The Snows of Yesteryear (10 page)

Our mother's frail health and almost yearlong absences from her house (the furnishing of which was only scarcely completed to suit family occupancy), a house she hated, did not benefit her young married life. Nor did the four years of war that followed bring our parents any closer. We had left the house when the Russians arrived, and I believe that their appearance came as rather a relief to her. It was a ramshackle old building, in appearance half monastic and half a Turkish konak located in a most remote region and of a rusticality that only my huntsman father did not mind. My mother much preferred our house in town. In 1918, upon our return to the Bukovina, we resumed our family life in Czernowitz; the family was split into contending parties and, in view of our father's absences, owed its cohesion only to the permanent old-time domestics—Cassandra; Olga Hofmann, the Bohemian cook; Adam, the coachman; and finally Bunchy, those firm pillars amidst the coming and going of all the others. My parents were already so alienated from each other that for my own part I could not have found any pretext for the formation of an Oedipus complex. Jealousy I felt only toward my sister and her close bond with my father, a relationship from which I was totally excluded.

During my childhood days, my father was more a mythical than tangible figure for me. I saw him as rarely as my sister had seen her mother during
her
first years. Now he was away from home most of the time on hunting expeditions: Nimrod, the great hunter, whom from afar I marveled at, admired and envied and whom at close range I feared. I grew up among women, and it is through them that I experienced “the female” in three archetypal embodiments: through Cassandra, a brood-warm, protectively enveloping motherliness; through my sister, forever outdistancing me by four years and by nature's favor or disfavor the superior, the more airy, spiritual, always nimbly evasive figure of the nymph; and through my mother, an iridescent interplay of all archfemale characteristics—sensual excitement paired with the fitful capriciousness of the potential mistress, forever vacillating between stormy tenderness and pretended indifference, between lovingly passionate empathy and cruelly punishing iciness.

A potential mistress, yes, but one in the sentimental guise of a turn-of-the-century painting. The essential of my mother's femininity I perceive in her clothing. She was very attractive in those years, with her still girlish though gently rounded slimness. I never imagine her body but always as she appeared, formally clad, in society. To my mind she is the prototype of the lady. I love her movements, her posture, as well as certain graceful details: her smooth arms, the nape of her neck with the line of her chestnut-colored hair artfully teased into an airy, fluffy fullness—not like Cassandra's tightly wound pillow for baskets and pitchers. But I find even more appealing the elegant line of her clothes: the long narrow skirt, slightly gathered at the hips, the tightly laced waistline and the accented high bust of the period. Her favorite color is a light pearl-gray that invests the fabric with a discreet, self-assured neutrality which brings out the bloom of her delicate skin. For jewels, she prefers pearls. Her thin pointed shoes and soft kidskin gloves that cover her arms to her elbows are endowed for me with an erotic fascination. I develop a sharp eye for the quality of hats, handbags, umbrellas and other accessories. In winter, her furs flatter her with a voluptuous sheen that speaks eloquently to me. And all this is suffused with the scent of a fastidiously cared-for womanliness.

As if she meant to transpose this ethereal physicality to a spiritual and psychological sphere, she has an unworldliness, a remoteness from life that removes her as a possible object of my sensuality and places her in a category of sublimated eroticism. What is feminine in her awakens merely a mediated desire so that it remains platonic, as one used to put it. One might say the desire was directed at the brassiere rather than at the breasts. What I perceived as “womanly” in my mother were her female accoutrements: a totality of culturally distinguishing characteristics. The inevitable attraction of the totally different, forever unattainable and eternally incomprehensible female being, though belonging to the same zoological human species, was summed up for me in the onion skins of feminine clothing.

Whether that remoteness from the world and from reality also sublimated the desire of the men in my mother's life remains a moot question. As far as my father was concerned, this would seem paradoxical, but it can't be ruled out. He loved her very much, even though he never took her entirely seriously and cheated on her left and right. She accused him of unbridled sensuality, thereby probably expressing her inhibitions regarding any overt assertiveness. She feared reality; her life seemed to her a spell that had cast her into irreality. She always felt guilty about not fitting, as she saw it, into a world where everyone else was at home. Nothing around her or in herself corresponded to the conceptions she had formed about her life, and this nourished a culpability that she then angrily rejected. She felt constantly reminded of her subservience to the call of duty, as if she were forever failing at some task. This unfulfilled, unfulfillable sense of duty magnified ultimately into a nervously obsessive need for self-imposed duties. She assigned herself duties like self-inflicted punishments.

