Soon there was hardly any need to explain away my father’s growing skepticism of the Third Reich by his all too well-known affinity for paradox. The invasion of Czechoslovakia occasioned a letter in which he expounded for my benefit on the catastrophic consequences that always ensued whenever the storms of history engulfed Bohemia. It may well be that his unconscious association with Sadowa had incensed his Old Austrian feelings against the obvious Prussianization of the Greater Germany idea, about which he commented in his letters in increasingly testy tones.
Father always considered Prussians as not Germans at all but, rather, Wends and thus Slavs, an unpleasantly assertive minority in the German-speaking world. “Prussia,” he used to say, “is a typical upstart nation: one of the colonies of the Reich that seceded from the mother country and managed to rise to prominence. Similar developments caused the downfall of the Roman Empire. Frederick II of Prussia dealt the death blow to the Holy Roman Empire of Germanic Nations, whose imperial crown legitimately had been worn for six hundred years by Habsburgs. Later Hohenzollerns, foremost William II, extended the damage to catastrophic proportions. A former colony preserves the spirit in which it was founded and administered. The Prussian concept of the state, according to which each citizen is primarily a soldier, should never have impinged on the old dominions of the Reich. But it isn’t merely the calamitous Wilhelminian militarism that is Prussia’s legacy ...” and so on.
Whether he considered later developments with an equally consistent perpiscacity and saw in the Third Reich of Hitler (whom he termed a “vagrant housepainter’’) the ultimate debasement of a Prussian pseudo-spirit and thereby the true betrayal of his much beloved concept of a Greater Germany is a moot point. He could not express this in letters; even then, any mail reaching the ever larger realm of Greater Germany from abroad was filtered through a censorship that never would have permitted such heresies to go unpunished. Still, I had many reasons to assume that he was greatly pained by what he saw as a profanation of once pure and stimulating ideas, which were then further perverted by misuse. His quixotic disposition prompted him to translate these convictions into action. When the Transylvanian Saxonians became infected by Third Reich delusions, their leader, a Mr. Roth, managed to extort from the Romanian government, under pressure from the German authorities, the privilege of issuing special passports to German-speaking ethnics in Romania. My father declined such a passport with an expression of thanks. He declared that he was a citizen of the Kingdom of Romania and intended to remain loyal to this allegiance. Unfortunately, the Romanians too no longer had much comprehension for such an attitude. As a result, he remained without a passport. But he had no intention of leaving the country.
The year was 1939 and war had broken out. Russia’s initially peaceful occupation of Bessarabia and the northern Bukovina took place in 1940. The state treaty that made this possible neither surprised nor deceived my father. “Remain where you are,” he wrote to me in Vienna. “One has to go into cover.” He too remained where he was. He still hunted occasionally and cultivated a special friendship with a Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, born a Nabokova—member of a family with whom I was linked by many independently formed friendships. And then his health began to fail. The irony of fate ordained that the illness that felled him was the one of which my mother imagined herself to be the victim: a kidney ailment. In his case, its origin was clear. While visiting friends, he had contracted scarlet fever from their children. That he survived at all at his age bordered on the miraculous. Without waiting for his complete recovery, he then had jumped into an icy river in the dead of winter to recover a piece of game—he wanted to spare his dog. In September 1943 he took to bed with uremia. It was his wish that I not be informed. Dying is the most private of matters. When he realized he was going blind, he resorted to one of the “strong remedies” from his medicine box in the linen closet.
His friend Bishop Glondys had visited him on the preceding day. To his question whether, after all, there was a message for me, my father replied: “Yes. Please tell him I’m sorry to be dying in a year in which the wine in Transylvania promises to be so outstanding.’’
The Sister
A child’s paintings on some sheets of paper: large, wondrously dark-shaded flowers, stemless and floating in space as in the world of the blind. Next to it an owl with reading glasses on its round eyes—a sort of student joke, and also a finely chiseled, very pointed stiletto. All this framed by a branchwork of mistletoe twigs in the Art Nouveau style and inscribed with a name, forming an ex libris. The name sounds neo-Romantic, as from a knight’s tale of the turn of the century: Ilse.
