The Snows of Yesteryear (33 page)

He was a man of glittering abilities, small and wiry, full of beans yet somewhat abstracted, brightly alert though appearing mentally absent, highly intelligent and surprisingly well-read and informed about everything. Together with his wife, Wanda, he lived a few hundred feet from the hamlet in a spacious wooden house, a haven for a multitude of much loved and spoiled pets: hens, geese, dogs, cats, a couple of otters in the garden pool, sheep and cows and some Huzule ponies, tame as lambs. The dark forest rose behind some fat grassy meadows, where capercaillies could be heard calling in spring; the roaring of stags resounded in autumn; and wolves howled in winter, when the pines towered like giant icicles from the deep snow all around.

Yet Dr. Z. was not content with this idyllic retreat, redolent with the scents of hay and resin. Each year he closed his practice when the snows melted and, together with his wife, traveled from March to May in the capitals of the West: Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London, and home again by way of Madrid and Rome. Money was no object, for he made more than enough and had no other way of spending it. He returned covered with the pollen dust of Occidental culture and once again labored for ten months as a country doctor in Cîrlibaba. From time to time I was given a chance to nibble at this cultural honey. It was in his house that I delighted for the first time, as if hypnotized, in art magazine reproductions of the paintings of Mondrian and Modigliani, of Braque, Picasso and the Italian Futurists, and discovered, through an osmotic absorption of the style of the era, a harmonious concordance between the violence and sarcasm of Majakovsky's posters and the pioneering visions of Kupka. In the issues of
Studio
and
Gazette du bon ton
, available in my parents' houses, such things could not as yet be found.

My sister had not been in the Carpathians since her childhood—surprisingly, it seems to me in retrospect. It may be that my father considered life in the woods too rough for a girl, let alone a young lady. It may also be that he didn't want her near, when her dislike for hunting was obvious and ever present. I, on the other hand, was a frequent guest at Dr. Z.'s house. When my father went hunting, he never missed calling on him, not only because of his pleasure in the company of the doctor's attractive wife, but also because he enjoyed talking with Dr. Z. about all kinds of topics. In particular, they liked to discuss poisons, a subject stimulated by my father's early love for chemistry (and alchemy), and in which Dr. Z. showed an astonishingly thorough knowledge. This shop talk always ended with the hypothetical quest for the perfect murder by a poison that could not be detected. I remember well one of these conversations. A fire burned in the chimney, the two men sat over glasses of wine while the doctor's wife and I were busy with a large basket of huckle-berries, picking out unripe ones, when the talk turned to the question of whether it was possible to detect the presence of potassium cyanide in a corpse. The closeness to our hosts lulled us into a feeling of comfortable well-being, a belief in the immutability of this well-appointed and lavishly run house and in the contented happiness of its owners. But Dr. Z. surprisingly complained of the schizophrenic nature of their life, split between Cirlibaba and the great hotels of Europe. They had to come to a decision, he said. He wanted to change his life. But to do so he needed more money than he could make in a year and waste in three months. He had a plan, thought out in all details, as simple as it was foolproof. The valley of the Bistriţa River was rich in healthful springs, primarily sulphurous ones. He, Dr. Z.—and he alone—knew also of one that contained arsenic: it bubbled up, until now undiscovered, next to a former convalescent home for railway workers, a building going back to the days of the Austrian monarchy which had stood empty for decades and could be had for a pittance. How would it be, then, if my father were to purchase this building and place him, Dr. Z., as medical director of a sanatorium which, with the lure of sulphur and arsenic health baths, would soon attract crowds of patients, thus making both of them rich in no time at all?

My father declined forthwith. Not only had he no intention of making a fortune by means of any enterprise at all—particularly one in which the customers could be expected to be mainly Jews—but also he was much too familiar with the actual situation. Even such old and well-established spas as Vatra Dornei attracted fewer and fewer customers during the brief summer months. For rich people, these spas were not fashionable enough—the “in” set went to Biarritz or Meran; and those with more modest incomes couldn't afford Vatra Dornei. Moreover, the convalescent home referred to by Dr. Z. was a derelict rattletrap halfway between Jacobeni and Vatra Dornei, one-storied on the front side but with three stories at the back on a precipitous slope over the BistriÅ£a. The bathhouse was on the river, which was too shallow for bathing during the damming periods and so torrential during the logging season as to be not only a danger to life and limb but an outright playground for suicidal candidates. As far as the sulphur baths, these were available everywhere; and my father simply could not believe in the existence of arsenic spring water. He was right on all counts.

