Today I appreciate the strength that she needed to withstand the vicissitudes of fate and that she communicated to us for the rest of our lives—a feat all the more remarkable when one remembers that war overshadowed each hour of our everyday life. The smell of blood and steel pervaded everything, even places where these had not yet had a direct impact. No one could believe any longer in the possibility of a victory by the Central Powers. Its defeats threw the discouraged into gloomy despair. It was not just an empire that broke apart: a whole world went under. And it was as if, with the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a light was extinguished that until then had bathed the days in a golden sheen. This struck not us alone: a new era had begun.
We grew up with the myth of a lost bygone world, golden and miraculous. By 1915 we were already what later hundreds of thousands of Europeans were to become: refugees, exiles, leaves tossed by the storms of history. Toward the end of the war we were forced to leave the village in Lower Austria that had been our refuge; it became even more inhospitable than it had been from the beginning. Vienna, with the dimming of its glory, had become a gray and squalid slum. My mother’s relatives who lived there recommended that we return to the Bukovina. My father, whom I saw for the first time when he returned from the war, agreed. Although the future of this former crown land was still entirely unsettled, it seemed a more promising place to live in than any of the other splinter states of the dismembered monarchy. We went home.
This too was not accomplished in unmarred serenity. In Galicia, the stretch between Lemberg (now Lvov) and the Prut River, marking the border with the Bukovina, was bordered by the simple wooden crosses crowned with the helmets of fallen soldiers. Swarms of crows dotted the gray skies. The closer we came to the Prut, the more frequently we could look through burnt-out window frames into houses through whose torn roof timbers one perceived storm-swept clouds and from the floorings of which nettles were growing. Czernowitz, on the other side of the Prut, had become restive and shabby, peopled by a wretched species of individuals, hitherto encountered only alone or, at worst, in shady twosomes or threesomes but never before in such compact exclusiveness.
We had fled the Bukovina from a house in the country my mother had never liked. It had been my sister’s birthplace. That I, too, had not been born there I owed to her panic-prone disposition. My sister’s birth had been a difficult one, and my mother did not want to face once more the risk of perhaps bleeding to death in the hands of some rural midwife, far from medical assistance. When she went into labor, she had herself driven to the city by horse carriage—a distance of some fifty miles. I was born before she reached the clinic. The experience may well have contributed to her hatred of that country house. Now, after four years of rural seclusion and with the disconcerting uncertainty of the times, it was decided to stay in Czernowitz.
But uncertainty also yawned all around our new house: it was located at the outermost edge of the city, where, beyond the villa gardens and small farm holdings, the views broadened to open country. The East was threateningly close. The great trees of the public park, adjacent to our own, were denuded. Impacts of howitzers had opened craters at the bottom of which rainwater formed murky pools. The monstrously swollen corpse of a horse lay by the roadside a hundred meters away. And yet this was to become the house of a merry, happy childhood, though all too short and filled with tensions that were alien to what is commonly understood as cozy and homelike.
Visitors may have thought it comfortable and even elegant. The furnishings that had been destroyed or plundered were soon replaced by new acquisitions. For this my mother had a deft hand. Jubilantly, my sister and I moved into the large and airy children’s rooms. But before the beginning of that span of my life, which I recall as my true childhood, threatening storms once more overshadowed our life.
Those were the days shortly before the Romanians, in 1919, occupied the Bukovina. The sinister species in rags that had begun to fill the streets of Czernowitz was a constant reminder that a few hundred kilometers to the east, just beyond the Dniester River, Russia lay waiting, where, for the past two years, the Bolsheviks made short shrift of our kind of people. The revolutionary spirit of 1917 had degenerated into bloody madness and might easily spread over to us. Gangs of plunderers drifting about had already targeted the ration warehouses of the departed Austrian army as their first objective. Besmirched with lard and plum jam, totally inebriated and with their bellies full, the howling gangs of rabble staggered past our house; they were more or less held in check during the day but became menacing at night. My romantic father provided everyone in the house with firearms. Even Cassandra was handed a pistol, which she hid comfortably between her voluminous breasts—with the safety catch off. The precautionary measures with which this pistol then had to be retrieved enriched the anecdotal treasure trove that accumulated around my remarkable nanny over the years. But for the time being there was no cause for laughter. These are clearly remembered images: we, the children, are fetched from our beds and hastily dressed; all lights are extinguished; I see Mother’s hands in the moonlight as she frantically hides her jewelry; the glitter of pistol barrels. But the danger passed us by. Within the next few days, Romanian soldiers occupied Czernowitz. Occasionally some shots were heard, and then it was announced that order had been restored.