My remembrance of that early time is murky. The sunny days of childhood came later for me. I was still frightened by the stormy skies and the blood-red sunsets over the deeply melancholy spaciousness of the landscape, of which we had an unobstructed view on three sides of our house and garden. Clear-lit images, such as that of my mother at the tea table on a summer afternoon before her elfin dreaminess iced over, are rare. If there hadn't been the brood-warm love of Cassandra and her comical buffooneries, I would now be visited in an even worse way by the anxieties that in those days permeated our problematic family life. None of them are forgotten. My allergies to all kinds of tensions, exaltations and neurotic resistances have their throat-tightening origin in those days, when, presumably, the hardness I displayed to my mother at the end of her life also originated. Her endearments were of a tempestuousness that frightened more than delighted me, and in addition prompted venomous remarks from my sister. Even though I surmised, with the uncanny ability of children to plumb the reality behind the surface, that the bluntness with which my mother interfered in our harmony stemmed from her need to find some firm ground in a life that was slipping away from her, I never forgave her for it. Nor did I forgive her her absentmindedness, which she tried to correct with unyielding opinions and rigid prejudices. The hostility to anyone not sharing her opinions and intentions resulted directly from existential panic. When she was alone or thought herself so, her glance would drift away and she would lose herself in a remote nowhere, initially filled by dreams, perhaps, but later peopled by phantoms from her misspent life—in any case the true scenery of her mind.

I see her at table, our meals a silent ceremonial. She holds herself stiffly erect and eats automatically, without visible enjoyment, the eyes either downcast to the plate or directed unseeingly straight ahead, apparently indifferent to what happens around her. She herself—or her soul, her fantasy or whatever; in any case, her true life—is miles away, beyond the dining room walls. All the more persistently she insists on the ceremony of the meals, on our table manners, on a letter-perfect service; she devises sophisticated menus, watches over our nutrition by serving us foods that promote our health, appetite and digestion, and punishes us excessively if, overfed and sated, we reject it. She requires sound corporeality to convince her of our physical reality. We have to prove that we actually exist, by means of thriving health, growth, appetite, regular bowel movements, red cheeks and bubbling exuberance as much as by unconditional submission to her unending instructions, prescriptions and proscriptions. What she understands to be maternal love clutches at the visible and the tangible. Intellectual development is by tradition left to professionals, hired employees: governesses, tutors, teachers. But the supervision of our weal and woe devolves upon her alone and it turns into a rankling obsession. She holds on to it desperately, as if it were her only support in the whirlwind of the times.

And it is true that that whirlwind was exceptionally violent. One no longer realizes today the extent of the changes that the 1914–1918 war wrought in the world in general and Europe in particular, though it did not bring so much destruction as its continuation in the even fiercer 1939–1945 war. Only the regions of the embattled fronts lay in ruins; the hinterland was largely spared. There was not the terror of aerial bombardments night after night, nor the horror of flattened cities across the continent, nor the misery of their ruins and the wretchedness of swarms and mobs of bombed-out populations and refugees. On the surface, the world seemed unchanged, but it was all the more spooky for that. In the first installment of the worldwide war which had come only to a temporary halt in 1918 and broke out all the more fiercely two decades later, an order had been destroyed in which, up to then, everybody had put faith. Critical voices had not been lacking: the world before 1914 no longer considered itself the best of all possible ones. But it was a world in which culture still rated high. The meat grinders of Ypres and Tannenberg, the hellish barrages of Verdun and the Isonzo shattered all illusions. A species of men arose from that ghostly landscape of bomb craters and trenches whose bestiality was unconstrained. A free field was given to the Hitlers and Stalins to come.