I no longer recall how the project ended up with my mother. She had known Dr. Z. for years and trusted him, especially since she heard him tell me in graphic detail about the spread of syphilis among the Huzules; it had been one of her worst fears that, because of either inadequate supervision or my father's pernicious influence, I might some day sexually assault a daughter of the region on one of our hunting expeditions. What convinced her of Dr. Z.'s qualifications to be director of a thermal spa no one could say. In any case, she took all the money she had and bought the old convalescent home. Dr. Z. became a partner in the enterprise, contributing his services and the secret of the arsenic spring, in exchange for which he gave up his medical practice in Cirlibaba and his comfortable life. My father's urgent warnings were of no avail. Later, my mother explained to me that because these warnings had been conveyed by my sister and me, she didn't take them seriously; she had assumed that her ex-husband merely wanted to denigrate her in our eyes. No one else was consulted.

The purchase of the ramshackle convalescent home swallowed up all her available means. Philip contributed what was needed for its renovation. To make it a luxury sanatorium, it also had to be refurbished completely, and in this my mother did not stint. Over questions of interior design, she fell out with Wanda, the doctor's wife, and there were ill feelings and angry words. A year went by before the place could be opened for guests. But none came. Dr. Z., who had no income and therefore was soon left without means of support, took out a mortgage on his share in the enterprise. He also opened a new practice of his own but failed to attract patients. Another doctor, Dr. B., was as well established in Jacobeni as Dr. Z. had been in Cîrlibaba, and although Dr. Z. hatched some intrigues to supplant Dr. B. as the official health insurance physician, these failed. Winter came and with it the dead season. Once the snow melted, Dr. Z. could bear Jacobeni no longer. He left with his wife for Paris. He came back in May. In June—the sanatorium had just opened, but not a single guest had arrived—my mother was arrested in Czernowitz. She was freed after a brief interrogation at police headquarters, but she had to keep herself at the disposal of the authorities. Dr. Z. had committed a murder; as his business partner, my mother was at the center of the investigation.

The facts in the alleged crime were incredible, and the investigation dragged on for years. What had happened was as follows: Dr. Z. had gone to see his medical rival and had told him, “My dear colleague, I am doing research concerning the measurement of lung capacity. Please be so good as to inhale the contents of this vial.” With which he unplugged a vial and held it under the nose of Dr. B., who in good faith inhaled deeply. The vial contained hydrogen sulfide. Dr. B. apparently dropped dead; Dr. Z. replaced the vial in his briefcase and returned to the empty sanatorium.

But Dr. B. did not die immediately, although he had been blinded. He dragged himself to his desk and with his last remaining strength managed to scrawl on a slip of paper: “Dr. Z. has killed me.”
Then
he died. His wife found him an hour later; one and a half hours later the police discovered in Dr. Z.'s consulting room all the paraphernalia necessary to prepare hydrogen sulfide. The vial was still in his briefcase.

The person who couldn't stop shaking his head over these events was my father. It seemed to him entirely implausible that a man who for years had held forth as an expert on the perfect murder by poison would choose to kill someone by such a primitive method, which any child could readily detect. It was at least equally incomprehensible that a physician with experience could be the victim of so crude an attempt at murder. “Every school-child knows from lab experiments that one has to run as fast and far away as possible the instant one smells rotten eggs,” Father observed. “It can't have happened so simply.” The investigating authorities shared this opinion. Nothing could be gotten from Dr. Z.; he remained mum and neither admitted nor denied anything. Primarily, motives were searched for, and the most likely ones were professional, that is, financial. The still virginal luxury sanatorium remained sealed by the authorities. My poor mother and innocent Philip were harassed by questions that went all the way back to elucidate the original means by which the wretched place had been acquired—which, in turn, led to punctilious and highly embarrassing fiscal examinations. (No one had ever thought of paying taxes on the Odaya.)