But it was an eerily nervous order. We had no idea how the Romanians would deal with us. Our father stayed in the city all day long to find out how the situation was evolving. We children were strictly forbidden to exchange so much as a single word with any stranger. Of course, we were not to go beyond the garden under any circumstance. (Nor were we allowed to do so later on without accompaniment, and when once I did so, my punishment was draconian.) But this seclusion was difficult to maintain. Like all children of a nation at war, we were enthusiastically patriotic but at the same time ardently attracted to anything military, even in the form of an enemy. When Romanian troops marched by, I could not be restrained; I had to get to the garden fence to see it all. In so doing one day, I had failed to consider that I was holding in my hands a doll called “The German Brother’’: a childlike soldier in a field-gray uniform and with a black-white-and-red cockade decorating the German recruit’s visorless cap covering his blond locks (the very same headgear the sight of which, five years earlier, because it had been mistaken for Russian, had caused our first flight). A sergeant of the Romanian battalion filing past saw this toy and in a rage ran over to me, reached through the fence, tore the offending object from my hands and flung it, cursing, into the gutter. But he hadn’t noticed Cassandra, who, driven by the same curiosity as my own, had joined me at the fence. A wild sow whose piglet has been threatened could not have broken from the underbrush with fiercer speed: she threw herself with such uninhibited vehemence against the iron fenceposts that the sergeant, frightened, jumped back. A torrent of bawdy Romanian curses was loosed on him which, together with the weird appearance of the scolding fury, triggered a wave of derisive laughter in the troop. Had there not been this outburst of rude amusement, Cassandra’s impetuosity could have cost her dearly: without a moment’s hesitation, she grabbed a handful of earth and flung it after the retreating figure. She could have been shot on the spot.
All memory of early childhood is episodic, embedded in the moods of separate periods which later we interpret as stages of our development. It is a year later, a summer day of almost unbearable heat. The foliage of the trees around the house hangs listless. Our mother exacerbates her growing fear of just such threats even though the times are by now more peaceful: we are citizens of the Kingdom of Romania. My father’s monarchism has proven to be more enduring than his Austrian patriotism: he prefers the monarchy with a foreign language to the now exclusively German-speaking republic of the shrunken Austrian rump state, contrary to my mother, who feels like an exile cast out in an inferior culture, a world full of menacing forces, including climatic ones. A hot day such as this hatches unforeseeable perils. It is only natural, therefor
e, that on a sudden impulse it is decided to drive to the nearest lookout point in the gently rolling landscape. Even though the difference in elevation is minimal, it might be expected that the air would be cooler there, where large tracts of forest abounded.
In those days, such excursions were not made easily. One drove in horse carriages that took hours; to protect oneself against the sun, parasols were taken along, together with dusters, as well as blankets and overcoats for the return in the evening. Since there was no inn along the way, cold drinks were brought in thermos bottles and sandwiches were packed in baskets. And toys: thin loops of reed that were thrown in the air with small sticks and then caught again with swordlike thrusts; balls; and of course, my sister’s diabolo game, that hourglass cone rotating on a string stretched between two sticks, which was thrown up whirring high above and caught once more to run back and forth along the length of the string with micelike fleetness. Mother liked to watch us playing these tame games harking back to her own youth. They soon bored us to tears.
Usually, when Cassandra came along, I was excused from these choreographic, rather than sportive, exercises. On the pretext that under all circumstances I had to avoid congesting my affected lungs, we withdrew to the shade of some tall trees in a grove. This is the key image of that period and bearer of its mood (I would have been just over five years old at the time): in the wide-open expanse of the landscape stands one of those clumps of splendid trees in the mighty crowns of which golden orioles are whistling and warblers are flying hither and thither. A light breeze sweeps over the fields, where one can hear the rustling of the dry corn sheaves; big pumpkins with yellow-white and black-green tiger stripes lie heavily on the rich black earth, attached to their hairy vines. Far away the call of a cuckoo is heard and the warble of bobwhites; closer by, frogs croak in the reeds of a swampy water hole; a stork stalks with careful deliberation under the willows of a brook, then slowly rises over their crowns with a heavy flapping of its wings and flies off. Cassandra cradles me in her arms and tells me a fairy tale.