For the class to which my parents belonged, this meant a fall into chaos, into impotence and deprivation, hopelessness and squalor. What today is designated by the collective noun
bourgeoisie
lived with an imperturbable faith in what Robert Musil's Count Leinsdorff called “property and learning.” All the trust in life that these two pillars had supported collapsed together with them. The resulting changes in reality were so sudden, unpredicted and incomprehensible that at first they seemed more like a monstrous nightmare. The desire to wake from the bad dream gave rise to the Utopia of the 1920s, one of the worst by-products of which was to be the Third Reich. But most people remained stunned and paralyzed: sleepwalkers in an alienated present.

My mother, born in 1890, was almost thirty years old when the First World War ended and had—as she used to say—“hardly lived at all, in fact.” She had been raised in a golden mist of expectations about the future, which in the imagination of a young girl of her generation were nourished by ambiences and impulses, lights, colors and sounds, an intoxicating vision of an enchanted, permanently celebratory existence: the “grand life” in the style of Madame Bovary. Seen in this light, her first married years, in a hated house which she had fled for the daffodil meadows of Montreux and the palm shades of Luxor, were indeed a time devoid of meaning. Those years of refugee subsistence in the remoteness of a small villa near Trieste and in a cowherd hamlet in Lower Austria must have seemed even more estranged from what she thought of as the “true” life. She had borne two children and had assumed the role of a conscientious mother, but the dream of her life had remained unrealized. For this she blamed mainly my father, but also in part the country we lived in.

After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Bukovina became part of Romania. While in Austrian times its linguistically and sartorially kaleidoscopic mixture of people had given an attractive touch of color to the placid and mannered everyday life of a flourishing crown land, the opposite now occurred: a thin foil of civilization appeared to have been superimposed on an untidily assorted ethnic conglomerate from which it could be peeled off all too readily. Neither my father nor my mother belonged to the indigenous population. Each in his or her own way lived in a kind of exile: they had both ended up in a colony deserted by its colonial masters. Hardly anything remained of the former social world they had inhabited—however confined and provincial it must have been here under the double-headed eagle—and that had been composed of more or less high-ranking government officials, owners of landed estates, officers of the garrison, university professors and like representatives of the so-called educated classes. Those who remained in Romania and did not return to the shrunken remains of the Austrian republic or emigrate elsewhere split into groups determined by nationality. The Romanians holding important government posts established themselves as the new masters under the aegis of the Romanian military establishment, which flaunted the brassy glitter of its fresh victory, and they remained largely isolated from those who spoke other languages and now were the new minorities. The so-called Bukovina Swabians—settlers who had established themselves in the region in the times of Emperor Joseph the Second—segregated themselves in a flag-waving Greater Germany clannishness, casting nostalgic sidelong glances at Bismarck's Second Reich. The Ruthenians refused to have anything to do with either former Austrians, who they felt had treated them as second-degree citizens, or the Romanians, who cold-shouldered them in return. Poles, Russians and Armenians had always congregated in small splinter groups and now more than ever kept to themselves. All of these despised the Jews, notwithstanding that Jews not only played an economically decisive role but, in cultural matters, were the group who nurtured traditional values as well as newly developing ones. But one simply did not associate with Jews—and thus obviated the danger of undermining credulously cherished ideologies or “bolshevizing” so-called healthy artistic canons through an encounter with what was regarded as too radically original and modern. We, as declared (and declasse) former Austrians, were counted willy-nilly with the so-called ethnic Germans.

In a town that at the time had a population of some hundred fifty thousand inhabitants, it would have been possible, of course, to find a dozen or so like-minded persons to associate with. But this would hardly have allowed for the intoxicating illusion of a “grand life” (which in other parts, incidentally, had meanwhile also become tainted), certainly not in the company of the ladies and gentlemen of the ethnic-German singing societies at their summer solstice celebrations, with fiery pyres over which black-red-and-gold banners swirled in the wind while full-throated choir bellowed into the flying sparks: “Tshermany, o Tshermany, my lohvely faderland ...” The person who saw through all this from the very beginning was my father, and he cared all the less for it since he was indifferent to anything that was not in some way connected to hunting. Mother thus was left all by herself. Her efforts to escape her growing isolation were pathetically touching; ultimately she became resigned and almost completely isolated herself and her children in the hermetic solitude of our house and garden.