The Snows of Yesteryear (41 page)

In the Chernovtsy of 1989 such a scene is unimaginable. It haunts my mind but not those neatly kept streets. What now moved through the streets before my confused and astonished eyes was utterly uniform and obviously homogeneous, nothing provoking any particularizing pride. People strolled about at all hours of the day like a mass of workers streaming from factories at the end of their shift. Despite the occasional colorful getup, the ready-to-wear mass clothing seemed mostly to be a uniform gray. The faces were — as the saying goes — all of the same stamp: of Slavic broadness and angularity with coarse skin and light-colored hair. These were Ukrainians. In the old days we called them Ruthenians, one of the many minorities in a place where there was no majority. In all the Bukovina they did not make up more than a third of the population, in the Czernowitz of old Austria even less, and a smaller proportion still in the Romanian CernăuÅ£i. Now they were the only ones left, those people's comrades of the Soviet Republic of the Ukraine, which, as the former “Little Russia” enlarged by the annexation of Galicia and the northern Bukovina, now accounts for more than half the European territory of the Soviet Union. Nor were these people different from other Russians. The women were almost without exception plump, the men stocky and puffy, a people of cabbage eaters, not in dire want, not dissatisfied but inclined to submit resignedly to God's will, serious and well behaved. Very well behaved, it seemed. Femininity found its expression solely and ostentatiously in a petit-bourgeois motherliness — and perhaps also in a fatal predilection for dyed fire-red hair. Only very young girls wore slacks; and only a few teenagers made weak attempts to imitate Elvis Presley hairdos. But this was mere modishness and not an expression of a sociopolitical essence.

All in all, this certainly was not a world of ease and plenty, and it was entirely free of the mad waste and squandering that is the hallmark of late Occidental consumer paradises. There was no sales talk, no urging to buy this or that, nor did anything irritate by junky superabundance. The moderation was pleasing, whether or not it was voluntary. I felt no obligation to purchase or become the user of anything, and this circumstance may have given me the deceptive impression that the people here were possessed of the dignity of those who voluntarily do without and content themselves with little. I could not help thinking that they would have been to Hitler's liking.

Nor was Chernovtsy entirely without color, as I had thought at first: the sounds of a military band were heard from what was once called Austria Square. In the past, this had been the great downtown market square, whither the rattling peasant carts all converged on Mondays for the week's market, where — under a fragrant cloud of garlic, freshly tanned sheepskins, sharp cheeses, the smoke of
machorska
tobacco and cheap rotgut, cooking oil and cow dung — everything under the sun was sold and bought, from cowhides and calico kerchiefs to rusty padlocks, coachmen's whips, embroidered linen shirts, mouth organs, chickens bundled together by their feet, butter on coltsfoot leaves, baskets of eggs, sandals (the heavy
opankas
of the region) made of cut-up rubber tires, pocket knives, lambskin caps and innumerable other things of the greatest variety. Under the blue of the open sky, this motley, multifaceted scene resembled nothing so much as one of those drip paintings by Jackson Pollock and, at the same time, the wildly confused swarming of an anthill. There Jews haggled for used clothing, Armenians bought corn, linen rolls and skeins of wool by the carload, while Lipovanians hawked their beautiful fruit and shoemakers vaunted their while-you-wait services. Huzule women would get into a violent squabble with a gaggle of Swabians from Bistriţa; drunks beat up on each other; the blind, lame and leprous went begging; gypsies fiddled, while crafty monte players, shuffling two black aces and one red ace with hypnotizing speed from one side to the other and back again, extracted hard-earned pennies from gaping rustic simpletons as easily as did the ubiquitous pickpockets hustling in the thick of the crowd, always anxiously on the lookout for the police who, at any moment, could arrest them or extract horrendous bribes from them. It had been a place of the most intense life, teeming and full of pungent ferment, the navel of that
cosmopolis
which Czernowitz was in a much more literal sense than many a world capital.

