I no longer recall how the project ended up with my mother. She had known Dr. Z. for years and trusted him, especially since she heard him tell me in graphic detail about the spread of syphilis among the Huzules; it had been one of her worst fears that, because of either inadequate supervision or my father’s pernicious influence, I might some day sexually assault a daughter of the region on one of our hunting expeditions. What convinced her of Dr. Z.’s qualifications to be director of a thermal spa no one could say. In any case, she took all the money she had and bought the old convalescent home. Dr. Z. became a partner in the enterprise, contributing his services and the secret of the arsenic spring, in exchange for which he gave up his medical practice in Cirlibaba and his comfortable life. My father’s urgent warnings were of no avail. Later, my mother explained to me that because these warnings had been conveyed by my sister and me, she didn’t take them seriously; she had assumed that her ex-husband merely wanted to denigrate her in our eyes. No one else was consulted.
The purchase of the ramshackle convalescent home swallowed up all her available means. Philip contributed what was needed for its renovation. To make it a luxury sanatorium, it also had to be refurbished completely, and in this my mother did not stint. Over questions of interior design, she fell out with Wanda, the doctor’s wife, and there were ill feelings and angry words. A year went by before the place could be opened for guests. But none came. Dr. Z., who had no income and therefore was soon left without means of support, took out a mortgage on his share in the enterprise. He also opened a new practice of his own but failed to attract patients. Another doctor, Dr. B., was as well established in Jacobeni as Dr. Z. had been in Cîrlibaba, and although Dr. Z. hatched some intrigues to supplant Dr. B. as the official health insurance physician, these failed. Winter came and with it the dead season. Once the snow melted, Dr. Z. could bear Jacobeni no longer. He left with his wife for Paris. He came back in May. In June—the sanatorium had just opened, but not a single guest had arrived—my mother was arrested in Czernowitz. She was freed after a brief interrogation at police headquarters, but she had to keep herself at the disposal of the authorities. Dr. Z. had committed a murder; as his business partner, my mother was at the center of the investigation.
The facts in the alleged crime were incredible, and the investigation dragged on for years. What had happened was as follows: Dr. Z. had gone to see his medical rival and had told him, “My dear colleague, I am doing research concerning the measurement of lung capacity. Please be so good as to inhale the contents of this vial.” With which he unplugged a vial and held it under the nose of Dr. B., who in good faith inhaled deeply. The vial contained hydrogen sulfide. Dr. B. apparently dropped dead; Dr. Z. replaced the vial in his briefcase and returned to the empty sanatorium.
But Dr. B. did not die immediately, although he had been blinded. He dragged himself to his desk and with his last remaining strength managed to scrawl on a slip of paper: “Dr. Z. has killed me.” Then he died. His wife found him an hour later; one and a half hours later the police discovered in Dr. Z.’s consulting room all the paraphernalia necessary to prepare hydrogen sulfide. The vial was still in his briefcase.
The person who couldn’t stop shaking his head over these events was my father. It seemed to him entirely implausible that a man who for years had held forth as an expert on the perfect murder by poison would choose to kill someone by such a primitive method, which any child could readily detect. It was at least equally incomprehensible that a physician with experience could be the victim of so crude an attempt at murder. “Every school-child knows from lab experiments that one has to run as fast and far away as possible the instant one smells rotten eggs,” Father observed. “It can’t have happened so simply.” The investigating authorities shared this opinion. Nothing could be gotten from Dr. Z.; he remained mum and neither admitted nor denied anything. Primarily, motives were searched for, and the most likely ones were professional, that is, financial. The still virginal luxury sanatorium remained sealed by the authorities. My poor mother and innocent Philip were harassed by questions that went all the way back to elucidate the original means by which the wretched place had been acquired—which, in turn, led to punctilious and highly embarrassing fiscal examinations. (No one had ever thought of paying taxes on the Odaya.)
My sister and I heard of all this when we came back “home’’— whatever that meant. She had come for a few days from Galatz and I from Leoben for summer vacation, which I was to spend hunting with my father. I fetched her from the train station and drove her to his house—we were kept away from our mother’s for the time being, in order to spare us unpleasant scenes. Once we were there, I told her what had occurred; together and in tears, we sank to the floor in paroxysms of laughter. When my sister recovered, she went to the bathroom and threw up.