Now that I write this down, she has been dead for fifty-six years and not one of those years has gone by without her being close to me in an almost corporeal way—not in the abstract sense of a lovingly preserving memory, but in a well-nigh physical presence, often anything but welcome. Whatever I do or fail to do, whatever happens to me, she stands constantly in front of me, next to me, behind me, observing; at times I even call her to make sure she’s there. For fifty-six years—a whole life span—there has not been for me a single happy or unhappy moment, neither success nor failure, no significant or even halfway noteworthy occurrence on which she might not have commented. She is mute but she is there. My life is a wordless dialogue with her, to which she remains unmoved: I monologize in front of her. In the sequence of images in which I experience myself in life, she is included in every situation, as the watermark in the paper bearing a picture: she has the face of a twenty-year-old, clear eyes watching me with an amused air, one brow raised skeptically, full lips, inherited from her father, ironically angled at the corners. The watchful expression is constant; it is always there.
I would not know where to look in me for the key traumatic experience that generated this obsession, nor do I know how I could find it. With psychoanalytical methods? I don’t quite believe in them. In the 1930s in Vienna, when I still could have consulted the great Sigmund Freud himself, I came across a copy of his case history of the “Wolfman.” I could not imagine how the distraction of this unfortunate man, scion of an assiduously suicidal family, widower after the suicide of his wife as well, a former millionaire whom the Russian Revolution had driven into exile without a cent, saddled with a hysterical and ailing mother who refused to die, himself afflicted with an exemplary checklist of neuroses—I could not imagine how the derangement of this poor devil could be traced to nothing more than that, as an infant, he had accidentally witnessed his parents engaged in coitus a tergo. Even today I find myself unable to deny my skepticism about such allegedly scientific assumptions, especially when I’m supposed also to believe that the discovery itself would induce the healing process (which, incidentally, was not the case with the Wolfman).
Nevertheless, deference to the spirit of the times prompted me to push my investigations in that direction—most inadequately, no doubt, since I undertook them on my own, using only the rather crude means at my disposal. With a fine-toothed comb I went through our jointly experienced infancy, as well as through the adolescent years during which I was separated from my sister, all the way to her death at twenty-two—I was eighteen at the time. All I could have come up with on the notorious oilcloth-covered analytical couch was an expression of gratitude to my parents for having arranged—although not millionaires (not Russians either)—for our nursery to be far enough removed from the scene of their (fairly infrequent) sexual activities, to spare us early traumas. Even if this had not been the case, I would have observed such a happening with the same clinical interest with which, instructed by Cassandra, I witnessed similar activities between dogs, cats, rabbits and other animals; the experience left no lifelong repercussions in my psyche. I should add, though, that the nonsexual tensions between our parents and their uninhibited explosions in front of us triggered a fairly complete anthology of neuroses. My efforts to deal with these on my own, without professional rummaging in my unconscious, greatly enriched my life. Insofar as my
sister is concerned, however, it may well be that they contributed to her early death.
That she was endowed with a special quality I’ve heard from all sides and so persuasively that it finally could not be doubted. Nor was this the transfiguration of someone prematurely taken by death, but quite simply something that resisted definition. No one could say precisely what it was that distinguished her, for it could not be illustrated by a specific out-of-the-ordinary quality. She was intelligent, she had my father’s cheery temperament, she liked to laugh and had a sense of humor, and she was mature beyond her years. That was all—and yet it was not that alone. She was astonishingly precocious. For her eighteenth birthday, I, fourteen years old, thought of a very sumptuous present: a writing case of green morocco leather, each sheet of stationery engraved with a fist-size monogram. She never used it for her correspondence but kept it reverently; I still have the case to this day. After her death I discovered that on some of the pages she had recorded diarylike notes: lists of books she wanted to read, character sketches of persons she knew, accounts of her pocket money and, strangely enough, a short essay on jealousy. Some twenty years later I showed all this to a friend who understood something of graphology. He was amazed. “Unbelievable that this should be the writing of an eighteen- or nineteen- or even twenty-year-old. It is the fully formed writing of a mature person. A forty-year-old woman with a great deal of experience in life could have written this.’’