At present this civic rectangle is a concrete-covered parade ground, wide, empty and painstakingly scrubbed. Yet not entirely gray on gray: one of its narrow sides, where the square slopes down toward the suburb of Klokuczka, has been taken over completely by a gigantic, glaring red billboard. Jumping out from the crimson background in richly golden yellow is a huge, severely stylized portrait of Lenin, dwarfing the four- and five-storied houses on the long sides of the square. A few dozen marching paces in front of it, a handful of notables were sitting at a long table, half of them in uniform, their epaulets glittering with stars, the women among them with blond hair permed in aspiring-Hollywood-starlet fashion. Another two dozen marching paces in front of the rostrum, three military bands had taken up position, each under the command of a bulbous drum major, and one after the other competing in the performance of jaunty marches and musical favorites both cheerful and solemn.

I was told that I was witnessing a competition among garrison bands. Any number of regiments and various branches of the armed services were represented in their parade uniforms. It was a colorful scene, and each band, in addition to playing its regular program, sought to distinguish itself by some optional virtuoso piece, from the Radetzky March by way of the Andreas Hofer tune all the way to the overture of
Der Freischütz
— in a word, Russian popular music. This had already lasted all morning, a Sunday morning to boot, and I would have surmised that such a performance was bound to attract a fair crowd of onlookers. Yet only a few passersby stopped briefly to look and listen — even when, toward the end, some battalions paraded by in historical uniforms, soldiers of the imperial army that had triumphed over Napoleon, and — less colorful but eerily scary in aardvarklike camouflage — of the forces that had subdued the armies of Hitler. The performance concluded with groups of dancers in regional costume, but these so obviously came from the property department of the local theater that in this place where only a few decades ago such brightly variegated garb could be seen every day and everywhere, they aroused no interest at all.

I too, the foreigner, clearly recognizable as such by clothing and comportment, aroused no interest. No curious glances were cast my way and no sign gave me to understand that I might in any way be conspicuous. It was as if I were transparent or simply did not exist. The feeling of on the one hand being very much and undeniably at home in this place, and on the other being half a century and a whole world removed from it now intensified into the irreal density of dreamed reality. I was there and yet I was not. I dreamed while fully awake — I dreamed not only this tangibly real town but also myself in it. Thus removed from my usual placement in either space or time, I started out to search for the house of my childhood. Let me anticipate right away the outcome: of all the houses in Czernowitz, of which not a stone seemed out of place, my house was the only one missing.

The house of a childhood lying half a century in the past in any case is a mostly airy structure. It consists more of views in and out of it than of solid walls: of partial views of corners, nooks and crannies, certain pieces of furniture, foregrounds and backgrounds — in short, something fragmentary, like the disparate sets in a film studio for a movie shot from the perspective of a knee-high nipper. Nevertheless I well knew — and still know — that our house had been just beyond what had then been the outermost periphery of the city, set in a large garden and giving out on three sides to open countryside. I knew — and still know — that like innumerable other neoclassical villas of its kind, its façade was supported by columns with a narrow terrace crowned by a tympanumlike gable, and that a glassed-in porch at the back looked toward the depth of the garden. It had been reached by a long street bordered by many gardens, Garden Street, in the so-called villa district of the town. I found the street without difficulty. It too was unchanged — at least for most of the way. Of dreamlike surreality, just as I had left it fifty-three years earlier, it ran between two rows of prosperous one-family houses of the kind that had incited Karl Emil Franzos to compare them to cottages in the Black Forest. Some of them greeted me as fond memories; some others, lining the street where in my own time there had been vacant lots, upset me: I knew they had not been there before, but I could not deny their factual presence. They showed no stylistic characteristic, no particular newness or lesser degree of wear and tear to differentiate them from their neighbors. No historical feature distinguished them — neither a nationally emphasized particularity denoting Romanian sovereignty in architectural terms, nor any signs of fifty years of Communist housing precepts. Back of the lilac bushes and mulleins in their front gardens, these houses, in all the idyllic romanticism extolled by Franzos, ivy-clad up to the gables, oriels and bartizans, challenged my presumption that they could not have been built in the same global period of irreality as the rest of Chernovtsy. I began to lose the unerring determination with which I had been seeking my objective. This Garden Street had become longer by a third, just as in a dream a familiar path lengthens into endlessness. And when I finally did reach the end, there, before my very eyes, rose row after row of twelve-, fourteen- and sixteen-story high-rises blocking the view of what had been open country.