But this time Cassandra hadn’t come along. Mother didn’t quite trust yet the newly established peace and even less the good-natured disposition of the rural population, which had run wild during the war and was in any case degenerating as a result of the city’s proximity. Therefore as many people as possible had to come along for protection and proper supervision: everybody went with the exception of Cassandra and the maids, who were given one of their rare days off. Cassandra stayed home because someone had to take care of the house, and much to our chagrin the dogs stayed with her—to defend the house and her and, chiefly, because it was feared that they would go hunting on their own if let loose in the fields.
Dogs played an important part in our childhood. There was at least one dog for each member of the family and all of them were instinctively drawn to Cassandra. They acknowledged her as an authority in the hierarchy of the household on the strength of her being, so to say, their own companion in fate and dependent on their common masters. But strangely enough, and notwithstanding their passionate love for my father and for us, it was Mother whom the dogs considered the supreme authority. They had—and I cannot express it more clearly—an order of rank ascending from secular precedence to spiritual supremacy. With the exception of the dogs, all of us trembled under my mother’s febrile humors as under a metaphysical power that could not be explained rationally and even less could be denied. She embodied the eternally threatening and fragile nature of all existence. The drama of life confronted her at every moment with the potential to turn suddenly into tragedy. She saw it as her duty to prevent the worst by constantly alerting everyone around her to watch out. (Had she realized that the name of Cassandra fitted her better than it did my nurse, she would have been deeply offended.) In any case, the dogs seemed to sense her innate and tragic comprehension of the ever threatening evil in all existence, and whenever a storm gathered they all sought refuge at her feet.
At the opposite end stood Cassandra’s full-blooded animal vitality. Her almost frightening merriment—like my father’s hardly ever dampened good spirits—was perhaps nothing more than a robust physical disposition’s natural consonance with the surrounding world. While my mother and sister were both incomparably more frail, Cassandra and my father both enjoyed the rudest health, the best of appetites, the most perfect digestions and therefore also the sunniest of temperaments, ready at all times for jokes and laughter. That this readiness to make light of life resulted from insights into its inscrutability at least as profound as Mother’s can be only surmised and hardly proven. To recognize what is absurd and to accept it need not dim the eye for the tragic side of existence; quite on the contrary, in the end it may perhaps help in gaining a more tolerant view of the world.
Our excursion to the refreshing breezes on the hill was probably as chaotic as most undertakings that had their roots in Mother’s rather touching intention to rearrange the world for us as it had been in her own childhood at the turn of the century. We drank cold tea with the metallic taste of thermos bottles, ate sandwiches that had fallen into the sand, played with our hoops and balls, jumped rope and did charades until we became cranky and bawled and scuffled with each other. Soon a storm came up. Our excursion had to be curtailed and we returned to the city sooner than anticipated. The house seemed deserted. The door stood open. The first rooms we entered were in a terrifying state of devastation. Our immediate thought was of robbery. Then Cassandra appeared, naked as the day she was born, out of breath, her chimpanzee face congested to a scarlet hue, her hair loose and barely covering her nudity: a Lady Godiva with a pitch-black mane. She had taken advantage of our absence to have her fill at romping with the dogs all afternoon—bare-assed, a beast among beasts. The wild chase had gone through the garden and the house, and our premature return had left no time for the riotous bacchante to tidy up. She was not in any way embarrassed, but merely declared that the dogs occasionally needed such an untrammeled spree. My mother was on the point of dismissing her right then and there, but my father, who as usual was away hunting at the time, on his return took Cassandra’s side. With that the “scandal,” as my mother saw it, took its place in the long list of humiliations which it was her lot to endure. To her, Cassandra once more had been declared the winner in a decisive either-or situation. We, on the other hand—Father, my sister and I—saw in the bizarre happening not merely proof of the untamable nature of our strange housemate but also something mystical, almost mythological: the primeval essence of our country embodied in one of its own chosen daughters. For us she was imbued, henceforth, with the power of an arcane native priesthood. When I think back to the house of my childhood, which my memory places in a bright, wide-open landscape, surrounded by birches, beeches and rowan trees (in style somehow akin to the pagan neoclassicism of paintings like those of Franz von Stuck), there is always present in it the image of Cassandra, running wild and naked, and behind her the pack of dogs snapping at the black banner of her mane.
