated with the welfare of the individual, and instead of the disastrous leveling of materialism, varied individualities could join in a common ideal. As to the anti-Semitism of the upward-striving Third Reich, it was the generally accepted wisdom among non-Jews in the Bukovina at that time that, irrespective of all tolerance and even close personal relations with Jews, it could be only salutary if a damper were placed on the “overbearing arrogance of Jewry.” That this “damper” would bring about the murder of six million Jews no one could foresee.

In a nutshell: The ascent of Nazi Germany, with its thunderous marching columns and wheat-blond maidens, concerned us infinitely less than the abdication of the recently crowned King of England in order to marry Mrs. Simpson. And in this act no one could have recognized that not merely was it symbolic of the decay of venerable traditions and values but it signaled the final decline of the Occident as we had known it, a decline that was eventually sealed by another marital bond: to wit, the one between Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun in the air-raid shelter of the Reich chancellery in a dying Berlin.

Almost without anyone noticing, the years of illusory peace between 1919 and 1939 were suddenly gone; they turned out to have been but a truce between two phases of the European suicide. When the Second World War started, Romania at first remained neutral, but it was only a question of time before it too was drawn into the conflict: as a reward for the Russo-German nonaggression pact, the northern parts of the Bukovina and Bessarabia were ceded to Russia, but the Romanians harbored hopes of regaining these two rich provinces—paradoxically, by fighting on the side of the covenant-breaking Germans to whom they owed their loss in the first place. In great times the paradoxical becomes the usual.

I learned of the occupation of the Bukovina when I was in a moviehouse in Vienna, where a latecomer in the row behind me whispered the news to her neighbor, accompanied by the cynical giggles reserved in those days for imparting reports of dire catastrophes. I did not yet know that it had been agreed to have the German-speaking populations in the ceded territories, the so-called ethnic Germans, repatriated to the German “homeland.” Nor did I see any reason why the Russians in 1940 would comport themselves differently toward the
burshchuj
, the bourgeois, than the Bolsheviks of 1917. I knew my father was safe. He had smelled a rat and had relocated himself in Transylvania three years before. But my mother was in Czernowitz. Only later did it become known that former Austrians (now also “ethnic Germans,” for the shrunken Austria in 1938 had become the Ostmark of the Third Reich) were also to be “repatriated.” For my mother that meant that—just as in 1914—she had to leave her house and her adopted homeland, this time forever.

I tried to imagine her leave-taking, for she must have realized that it was the farewell to her entire past life, and though she considered it misspent, it had at least been comfortable. Henceforth it would be an existence in uncertainty and deprivation among strangers, a refugee life much worse than during the First World War. I could not feel what she must have felt, but an image took hold in my fantasy as if in a dream: she stands in front of one of the “house horrors” that my sister and I, during our teenage infatuation with anything novel, considered the worst kind of kitsch: a foot-high reproduction in white marble of the Nike of Samothrace on a tall column of red marble; in this version, my mother looks at it with the same stunned expression of past happiness lost with which she had once gazed at the picture of my dead sister. This idle fantasy seemed to me to have pertinent symbolic connotations: it was as if the mutely thunderous wing-beat of the Louvre's goddess of victory epitomized all the dreams and aspirations of her youth, which now she had to give up forever.

The relocation brought her first to a camp in Upper Silesia. Being of “high-grade race,” she was scheduled to become a “defense farmer in the German east,” specifically in the province of Warta, as the southeast part of Poland had been renamed. (Her Polish housekeeper Valerka, who suddenly discovered her German origins but was nevertheless racially of somewhat lower grade, was sent to Nuremberg, where she died shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, nothing could be done for Cassandra, for the ethnic mishmash of her component parts was as variegated as her language; it allowed neither racial classification nor, as its consequence, relocation.) In the camp, my mother shared a tiny cubbyhole with Philip. They never spoke to each other and she left Philip for good when I succeeded in freeing her from the camp and sparing her the fate of becoming a defense farmer. But this was possible only on condition that she contribute in some other capacity to Germany's ultimate victory. In an air force office in Vienna she managed to advance to the rank of civil disbursement officer. She saw Philip once more, by sheer coincidence, at a post office. With a satisfied mien—a mingled expression of both her resentment and her guilty feeling of inadequacy—she told me that while standing in line at a stamp window, she suddenly felt that someone was staring at her; the sensation was so strong that she turned around and there was Philip, transfixed in shy veneration. I told her I hoped she had taken him in her arms, to wipe out once and for all the bitterness between them, but she vehemently shook her head. It did not matter that by then the Odaya, the bone of contention between them, was as far out of reach as the moon. He had been her enemy and he still was. She turned away from him.

