The Snows of Yesteryear (38 page)

Six years had gone by since we had seen each other, almost half of my own life. Bunchy — by now endowed for me with the fame of a remarkable biography, which had taken her overseas and had reached unheard-of heights, what with a circumnavigation of the world and an instructive sojourn of several years in Florence, mecca of Western cultural aspirations, now seemed even more legendary than before — and that first apparition of her belonged to the never-never land of a past that had lost credibility. So it was no longer a kindhearted lady in summery white whom I now confronted after so long a separation, but — if this were possible — an even more imposing matron in severe black. She seemed a head shorter, but I had grown by precisely that amount. I bowed, bashful and reticent.

“What's this?” she said. “Don't I get a kiss?''

I forced myself to relax and found myself all the more constrained. “Forgive me! It's been so long — I'm simply embarrassed.''

“Embarrassed?” said Bunchy, lingering on the word and arching her eyebrows in disapproval. “Don't be so full of your own importance.''

That was like the lash of a whip, particularly since it had been said in front of a witness — without having announced myself, I had burst in on one of her tutorials: an elegant young man with glasses and smooth black hair, quite obviously from one of Vienna's best Jewish families, was sitting on the sofa behind the round table at which Bunchy generally faced her pupils. At his back, reproductions of drawings by Michelangelo of Vittoria Colonna hung on the wall. I froze. The young man showed a smiling understanding that only worsened the situation. Of course, he knew my sister, appreciated her intelligence, her charm and wit....

I avoided visiting Bunchy for several years. But in the interim, her admonition bore fruit. Whenever insecurity befell me, I would take her sharp reminder to heart — yes, even today. She helped me gain a good portion of disdain for this world.

Nor did I see much of my sister in those years. As long as we were at boarding school, we saw each other only on Sundays for lunch at Grandmother's. Later, she attended the Consular Academy and spent every free moment with her subsequent betrothed, Fritz. As for me, there followed a confusing succession of diverse studies, listlessly begun and ingloriously broken off: three semesters of mining in Leoben, two semesters of snipping away at corpses at the medical faculty in Vienna, two semesters of architectural studies at the Technical Academy, also in Vienna. Then one evening, at the house of a girl whom I was courting, I met Bunchy by sheer coincidence. No one there even had any inkling that we knew each other. The fact that I had been brought up by Bunchy considerably raised my standing in the eyes of both the wooed girl and her parents. Here too Bunchy enjoyed the love and devotion that all her former and present pupils and charges gave her, and something of this also reflected on me; my documented antecedents so to speak ennobled me. Bunchy told of my grandparents, of my mother and her siblings, of my sister and me and our father, of the Odaya and Cassandra; it was a tale rich in anecdote, and everybody listened with all the more interest as Bunchy knew how to place me in the foreground of general attention time and again. I was allowed to pander to my weakness — as my sister would have termed it — for dramatizing Bunchy's story graphically. Once more Cassandra's linguistic blossoms shone forth in all their glory and entertained an audience who knew how to appreciate them: well-educated Jews seem to me to have a remarkable feel for language.

I took Bunchy home. In front of her door, the open wings of which were secured by a heavy cast-iron grille, we bid each other an affectionate good-bye. From then on I never let a free day pass by without visiting her, taking her out or driving her into the Vienna Woods or to the nearby hills, or going with her to the theater or concerts. She knew, of course, of the worries my family had about me. “Do you have any conception of what you really want to do in life?” she asked me one day.

“You know it as well as I and everyone else. I've been saying it forever and to anyone who wants to listen. I want to
draw
, and nothing else.''

Bunchy had no telephone in the two rooms she occupied in her benefactor's house, and she was reluctant to use his. “Get me to the next public phone,” she ordered. Once there, she dialed a number and explained my case to a person unknown to me. In silence she listened and then noted down a number and an address.