She returned to Galatz without having seen her father, who was away hunting. I myself stayed with him only a short while and spent the summer in Czernowitz, one of the happiest summers of my whole youth: unsupervised and carefree, playing tennis in the “Jew club,” as my father called it, in love without the usual gnawing obsessiveness, unencumbered even by embarrassing arguments between my mother and Philip, which disclosed ever more and deeper discrepancies than those that were the immediate consequence of the collapse of Jacobeni. Then, in autumn—oh, the blue-golden autumn days of those years!—I returned to Leoben, still lighthearted and unencumbered, so frivolous that even today I remember that period of presumptive studies with conflicting feelings. On an evening after the usual boozing with fellow students, I somehow ended up in the kermess booth of a fortune-teller. Her gaze rigidly directed at some far-off point, as in a picture book, clad in a wrap decorated with the signs of the Zodiac, her smooth, shining black hair severely parted in the middle, she was surrounded by the complete instrumentarium of prophecy: the glass globe, tarot cards, astrological tables and, behind her on the wall, the picture of a turbaned magician with glowing eyes, surrounded by flowing rainbows. Smirking, I sat down across from her, and she took my hand, peered into its palm and said, “Soon someone who is very close to you will die.” I wish I could swear by something exalted that would invest what I am about to say with the seal of gospel truth: at the very instant the seeress intoned those words, I saw my sister’s green eyes before me. The next morning I got a letter from her: “I’m a little bit sick.” We never had written to each other, least of all when we had a cold or an upset stomach. I knew it was she who would die.
Soon she had to give up her position in Galatz and return to Czernowitz. A small swelling of a gland behind her left ear enlarged. My mother brought her to Vienna. We saw her leave, my father and I, in the train station where so many of our arrivals and departures to and from our schools had taken place. My sister, laughing, looked down at us from the window of her compartment, and my father joked boisterously, unconcerned by the reaction of strangers and bystanders, as was his wont when he was in a jolly mood. The train started up slowly, we exchanged some final farewells, we waved good-bye, my father took off his hat and then, turning abruptly, said, “I’ve seen her for the last time.’’
In Vienna, she was treated by a Professor Sternberg. The lymphogranulomatosis, as her affliction was diagnosed, in those days was called “Sternberg’s disease.” But even the efforts of this preeminent authority were of no avail. She wasted away, and soon the tumescence expanded over her neck and down to her shoulder. Once she said to me, “If Father were to see me in this condition, he would help me.” I knew what she meant.
To my mother, she showed great tenderness. She saw how much the poor thing suffered for her. At times, when my mother was sharp with me because of her, our eyes would meet and we couldn’t suppress a smile. Once I caught her unawares as she was observing her mother’s glance sliding off, as happened so often, from the here and now into an indeterminate remoteness. Once again our eyes met, and I understood something unfathomably deep: her expression was hard; she had always feared and hated the thre
at of slipping away into this indefinite vagueness. Had she realized that this was why she had renounced the poetry of her childhood myth at the Odaya? She gave me a brief nod: it was an admonition.
We became true siblings once more. I left Leoben and stayed in Vienna, where she lay bedridden in our grandmother’s house. I became friends with her kind and gentle Fritz; our close friendship was to last for many years past her death and until his own. Fairly soon it was clear that there was no hope for her. Because she loved the mountains, she was brought to a sanatorium near Hall in the Tyrol, in beautiful surroundings. It bore the somewhat creepy name of Gnadenwald, “Mercywoods’’—an occasion for more of our macabre jokes. She herself had no illusions about her condition. Although her suffering reached almost biblical proportions, she lost none of her courage or her readiness to laugh at absurdity. When I visited her for the last time, she drew me close and whispered, “I must tell you something that will make you laugh. I myself can’t anymore. It hurts too much.” The tumescence had fused her head and shoulders; her hair had fallen out; while receiving radiation, her larynx had inadvertently been burned and now she coughed incessantly; her whole body was covered by an itching rash. What she told me was something that in times past would have united us in laughter.