Amateurs of palmistry (and why not, since we are talking of arcane sciences?) may be interested in the fact that her palms showed no other lines than those of the heart and life, the second not notably short. Whether this allows for a conclusion about her exceptional nature I leave undecided. In any case, everyone seems to have noticed her unusual individuality. A sober and worldly old lady, aunt of the young gentleman whom my sister intended to marry, told me: “She would arrive, a young girl of excellent manners, pretty but not of conspicuous beauty, very graceful and well groomed without being ostentatiously elegant, with carefully selected shoes, hats, gloves and other accessories, nothing extravagant, completely natural in her comportment—and yet the attention of everyone present would concentrate on her, without her having done anything to attract it; even old people like myself fell immediately under her spell.’’
This is how I remember her too—or, I should say, this is the image which for fifty-six years has been imprinted, transparent though indelible like a watermark, on my experience. Naturally, I can also conjure up any number of other images of her, depending on where I stop the filmstrip of my life’s record, freely reeling it forward and back to a moment in time when she had not yet turned into a ghost: for instance, to a day in early childhood, it must have been during our refugee period in Austria; I cannot yet climb alone and unaided over a picket fence in our garden, although it is not much higher than the currant bushes bordering it; she stands behind in a meadow plucking flowers, a long-legged girl with the somewhat awkward grace of a foal, typical of a seven-year-old, in a short flowered dirndl dress with a little apron and a big bow in her hair; she watches my ineffectual efforts to join her in the freedom of the meadow and maliciously sticks out her tongue at me.
Another snapshot: She is ten or eleven, I am seven, and we are standing at the nursery window in Czernowitz. I like to hide in that recess; it is the starting point of many of my emotion-filled flights of fancy, with a view over the tree crowns of the People’s Park out to the poplar-lined arterial road leading into unknowable remoteness. My sister has planted herself in front of me, looks at the sky and commands: “Turn, sun! And you, moon, stand still!” It is a senseless rigmarole, as I well know, and I also know that she does not have the power to order celestial bodies, but her presumption is all the more vexing, so that I tremble with anger without being able to throw myself at her, as I would like to, because my father is standing next to us, relishing my helpless rage. It is one of the games with which he makes her happy at my expense. I cannot hate him because he is my father. I must not hate her, for she is my sister. I am helpless.
And again: I am awkward with knots and cannot tie my shoelaces by myself. She stands in front of a mirror, deftly undoes the bow in her hair and reties it into a perfect knot with playful ease and speed; then she throws me a mocking glance through the mirror and bounds away.
Frustrating episodes, without doubt. They can be classified together with the humiliation of having to inherit, during the war years and immediately thereafter, when children’s clothing was scarce, my sister’s underwear, the lace panties slit behind instead of in front; later, when Mother fancied to put us on parade in identical attire, I had to submit to being clad in the same short, light-colored paletots with velvet collars, the legs in gaiters buttoned above the knees, and on our pageboy haircuts—my hair too was cut like a girl’s, which in Czernowitz was unusual for boys at the time—the much hated Christopher Robin hats, secured with thin rubber bands, a favorite article of attire for a mother who could not comprehend a boy’s soul. I cannot describe the despair with which I tried time and again to bend down one side of the brim so as to transform it into a safari hat or something resembling Buffalo Bill’s cowboy hat, only to feel the finger of a governess, with a light nudge, making the stiff brim snap back. My sister would observe this maliciously, and she wore the costume with all the more ostentatious satisfaction since it made her look boyish, while I felt like a little girl in it.
One last small vignette: We stand in the bathroom and are both naked. My sister looks at the thing hanging between my legs and screws up her face in disgust.