I should have expected this. It was logically consistent: when considering the steep slope down to the Prut River valley which encircles much of the city, this was the reasonable and indeed sole direction in which it could have expanded — and that it would have expanded in fifty-three years I had anticipated. In any case the city had grown with an astounding mindfulness of what had been there in the past — in a spirit of such careful preservation that the results transposed me to a no-man's-land in time and into a state somewhere between dreaming and the most acute wakefulness. Not only did everything from my own time remain untouched, but the additions made to it were heavily reminiscent of that period. All the harder was it, therefore, to accept that only the house of my childhood was omitted from this reverential preservation of the past. I clearly remembered that from our southeastern windows one had a view of the poplars lining Transylvania Avenue, leading straight through the open country all the way to the airy blue horizon: the path of my childhood's deepest longings. And the road still existed, although its length could no longer be encompassed at a glance. No longer was it lined by poplars, their branches swarming with birds, but instead by residential blocks and shopping centers (in which only paltry goods were for sale). Between these and the squadron of high-rises, untidy tracts of land remained partly vacant and partly built up, haphazardly — here a student colony, there an orphanage (looking typically Romanian), here a home for the blind among some remains of tree groves, there some one-family houses of a size more appropriate for weekend cottages. In between, in front or behind, our house had once stood. But it was no longer. It had disappeared without a trace. It did not help to inquire after it. Everyone was as helpful as could be imagined, but no one knew it: they were too young or had come here too late or simply could not remember that far back. The more intense my search, the more hopelessly did I lose my way in the thickets of the unknown. After two days of unavailing inquiry and search, the house of my childhood had become a specter that haunted only my own mind.

To test whether I was not simply the victim of schizophrenic hallucination, I once more took up my search — but this time a search for my own self, and in the center of town. I looked for the town house where my mother had lived after separating from my father, with its big garden, unique relic of Czernowitz's small-town and even rural past. And this house was still there. It stood, with gaps to its left and right, across from a quite substantial apartment house; but what once had been its garden now unfortunately lay under an expanse of concrete. What was more — and this seemed to defy logic — it somehow appeared to have shifted closer to the street. Its roof was covered with rusty sheets instead of shingles, and its walls, once hidden behind jasmine bushes, were naked and painted a horrid coffee-brown shade. The porch had disappeared. Here too, new buildings had materialized that had not been there during my time: all kinds of cozy little small-town cottages, as well as an already dilapidated factory built of yellow clinker bricks and a whole enfilade of cavelike dwellings reaching to the depth of the erstwhile garden. Again, there was not the slightest indication that all of this had not always been there, for the architectural styles were the same; everything seemed to have originated in the small-town past of Czernowitz and showed the same degree of shabby wear and tear.

I thought I was losing whatever remained of my mind: if anything had been built here since my own time, surely it had to be something more substantial than this proletarian colony! Even in the 1920s this piece of ground had been the object of lustful greed on the part of many real estate speculators and builders, all of whom my mother had heroically resisted. Since my mother's “expatriation” in 1940, the ground had been ownerless. An impressive block of apartment houses could have been built in its place, something exemplary of Communist progress; there even would have been space for some greenery around. Whatever had prevented this? It couldn't have been a historically preservative piety that saved the space for these dumps, which merely marred the neat image of the city. I could have sworn that they had not yet been there in 1936, but all appearances contradicted this sworn assertion. I could do nothing but affirm something completely implausible.