My mother would not tolerate that any of the sanatorium’s friendly, well-trained personnel took over the care of her daughter. For weeks my sister could not sleep and my mother would keep vigil with her, barely resting between periods of wakefulness. Finally her exhausted child fell asleep, and my mother, almost blinded by fatigue, was about to retire and find some rest herself. But as she stood up, she noticed with horror that a spider was lowering itself on its thread from the ceiling precisely over my sleeping sister’s head. Spiders always had been an abomination for her; there was nothing she found more loathsome. And now here, floating above the face of her deathly sick child, this creature appeared to her as the embodiment of all the evil that had befallen her. Mindless, on blind impulse, she took off her slipper and squashed the spider to the wall with it—with the obvious result that my sister woke up in shock and could not sleep again for weeks.
My sister feasted on my laughing to tears. She whispered that she’d like nothing better than to follow suit—for wasn’t it one of the funniest, most characteristic episodes, typical of her mother’s always misguided good intentions?
A few weeks later we buried her in the cemetery of Hall in the Tyrol.
Bunchy
In a cameo set as a brooch, a melancholy faun, sitting under an olive tree, blows on his panpipe; above him are seen the three richly flowing feather panaches of the crest of the Prince of Wales, together with the device Ich dien. The brooch lies in a velvet jewelry box in the lid of which, tipped open, the warrant of arrest for Landru, mass murderer of women, has been pasted. There are ice-flowers on the windows, and some newspapers in cane frames are lying on the marble tabletop of a Viennese coffeehouse. The lady in the back, behind the cash box, wears her short-cropped hair brushed down over her brow and is clad in a wasp-waisted dress; as with “The Lady Without a Lower Half” in a circus sideshow, only her upper trunk can be seen. She holds a magnifying glass in her hand which she discreetly hides whenever someone looks at her.
Bunchy came from Stettin, in Pomerania, and stressed this in her typically cheerful, self-assured way, yet at the same time with the ironic pride with which one might speak of one’s chance origin in an exotic place, such as perhaps an island in the West Indies. She had spent her life in many places but not in Stettin; possibly on some West Indian island and a number of years in America. But that she had been born in Pomerania she seemed to consider a special mark that guaranteed a native rural robustness and soundness in body and mind, qualities that Bismarckian Germanness liked to claim as its own. All her life she dressed in the fashion of that period: an imposing figure in the dark, severely waisted, ankle-length dress of the so-called lady companion, with a narrow lace collar closed by an unostentatious pin or brooch. Outdoors she was never seen without gloves of smooth black leather, but she wore no hat during the summer months, so that her hair, snow-white when I knew her, swept upward at the temples, stood up on both sides of the curved brow and dipped in the middle, “like the flame of a gas burner,” as my sister said. Her large face with the short nose and the gruff though often laughing mouth also had something Bismarckian about it, a determination and firmness of character that lent the slanted eyebrows both intelligence and superiority.
She had come to the house of my grandparents in Bohemia, and later to Czernowitz, to serve as the governess of my mother and her siblings, and then, after a decade devoted elsewhere to other pupils, to my sister and me—for all too short a time. She died, almost ninety, in the 1950s in Vienna, closely tied until the end of her days to all three generations of the family—closer, indeed, to each of us than we were to each other.
The only one who kept a reserved distance from her was my father. He also was the only one who addressed her not as Bunchy but as Miss Strauss (Strauss meaning in German “bunch of flowers’’) and spoke of her as Miss Lina Strauss, suggesting thereby that he could not deny her his respect. She had a solid education and was widely read, had worldly manners, and knew how to keep her place with dignified decency and firmness. He may also have felt that she appreciated his own signal qualities better than others who were misled by his manias and spleens. Whenever he exchanged words with her, it was in observance of a respectful ceremonial, a careful distancing, as in the salute exchanged between two swordsmen. He did not feel the need to show her any additional courtesy. He would ascertain that my sister’s fund of knowledge had gained astoundingly thanks to Bunchy’s instruction, acknowledged that even I was giving signs of domestication under the influence of the “new” governess, before leaving “on assignment.’’