Nor did she forgive her relatives for the fact that her return to the lap of the family did not lead to the permanent bliss that during her years of separation and unhappy marriage she had dreamed of as the outcome of such a reunion, however improbable it seemed. Two of her sisters were still living with her widowed mother—one also widowed, the other a spinster. They were all too dissimilar in character and similar in irascible temperament to get along for any length of time, but soon this was all obliterated by the rush of historical events. Vienna was bombed—much against the expectations of those Austrians who (after the event) considered the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich a blunder that the Western powers not only had tolerated but had even encouraged and for which Austria was therefore in no way ever to be held responsible. The office in which my mother labored for the ultimate victory was relocated to Bohemia; as a conscript employee, she had to go along. Soon backward-fleeing elements of the defeated German armies in the East swept over her. The Czechs rebelled. Her office was plundered, and she herself was almost shot. She fled to the West. A former receptionist at the Hotel Pupp in Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary), who knew her as a young girl when she had stayed there with her parents, picked her up in the street and gave her shelter for a few days. When he and his family were also driven out, she set out on foot. During the night, she was overtaken by an American army vehicle full of black soldiers. One of them lifted her up by her backpack—“like a puppy being lifted by the skin of its back,” as she later told the story. “Come on, old girl,” he said, “we're all the same underdog.” Thus she too, although to the Germans racially more valuable than Valerka, landed in Nuremberg—or more accurately, in the expanse of rubble that remained of that city.

It borders on the miraculous that in the chaotic period between 1945 and 1946 she managed to find out whither the war had driven me: from Silesia to Hamburg by way of Berlin and finally to the Lüneburg Heath. In the bombed-out landscapes of cratered and flattened cities, where telegraph wires hung like whips from slanting masts and rails were tangled in knots, the German postal service continued to function. On a winter day in 1946 the news reached me that she too had survived the war. We exchanged letters with reports of what we had experienced. I had married and was the father of two children; a third was on the way. Forthwith she considered this a call on her maternal duties. I hesitated to grant her free play for her pedagogic ideas and methods with my own children, but my wife welcomed some help at home. After years of separation, we faced each other again. The elapsed time had left its mark on us, but that was not what stood between us as a deep estrangement. Rather it was a drifting apart of the most basic kind.

Nothing can explain the end—and generally also the beginning—of a love affair. In our case it was indeed a love affair: her maternal love for me and my child's love for her in all their volatile passion had been much closer to an amorous relationship than to a natural growing-together of mother and child. From the very beginning, Cassandra had stood between us, Cassandra who—at a clear remove from my mother—had let me taste the animal delights of brood-warm love and had thus transposed my mother from the realm of a primeval mother to that of an intellectual experience in which her magic charm and seductiveness, her pride and her vulnerability, her obsessions and her whims had joined together to form for me the allure—and possibly also the travesty—of the quintessential feminine. I was on guard against her long before I watched out for any other women. Even in our happiest hours, when she visited me in Kronstadt, I loved her at a distance, with reservations about a possible sudden sobering, in the twilight of fundamental otherness: that never-entirely-to-be-understood being that woman represented for me. I think too that she had perceived in the love object “child,” assigned to her as “mother,” the man into whom the little boy—Baldur-like — would grow under her maternal nurturing, and had believed he would also embody the qualities she most hated in men. All too often her demonstrations of maternity had had the earmarks of rape.

Now, faced by a grown man who himself had raised sons, she was helpless. And I was not perceptive enough to forgive her for never having been a true mother. She took possession of our sorry household and my children with all her tough energy, now concealed by a newly acquired submissiveness. We lived in much straitened circumstances; in those days, hardship was general in Germany and we might well have ended up with hunger edema like so many others had we not received some help from abroad through one of her sisters (the socialist who had married a Jew and who, repudiated by the family, had emigrated to America, whence she helped us keep body and soul together by sending us CARE packages). Mother gave us her all. She assumed the lowliest chores, as if she had to atone for being tolerated by us and by the world. Yet her presence was not always a blessing. Her fidgety absentmindedness, her overwrought anxieties and her occasional outbursts, her sporadic forlorn musings and woolgatherings, from which she would rouse herself as if sternly called to order, could hardly calm our already exacerbated nerves. She lived as if constantly rushed and hunted; she stinted herself on every mouthful of food, sewed children's coats from her last warm blanket, managed at the cost of indescribable abasement to get hold of black-market goods and procured ration coupons from unfathomable sources; she would hand these benefits to us with the hectic sacrificial eagerness of someone in full flight who rids himself of excess baggage to appease his pursuers. But she meant us to come along on this flight: a demonically driven flight in which guilt pushed her into self-annihilation. Her solicitude, her kindness and her self-devotion were as imperious as they were obsequiously degrading, and the angry servility that accompanied them, ever more exhibitionistic, turned into a formidable blackmailing weapon.