Not so fast, my dear psychologists! Let us not jump to conclusions; there were also moments of sibling harmony that offset all antagonisms. Still in Austria around 1917, we had visited acquaintances in a neighboring locality and, back home, were raving about their wonderfully warm toilet. No one quite understands what we are talking about. But our hosts of the day eventually show themselves to be peeved and fail to send their own children on a return visit, as had been promised. They finally disclose our outrage: we had defecated into their fireless cooking box. (Cooking boxes were cubelike felt-lined appliances, used in wartime to save heating material, to finish the cooking and keep food warm. We had seen a chaise perchée that looked more or less the same in our grandparents’ house in Vienna and had misinterpreted the purpose of this contraption.)
And then again in the Bukovina, after 1919: we have disappeared for a worrisome long time, the whole house is searched until we finally reappear from somewhere, talking confused nonsense, laughing without reason, finally sinking to our knees in front of the nursery stove, tearfully begging God that He may prevent it from falling to pieces, which would cause us to freeze to death in winter. We are put to bed, our temperature is taken but we have no fever. We forthwith fall into a deep sleep from which we regain consciousness only on the following day. This time we speak with delight of some delicious fruit compote which we found in Father’s study and consumed almost to the last. It was Father’s rum pot, in which, each year, he marinated ripened fruit, berries and green nuts.
The list can be continued. But what is decisive is the fact that in all these episodes from our early time together, even in those in which I stood helpless against her delight in mocking me, I felt my sister to be a part of myself as self-evidently as my arms or my legs. There was as yet nothing that separated us. She did not take advantage of the superiority, conferred upon her by her greater age, as perfidiously as she did later on. She occasionally played tricks on me, which prompted me to complain to Cassandra or to my mother that she was bullying or “ragging” me, but this remained within the boundaries of the perfectly normal; matters were no more tumultuous between us than they usually are between siblings. In vain do I look for occurrences that would correspond to the relations between brother and sister as described by Krafft-Ebing. Patient Baron F. corporem superiorem partim nudavit et puellas trans pectus suum et collum et osradere inbit et poscit, ut transgredientes summa caleibus per
merent. Nothing of that sort. She never tormented me physically. If ever she should have felt envy for my tiny penis, she was able to repress it with ease. I suspect that somehow and at some time she had had occasion to observe the difference between boys and girls and to be annoyed by it even before my own appearance in her life. In any case, I cannot remember with the best of intentions an instance when she would have tried to eliminate that difference with a knife or a pair of scissors.
Yet one thing is certain: I was not welcome to her. I had to be a thorn in her flesh. For four years she lived alone in the radiance of her father’s love, unmolested by her mother’s shifting emotional outbursts and in the stable world of the splendor and (deceptive) self-assurance of imperial Austria. Then one day I appeared on the scene—and forthwith the splendor faded away: her father vanished from life, the house that was hers alone, the garden that was her realm, the toys, the animals, the beings who looked after her suddenly came under a terrible threat; she had to leave them from one moment to the next, she went through a terrifying flight and entered surroundings that were both confined and anguishing, under the exclusive domination of a panicky, nervous mother who had eyes only for me, the newborn, who devoted all her care to me and who pushed her aside impatiently, reprimanding and punishing her both erratically and excessively. She was bound to associate all of this with my existence. In a word, she held me responsible for the First World War, and this she made me feel throughout her short life—although so subtly that the accusation may seem absurd.
Only after we returned to the Bukovina at the end of the war did her finely spun, spiderweb-like acts of malice become obvious. Circumstances may have fostered vindictiveness in her, if merely because of the festering boredom resulting from the restriction of our freedom. We lived in a state of suspension that excluded us from the world at large. House and garden, at the edge of town in a “villa district,” were adjacent to maize fields and pastures (in those days, cities were not yet girded by mangy belts of messy construction sites, small industries, auto repair shops and storage sheds; behind the last houses, open land lay directly before one’s eyes), but it was not a landscape in which we were allowed to roam freely. We were enclosed in our garden as in a cage, cordoned off as much from the town as from the fields, which did not belong to us and in our mother’s eyes were dangerously wild. We lived as on an island enclosed by the garden’s iron picket fence; beyond was the uncertain and alien world in which adventurous souls might find their way about, but certainly not we, who lacked experience.
The Snows of Yesteryear Page 22