The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor von Rezzori

Author:Gregor von Rezzori
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781590176535
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012-08-21T14:00:00+00:00

It was never revealed to me in what exactly his duties at the office consisted. No doubt some desk-job activities, though it remained unfathomable how and when he accomplished these. His desk was littered with photographs, drawings, periodicals, watercolors, catalogues from weapon dealers and safari outfitters, but never any documents. No one could have been more unsuited to be a functionary. Yet it would seem that he attended to this part of his daily labors with his usual assiduity. He was highly respected in the spiritual hierarchy of the church-estates administration, in which he held the rank of a councillor of the consistory. Yet he certainly was not liked, but rather feared, for his sharp tongue and total lack of respect for any form of authority, especially that claimed by the representatives of God on earth. Unabashedly he called them “frocked vultures” and never hesitated to denounce publicly even the most hushed-up scandals in their state-within-a-state. Somehow he disarmed opponents by his rigid sense of duty, developed under the old Austrian monarchy. His daily trip to the archiepiscopal residence was a demonstrative act.

All of us had to accompany him on these expeditions in a solemn procession: Paul, his colleague; my sister and I; and all the dogs—though the dogs were sent home with a magisterially sweeping gesture once we reached the edge of town. The image of their happily wagging tails sagging sorrowfully between their hind legs as they trotted homeward at this mute but commanding gesture will stay with me to the end of my days; nothing illustrates more tellingly how our own moods dampened whenever my father was ill-tempered, packed up his things and disappeared from our lives for weeks or even months.

Officially, these disappearances were announced by the sentence: “I have to go on assignment!” This left no doubt as to the importance of the undertaking, since it sanctified it as a fulfillment of professional duties. The “assignment” meant inspection trips to the historic monasteries of the Bukovina and on the upper Moldau, the structural condition and maintenance of which it was his task to supervise. Why he had to take along his rifles and shotguns was an open secret. The Religious Fund owned enormous tracts of forest. My father, who was on equally good terms with the abbots and the local forestry administrators, was granted free shoots in hundreds of thousands of acres of largely virgin Carpathian forest.

When I had grown up enough to have at least a rough idea of hunting, knew how to handle rifles and dogs in a sensible way and only seldom made mistakes in the peculiar esoteric idiom of venery, I was allowed to accompany him on his work at the monasteries. In those days, this meant laborious trips by railway, automobile or horse carriage, or at times by narrow-gauge forestry rail lines that penetrated deep into the remote fastness of the timberlands. Even today, those monisteries on the Moldau (in that section of the Bukovina still remaining in Romania and now a part of Moldavia) are placid islands in the barbaric hustle and bustle of our civilization.

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