Cassandra’s hair, the beauteous counterpart of her homeliness, was one of the delights of my childhood. She usually wore it tied in two braids, thick as arms, coiled on top of her enormous head and crowning it like a flattened Kurdish turban, a style—she told us—favored by all the women in her village so as to serve as a kind of pillow on which better to carry heavy baskets and pitchers. When she loosened her hair, it would fall down over her shoulders and back in a silkily crackling, glistening wealth, reaching down almost to the hollow of her knees. To grab it and dip my little hands in its dry flows was for me an inexhaustible pleasure. Evenings, when she undressed me to put me to bed, I would stand on the nursery dresser in front of her and take the pins out of her hair, unwind the braids and cover her face with them. Laughing and joking, she let me have my way. At times I would wrap myself entirely in its folds, hiding myself as behind a curtain, and call to my sister—already in bed and usually reading a book—to come and find me. Blissfully I inhaled its pungent smell of almonds a
nd frankincense. Such flowing hair has remained for me the epitome of the sweetly voluptuous darkness in all that is feminine—once more in perfect harmony with the late Art Nouveau style of the era I was born in, but in antithesis to that other, more problematic and refractory feminine element, so different as to be almost inimical to the first, which found its purest incarnation in my mother’s and sister’s ethereal skin and all but translucent eyelids.
This puzzled me later on, since it seemed inconceivable to me that I ever could have perceived in Cassandra anything that could be defined as sexual, let alone the quintessence of “woman.” For me she belonged to those objects and beings of my own, most intimate childhood sphere, among which some—my dog, my magpie, my rabbit or a favorite toy (my teddy bear, an elephant made of some rubbery substance from which I hardly ever was separated)—were especially “soul endowed” through the strength of my love for them. To all these objects I was tenderly attached and I would mourn their loss bitterly, but they had nothing to do with the factual, real world I was growing into: the world of adults, who guarded the secrets of sexuality and death. Cassandra was of my own world, and if I discovered that my domino set was the object of erotic fantasy, this would not have seemed more absurd to me than if this were claimed to be the case with regard to Cassandra.
Naturally, I was not without libidinous stirrings. Thoughts of the feminine rose in me early. Even as a six- or seven-year-old, I was perennially infatuated: with a youthful aunt; an elegant lady who had come to visit; a pretty girl I had seen in passing; or merely a picture in some illustrated journal; the daughter of our physician, more or less of my own age; and many more. My imagination was replete with images of blissful embraces, tender kisses exchanged in fondly silent togetherness, even temporary misunderstandings between myself and the loved one, and the ensuing all the more delightful reconciliations, when all would be cleared up once more—to my own satisfaction, of course. But such emotions were purely “platonic,” in the parlance of that period—“chaste,” as my mother would have said. They had no connection with the signs of budding sexuality that my infantile body exhibited upon chance arousals—much to the delight of Cassandra, I need admit, who on such occasions, with loud praises, half derisive and half in earnest, accompanied by much laughter, was wont to show me off in my proud condition to the cook, the chambermaids and whosoever else happened by or readily could be called to witness the spectacle. This too I saw as nothing but a boisterous prank, all the more so since the chambermaids, almost all of them—like Cassandra herself—barely domesticated daughters of Carpathian shepherds, fled screaming with laughter from this exhibition. Nevertheless, adherents of Professor Freud may find some satisfaction in knowing that then my direst nightmare consisted in my sitting on the potty in an open passageway, exposed to all eyes and unable to flee since, on rising, my naked behind would be fully revealed. The feeling of self-inflicted distress in this dream was every bit as terrifying as the recurring nightmare of a treacherous murder I had supposedly committed, which frequently haunted me as an adult.
The Snows of Yesteryear Page 3