“Present yourself tomorrow morning at eight o'clock at this address,” she said to me. “It is an advertising studio. The gentleman I talked to is one of the managers of Siemens-Schuckert [a large industrial concern]. The owner of the advertising studio is indebted to him as a major client, so much so that he will not hesitate to take you on as an apprentice. He is being advised of your coming this very day. Woe to you if you disgrace me!''

I did not disgrace her. The owner of the advertising studio, Karl Dopler, and his wife, a concert pianist, became my intimate friends. Day in, day out, I drew and daubed for twelve self-forgetting hours; we shared our evening meals, our personal and professional joys and woes, the worries for the success of the agency, the pleasure over newly obtained orders and the hope of additional ones, as well as the disappointments over those that eluded us; we praised each other for work well done and consoled each other over work we happened to have botched. Karl Dopler was not a great artist but a solid craftsman from whom I learned a great deal and who gave me the down-to-earth encouragement that had been missing from the rapturous praises heretofore thoughtlessly heaped on my natural gifts. Dopler too appreciated my talents, which he acknowledged ungrudgingly as superior to his own, and he promoted them in every way he could. All this was a double blessing. Not only did it put an end to the awkward period of my disorientation — the dawdling away of my time in trivial pursuits, nightclub-hopping and whoring around — and give my whole life a happy foundation; at the same time it relieved my family of the nagging worry about my dubious fate, while delivering me from their aggravating supervision. However, a much more serious calamity entered all our lives: my sister took ill and, inexorably, followed the agonizing path to her death.

This death put a sudden end to my career as a commercial artist. It also nipped in the bud another potential career as stage designer. The parents of the girl in whose house I had met Bunchy were giving a party for their daughter in their villa in Döbling, a garden district of Vienna, and they entrusted me with the decorations. One of the guests, the writer Sil Vara, much celebrated in the Vienna of that time for his play
The Girlhood of a Queen
, was so impressed with my decorations that he had me design the setting for a party in his apartment. Among those at the party were Luise Rainer, with whom I forthwith fell hopelessly in love, and the most famous stage designer of those days, Professor Strnad, who was as successful at the Vienna Opera as at the Metropolitan in New York. He asked me to become one of his assistants. Bunchy was exultant. “When I saw your sister for the last time,” she told me, “she talked about you. She hardly could speak anymore but said very clearly and slowly, ‘I always knew he would turn out all right.'''

My mother would not be misled by such auspicious constellations. She had staged her bereavement over my sister's death so dramatically that everyone feared for her health. She could not be left alone in Czernowitz; her life with Philip had become intolerable; the quarrel over the Odaya was festering; and her sisters, who theoretically at least were its co-owners, made themselves parties to the dispute. Her almost daily letters demanded with ever greater urgency and with increasingly energetic force that I come to join her. She wrote that the thought of Christmas was driving her out of her mind; we should not be surprised if she were to do herself some harm. This time it sounded convincing. My aunts escorted me to the station in order to ascertain that I really took the train to Czernowitz. As I was taking leave of Bunchy, she gave me as a Christmas present for my mother Franz Werfel's
Barbara
. “It is not meant to comfort her,” she commented, “and even if it were,” she added — and for the first time I detected sharpness in her voice — “it wouldn't help her. For she belongs to those whom the hard words of the Bible are meant for:
For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath
. Don't worry. It's merely for Christmas. You'll be back right after.” It was not merely for Christmas. It took me a full five years to get back to Vienna.

This had been in December 1932, when I was almost nineteen. At twenty, I was to do my military service, and the Romanian authorities, who suspected any member of an ethnic minority of readiness to commit subversive acts, particularly desertion by those liable to serve in the armed forces, refused to extend my passport before I had done that service. I was trapped in Czernowitz. Moreover, I was told that my Austrian high school diploma would not assure me of the status of volunteer officer candidate, who served only one year. As a drafted recruit I would have to serve a full three years; the only way to avoid that was to return to the school bench and get a Romanian diploma. What I then learned of Romanian history was a rightfully earned gift from the Odaya: I had legitimate roots in the country. But this was a gift like the one in Cassandra's fairy tale in which the beauteous king's daughter requests from the enamored shepherd, “Give me something that you fail to give me.” He obeys the order by giving her a swallow that flies away as soon as he opens his hand.

