The Snows of Yesteryear Read Free Page B

even my mother, mindful of her role as refugee and of her perennially fragile health, hardly ever drove into Trieste. Later, my sister told me that she almost died of boredom. Apart from endless hours of instruction with her governess, her sole distraction consisted in the game of diabolo, in which a rotating hourglass-shaped spool is balanced and spun on a string stretched between two sticks, then thrust into the air and caught again on the string—a game Proust had already described as obsolete at the turn of the century. Thanks to untiring practice, she managed to acquire a mastery of diabolo with which she often used to humiliate me later on. Photographs from that period show her, flowerlike, among gigantic agaves in a rock garden, clad in a white summer frock and a large linen hat to protect her against the Mediterranean sun. The strange plants, appearing to have originated in some other geological era, look like a stage backdrop, and this invests the figure of my sister with an air of artificiality and precociousness. At home—our home in the Bukovina, which she was to come to hate—her blossomlike appearance was natural. There is another picture of her in the garden of our true home that shows her at eye level with her stubby-haired setter, Troll, the dog my father had laid as a puppy in her cradle shortly after her birth—much to the dismay of the still ailing mother, the nurse and all the other females in the household. The dog and the little girl are as organically harmonious in the cheerfully overgrown garden as its trees and shrubs and lawns turning into meadows rank with wild flowers. The picture, taken no more than a year and a half before the one in the garden near Trieste, epitomizes an irrevocably lost period in my sister’s life. That childlike innocence, the existential oneness with all living creatures, the deep embeddedness in the ever astounding richness of all nature became a thing of the past and ceded its place to the realization of the complexity of being.
    More especially for Cassandra, the encounter with an alien world was not an enriching experience: she—who relished the anecdotal and raised any occurrence, however banal, to the level of an event and knew how to embroider and enrich it with fantasy, so as to incorporate it into the never ending garland of cameos that gave our life story (and thereby her own) glamour and drama—was incapable of telling us anything about the time near Trieste. Whether her memory was blurred by the homesickness she may have suffered there, or whether the sullen patience, legacy of an old line of slaves, with which she bore any dispensation of fate (a condition of psychic torpor similar to the physical rigor that certain bugs or birds assume at the approach of danger) prevented anything memorable from even dawning on her—this remains a moot question. That she had no eyes for the beauty of the landscape was but natural: as my father used to say, primitive people have no grasp of the abstract concept of beauty in nature, since for them, sensory perception of nature flows together with love of the ancestral soil; anything else is merely alien. Whenever I asked Cassandra whether she hadn’t liked the sea, she remained glum and taciturn. I had the impression that her sullen reticence had to do with some unpleasant occurrence she didn’t care to think about. Through some kind of spiritual osmosis there rose in me an image, somewhat in the Art Nouveau style of that period: a young woman in silhouette, like a figurehead on a galleon, stands on a foam-sprayed cliff by the sea, and in her I seem to recognize my mother; sitting before her, in a half-adoring, half-masterful attitude, is the dark-clad figure of a man combining all the traditional attributes of the southerner, the artist and the lover in a single epitome—dark hair, a flowing black lavalliere, a black slouch hat carelessly held in his hand. I have an inkling that the