The Snows of Yesteryear (29 page)

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 permerent
. 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.

Our social life was of like insularity. We considered ourselves members of a class of masters, although we were no longer masters of anything, taken over by another class to which we deemed ourselves superior but which, in fact, treated us as second-rate citizens because of the odium attached to an ethnic minority. We felt excluded, but on the other hand, our isolation made us feel out of the ordinary and even that we belonged to a chosen elite. The myth of lost wealth rankled in us but also made us arrogant. All our efforts were directed at not being deemed déclassé. Nothing was entirely unambiguous. Nothing was what it really was with any degree of certitude. Everything was bathed in a dubious twilight. In every way our existence was tinged with irreality—and if this irreality also possessed a highly poetic element, this was due to the queerness of our situation. Our parents were odd and off center, each in his or her own peculiar way, each in his or her own wrongheadedness, the cause and origin of which could be found in their quixotic reaction to an out-of-joint world. Their obsessions—our mother's anxiety-whipped, guilt-ridden sense of duty and our father's blindly passionate escape into his mania for hunting—were specific responses to circumstances that in no way fitted their upbringing, their existential concepts and expectations, even less their dispositions. We lived in the Bukovina—more radically than would have been the case elsewhere—as the flotsam of the European class struggle, which is what the two great wars really were. Our childhood was spent among slightly mad and dislocated personalities in a period that also was mad and dislocated and filled with unrest. And where unrest leads to grief and grief gives rise to lament, poetry blossoms.

Among the theories I developed concerning the possible causes of my sister's premature death, there is one according to which the gradual loss or, more accurately, the renunciation of the poetic content in her life contributed to a psychosomatic preparation for death. I do not speak of the ordinary loss of childhood's poetic quality, nor of the profanation that set in with the growing realization of the dwindling quality of life in our time, its loss of individuality. It is hard to describe this without being reproached for myth formation and nostalgic idealization of the past; essentially, one can't quantify the degree by which the quality of life not only of the privileged but also of the disadvantaged has been cheapened and debased in our century. The tangible expression of this—depredation of nature, hybrid growth and chaos of cities, drowning of the world in junk, lack of orientation in Man—has been pointed out, and yet it does not address the substance and core of the loss. In 1919, when we returned to the Bukovina after our refugee years in Italy and Austria, we were terrified by the specter of Bolshevism looming right at our doorstep. What had taken place a few dozen miles from us on the other side of the Dniester River since the revolution of 1917 sounded bad enough to conjure a horrifying transformation of reality. If any of this ever was to reach us, it meant the end. Not only could we expect to be mistreated, plundered, pillaged and finally shot; we feared more the gray subsistence that would be our lot if we were allowed to survive: the immense pauper's asylum into which so animated and varicolored a world as that of tsarist Russia had been transformed and which our own world would irrevocably turn into. Had I fallen asleep at that moment of history to reawaken now—a modern Rip Van Winkle—I would have to consider our worst fears of those days childish in comparison to the present actuality, which is grayer, more dreary, more anxiety-filled and more hopeless than we could have imagined. Withal, I would have to admit that the changes in the world only kept pace with the changes in me. Not because I might have been compelled to adapt myself but, quite the contrary, because I, as a true child of my time, carry in me, together with all my contemporaries, the quality of our time. We who live today are a species of human beings different from the one we were a mere fifty years ago; but even then we carried in us the seed of what we have become today. This truism can hardly be thought through too much.

Yet this is not quite what I mean by the loss of the poetical, or rather its renunciation, which led to my sister's death. I have to be more explicit. There are times when I spend idle moments speculating on how far one can elude the impact of worldwide changes occurring in the spirit of the time—and what price is exacted for even trying to do so. Occasionally I encounter people who, seemingly unaffected, survive from a former world and populate the present in odd incarnations, like dinosaurs; when I look a bit closer, they seem somehow hollowed out—all of them without any doubt personalities, that is to say, utterly and completely
personae
: masks shaped in a period-given stereotypical form. The growth of a shell around the time-resisting personality has eaten away the individual within. What remained, irrespective of the personal qualities, is a more or less anachronistic period document. I often wonder whether this was not the case with my father toward the end of his days. His apparently sovereign stand above the times seemed less a declared anachronism because he had donned the timeless mask of the huntsman. It did not cover the individuality but rather served to emphasize it. The mask was acquired by obstinate monomania, and he paid the price with alienation into loneliness.