Soon after my homecoming, my mother showed me an apricot tree she had planted years before, which had forked and grown into two strong trunks. Its health was close to her heart, for she had symbolically transferred it to the well-being of her two children. One of the trunks had now withered but the other one was all the stronger in its sprouting greenery. I was somewhat leery of this parable, for nothing could make me believe that I was anywhere near thriving. Bunchy wrote that Professor Strnad had unexpectedly died. The news left me cold; I had given up my ambitions and no longer drew. To learn Romanian as well and as quickly as possible, and to have as much fun as possible at the same time, I had surrounded myself with Romanians of my own age with whom I carried on, with wanton lack of inhibition as I had prior to the happy, salutary interlude at Dopler's studio, pub-crawling and chasing girls I also lost myself in pseudo-religious speculations and practices.

My family had been struck by death — not in the abstract but concretely and in shocking immediacy, and my mother saw to it that I would not repress this experience. Her mute despair continued to scream for the dead child; she would have liked nothing better than — as the phrase had it — to scratch the departed from the earth with her fingernails. I did my best to keep her company in this fruitless rattling at the irrevocable. The no-longer-being-of-this-life was for me as inconceivable as the not-yet-being-of-this-world had once been. In vain I tried to reawaken that dark terror which, in the remote days of my childhood and with Cassandra's gruff warning (“One day you too will be dead''), had made me realize the significance of death. It was a weightless knowledge, and lacked the stony heaviness with which earlier it had sunk into my heart. Soon the thought of my sister's death left my soul as empty as it did my brain; I neither felt anything nor thought of anything in this connection. Mother's attitudinizing like a latter-day Niobe irked me, and I suspected that she was casting a sidelong glance at her audience, while at the same time I was troubled that with my notorious coldness of heart I might be doing her an injustice. I accused myself of insensitivity and could never have dared admit that my sister's death had brought her closer to me than she had ever been in life — a thought that to anyone would have seemed absurdly perverse.

In those days I would look endlessly into the mirror until my face was no longer my own but some strange living organism entirely surrendered to the passage of time — a mechanical toy, the driving motor of which whirred relentlessly while I remained timeless in another dimension of my being and beyond the image in the mirror's depth. There my emotions were no longer my own, nor did I miss the heart I lacked.

While my sister was wasting away, one of my aunts, who headed a number of spiritualistic circles, had arranged several séances for her salvation in which I was allowed to participate. Although no medical help materialized from the beyond, there had been some manifestations that were astounding because of their inexplicability: voices spoke of circumstances that could not possibly be known to anyone unfamiliar with intimate details; admonitions and warnings made themselves heard concerning potentially wrong decisions that, indeed, did have calamitous consequences later on; but most of all, there were jubilant descriptions of the euphoria of all those who had shaken off the burden of earthly existence and now resided in the beyond, where, while not enjoying all the blissful delights of heaven, they were at least spared the tribulations of purgatory or, worse, of hell, finding themselves between reincarnations in an ecstatically timeless, weightless waiting condition, at the end of which stood that most longed-for of all goals, the promised nirvana.

Attempts were made to comfort my poor mother. Residual Catholic doctrines allowing that since my sister had died a virgin (as my mother proudly maintained) and therefore was more likely to reside in heaven than hell were inadequate to reassure her; she required certainty and, consequently, inquired in Vienna whether proof of her child's well-being could not be obtained from the unknown realm of the defunct; the spiritualistic circle headed by my aunt was fortunately able to fulfill her wish. Since it would have been onerous to travel from Vienna to Czernowitz with the whole staff of the circle, including its leader and mediums, the otherworldly committees that purportedly were in charge of determining how the over-there was to make contact with the here decided to empower my aunt with the required medial qualifications to establish a transcendental communication between mother and child.