This coolness on his part was understandable. Bunchy had come to our house at a difficult time, a time of “brewing crisis,” as my sister and I recognized later, under abnormal conditions that never reverted to normality after Bunchy left. A crisis was brewing not only in our parents’ marriage but in everything touching our home life together. My mother was less and less able to cope with the willful girl my sister was becoming. At the same time, I slid out from her and Cassandra’s supervision and developed into what my mother found an intolerably rowdy boy; I was far from the affectionate, curly-headed sweetie pie she would have liked to cuddle, as in a painting by Romney or Vigée-Lebrun—if not Raphael. Her increasing isolation and alienation depressed her. Family finances were precarious: her dowry was gone; what had remained of her parents’ fortune evaporated in the inflation. Her husband’s salary, in her opinion, stood in no relation to his costly hobbies. Moreover, our political situation was rife with ambiguity. Only now, in the early 1920s, did we realize that as former imperial Austrians we had lost not only the war but also our national identity. We trembled at the stormy awakenings of major-power aspirations and conceit on the part of Romania’s new sovereigns. Taught to be submissive to any form of authority, my mother was terrorized even by the mere appearance of a policeman. Her nervousness pervaded the entire house.
We had had a confusing series of mademoiselles and misses coming and going, women who became rebellious and distraught because of our insubordination, and then even more so because of my mother’s wavering interference in their pedagogy. For all of this, she held her incompetent husband in some way responsible.
Bunchy arrived as a result of my mother’s desperate call for help to her family in Vienna. My father could hardly have assumed that her own dearly beloved governess, deeply attached to her family, would be impartial in relation to him. More likely, he could presume that she had been sent to back his wife in every possible way and to draw his children away from him and into the bosom of the maternal family. Yet until my mother abducted us to Vienna, Bunchy never gave my father any grounds for suspicion that she was playing a role in the family intrigues. Her attitude was perfectly fair, disc
reetly insistent on meting out justice on all sides in questions of conflict and never lowering herself to a cringing neutrality. Although much too tactful to remind my mother that she had once been her governess and as such might allow herself the odd reprimand or correction, she did not refrain from voicing disapproval when it counted. She soon gained unquestioned authority throughout the house, and she exercised it in a way that impressed my father and calmed my mother’s flickering moods. But my father could not easily give up a prejudice once formed, and he expressed it by sometimes letting fall that Strauss was really a Jewish name.
Had he had an inkling that she had injected us with the “ferment of disintegration,” whose origins he, as a faithful pupil of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, attributed to the Jewish spirit, he would have prided himself on his intuitive powers. But her Pomeranian uprightness was not, as he claimed, a typically Jewish camouflage: after 1938 she had no trouble documenting her untainted Aryan lineage. In any case, my sister and I continued to maintain close relations with her after she returned to Vienna, where she resumed giving private lessons in English, French, Italian and art history to innumerable pupils, many of whom became our friends, and all of whom happened to be Jews. Faithful to Bunchy’s corrupting influence, these friends continued her mission of liberating us from the narrow-minded provincialism into which we might otherwise have sunk.
To my shame I did not realize this right away. I was proud to be the son of a huntsman and did not wish for anything more keenly than to indulge my father’s passion wholeheartedly myself; I admired him and loved all his whims and incongruities, even forgiving him his almost pathological anti-Semitism—but fortunately I never took him quite seriously. It had always been hard for my sister and me—less so for her than me—to take anything related to our family life seriously, for presumably we had an alerted instinct as a result of some intellectual self-preservation, since otherwise we might not have sanely survived the absurdities. Many eventful years had to pass before we became conscious that some of these aberrations could indeed hardly be taken seriously enough. At first we made fun of anything and everything, especially whatever was painful. Laughter was our means of keeping operable the mechanism of the compact between matters that in fact were incompatible. We never accepted our mother without a reservatio mentalis, but we never doubted either that thanks to her we had been granted the very best that a good birth and a sound education could produce. Likewise, we might shake our heads and roll our eyes at our father, even censure him for his harebrained follies, and yet be convinced of his ultimate infallibility. Our reservations did not alter our faith in the deeply grounded legitimacy of our world. Because we were wont to convert the eccentricities into family legend and finally regarded them as a kind of distinction, we got into the habit of considering (and accepting) neurotic behavior, narrowness of mind, and wrongheadedness as a mark of class superiority. It was at this point that Bunchy’s influence had a beneficially compensating effect.
The Snows of Yesteryear Page 26