My sister and I heard of all this when we came back “home''— whatever that meant. She had come for a few days from Galatz and I from Leoben for summer vacation, which I was to spend hunting with my father. I fetched her from the train station and drove her to his house—we were kept away from our mother's for the time being, in order to spare us unpleasant scenes. Once we were there, I told her what had occurred; together and in tears, we sank to the floor in paroxysms of laughter. When my sister recovered, she went to the bathroom and threw up.

She returned to Galatz without having seen her father, who was away hunting. I myself stayed with him only a short while and spent the summer in Czernowitz, one of the happiest summers of my whole youth: unsupervised and carefree, playing tennis in the “Jew club,” as my father called it, in love without the usual gnawing obsessiveness, unencumbered even by embarrassing arguments between my mother and Philip, which disclosed ever more and deeper discrepancies than those that were the immediate consequence of the collapse of Jacobeni. Then, in autumn—oh, the blue-golden autumn days of those years!—I returned to Leoben, still lighthearted and unencumbered, so frivolous that even today I remember that period of presumptive studies with conflicting feelings. On an evening after the usual boozing with fellow students, I somehow ended up in the kermess booth of a fortune-teller. Her gaze rigidly directed at some far-off point, as in a picture book, clad in a wrap decorated with the signs of the Zodiac, her smooth, shining black hair severely parted in the middle, she was surrounded by the complete instrumentarium of prophecy: the glass globe, tarot cards, astrological tables and, behind her on the wall, the picture of a turbaned magician with glowing eyes, surrounded by flowing rainbows. Smirking, I sat down across from her, and she took my hand, peered into its palm and said, “Soon someone who is very close to you will die.” I wish I could swear by something exalted that would invest what I am about to say with the seal of gospel truth: at the very instant the seeress intoned those words, I saw my sister's green eyes before me. The next morning I got a letter from her: “I'm a little bit sick.” We never had written to each other, least of all when we had a cold or an upset stomach. I knew it was she who would die.

Soon she had to give up her position in Galatz and return to Czernowitz. A small swelling of a gland behind her left ear enlarged. My mother brought her to Vienna. We saw her leave, my father and I, in the train station where so many of our arrivals and departures to and from our schools had taken place. My sister, laughing, looked down at us from the window of her compartment, and my father joked boisterously, unconcerned by the reaction of strangers and bystanders, as was his wont when he was in a jolly mood. The train started up slowly, we exchanged some final farewells, we waved good-bye, my father took off his hat and then, turning abruptly, said, “I've seen her for the last time.''

In Vienna, she was treated by a Professor Sternberg. The lymphogranulomatosis, as her affliction was diagnosed, in those days was called “Sternberg's disease.” But even the efforts of this preeminent authority were of no avail. She wasted away, and soon the tumescence expanded over her neck and down to her shoulder. Once she said to me, “If Father were to see me in this condition, he would help me.” I knew what she meant.

To my mother, she showed great tenderness. She saw how much the poor thing suffered for her. At times, when my mother was sharp with me because of her, our eyes would meet and we couldn't suppress a smile. Once I caught her unawares as she was observing her mother's glance sliding off, as happened so often, from the here and now into an indeterminate remoteness. Once again our eyes met, and I understood something unfathomably deep: her expression was hard; she had always feared and hated the threat of slipping away into this indefinite vagueness. Had she realized that this was why she had renounced the poetry of her childhood myth at the Odaya? She gave me a brief nod: it was an admonition.

We became true siblings once more. I left Leoben and stayed in Vienna, where she lay bedridden in our grandmother's house. I became friends with her kind and gentle Fritz; our close friendship was to last for many years past her death and until his own. Fairly soon it was clear that there was no hope for her. Because she loved the mountains, she was brought to a sanatorium near Hall in the Tyrol, in beautiful surroundings. It bore the somewhat creepy name of Gnadenwald, “Mercywoods''—an occasion for more of our macabre jokes. She herself had no illusions about her condition. Although her suffering reached almost biblical proportions, she lost none of her courage or her readiness to laugh at absurdity. When I visited her for the last time, she drew me close and whispered, “I must tell you something that will make you laugh. I myself can't anymore. It hurts too much.” The tumescence had fused her head and shoulders; her hair had fallen out; while receiving radiation, her larynx had inadvertently been burned and now she coughed incessantly; her whole body was covered by an itching rash. What she told me was something that in times past would have united us in laughter.