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.
I was saved by an angel in the person of one of the local dwellers. No, no, I was quite right, these additional houses had not been there, only the ancient one in the middle, and all the rest had been added in the 1950s, a time of dire poverty in which more substantial constructions were out of the question. And yes, the horrible industrial installation had also been built then, and in great haste. And yes, indeed, the house had once had a glassed-in porch, and over there, where now there are those pre-fab row houses, that’s where the stables had been, and the floors there were still always moist. Yes, over there, there indeed had been also some large cherry trees. And wouldn’t I want to come into the house and see for myself that the premises still were the same, even though now they were occupied by three families?
The stone that fell from my heart sank heavily into my soul. What I had remembered from my boyhood had not been all phantasmagorical illusion or pure imagination. It was a great relief to be reassured on this account. But I had to pay a price. No longer could I ever think of that house of my mother’s without its being superseded by the present ugly reality. The real house of my childhood had been spared this fate but instead had turned into irreality, haunted by a mythic quality that made me fear that I could never again believe in my own reality. So be it! It was indeed in the realm of the unbelievable and fabulous that my own Czernopol, the imagined counterpart of the factual Czernowitz, was located. The reality I had found in Chernovtsy threatened to destroy even this. I had to leave as quickly as possible. You must never undertake the search for time lost in the spirit of nostalgic tourism.
Biographical Notes
GREGOR VON REZZORI (1914–1998) was born in Czernowitz (now Chernovtsy, Ukraine), Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He later described his childhood in a family of declining fortunes as one “spent among slightly mad and dislocated personalities in a period that also was mad and dislocated and filled with unrest.” After studying at the University of Vienna, Rezzori moved to Bucharest and enlisted in the Romanian army. During World War II, he lived in Berlin, where he worked as a radio broadcaster and published his first novel. In West Germany after the war, he wrote for both radio and film and began publishing books at a rapid rate, including the four-volume Idiot’s Guide to German Society and Ein Hermelin in Tschernopol (to be published by NYRB Classics as Ermine). From the late 1950s on, Rezzori had parts in several French and West German films, including one directed by his friend Louis Malle. In 1967, after spending years classified as a stateless person, Rezzori settled in a fifteenth-century farmhouse outside of Florence with his wife, gallery owner Beatrice Monti. There he produced some of his best-known works, among them Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (published by NYRB Classics), and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography.