The Snows of Yesteryear (8 page)

Cassandra certainly could have limited herself to her ancestral Ruthenian or Romanian, both of which she spoke in a highly colorful manner with a strong dialect and rurally coarse inflection. That instead she chose to speak her laborious linguistic farrago, newly minted with every sentence and ultimately corrupting even her native tongues, was probably due to her innate humility. Submissively she tried to adapt herself to the languages spoken by her masters; and where German failed her, she filled it up with words from all the other idioms she knew. She made do with linguistic tidbits, like a beggar who collects the crumbs fallen from a rich man's table. If this, like her sterilized folkloristic garb, led to the grotesque opposite of unobtrusive assimilation, the blame should be put once again on the furtive ambition for betterment. German had been the language of the masters in the Bukovina during Austrian times and remained that of the educated classes. That Cassandra was allowed to live and work in and be part of a German-speaking household, that she was permitted to use German herself, even though corrupted with foreign borrowings to the point of incomprehensibility, constituted for her an admittance to a more exalted world and to a higher life form. She thought of herself as raised above her own kind on the strength of her speaking German, as much as on account of her fictitious nurse's uniform. In contrast to the black, white and gray abstraction of the uniform (in her own inimitable way, she is supposed to have said: “I go about like photograph of myself!''), her linguistic garb was composed of thousands of many-hued patches; whoever did not happen to know their multifarious origins could hardly understand what she was trying to say. Maybe I was the only one to understand her completely; the others, who couldn't plumb the etymology of her neologisms, found in them a source of unending merriment. In our household, she played the role of linguistic court jester. Through her speech patterns, and prodded and guided by my father, we developed a rare awareness of language, an almost maliciously acute way to listen to the spoken word and an interpretative feeling for written expression, to a degree that otherwise I have encountered only in students of Karl Kraus, whose linguistic education certainly was less fun than ours, even though it too stemmed mainly from the satirical pointing up of the ridiculous and the corrupted.

It goes without saying that my growing linguistic consciousness distanced me from Cassandra. At the same time, the distance from my sister, rather than decrease, also widened in those years. While I emerged from childhood and began my adolescence, my sister's teenage years were almost over and her full ripening was just around the corner. While I approached the difficult years of puberty with grim determination, she had left this phase effortlessly behind her, scarcely encumbered by the usual awkwardness or silliness, and was about to change over gracefully to the side of the grown-ups, whom I now faced alone in avowed enmity. Cassandra no longer was always on my side.

Before long, anyway, our family life disintegrated completely. Our parents separated. My sister and I were sent to separate schools, she to Vienna and I first to Transylvania and later Austria. We saw each other only during vacations, which we spent partly with our father in the country and partly with our mother in town or at various Austrian lakeside resorts. What bound us together despite this separation was our growing sense of the comical and absurd, which often enough marked our family situation. The resulting tensions would explode in such convulsions of laughter that we were left in tears and stitches, as if after some physical excess. In all this we had had sufficient practice before the final breakup of what, all our lives, we were to mourn—not without a strange trace of guilt—as our lost home.

Shortly before my parents' separation, there occurred a momentous incident between Cassandra and me which, incongruously, once again centered on those mythically significant chamber pots. I was eight years old and for some time already thought of myself as much too grown-up to let myself be cared for by my nurse as I had been in the days of my childhood. But Cassandra would not be deprived, at the very least, of seeing to it that I scrubbed myself each evening in cold water with a bristle brush, that I brushed my teeth and my hair—all this as conscientiously as she had done so hitherto on the instructions of our governesses. It did not help that I told her repeatedly in no uncertain terms that this was no longer any of her business. One evening, as I was climbing into bed, she held out for me, with an admonitory remonstration, what she called (in a corruption of the French phrase
pot de chambre
) a “potshamba,” and I angrily jumped down her throat. Cassandra bared her monkey teeth and looked at me with such fierce malevolence that I would have been frightened had my own fury not made me insensitive to her threats. Without a word she slammed the receptacle back to its habitual place under the bed, turned and wordlessly left the room. The door banged shut behind her.

The next day she failed to wake me up. The luckless person to whom my mother had assigned the role of governess to my sister had to take care of this task in her place, and she did it with the tips of her fingers, as it were, as if she had been expected to clean out the rabbit hutches. Cassandra had gone into town first thing in the morning, she explained. We gave it no further thought. Toward noon, when I was in the garden, my sister staggered toward me, tears in her eyes, hardly able to speak. Finally she managed to gasp: “Come, come right away! Cassandra ...” She had to take a deep breath before continuing: “Cassandra — bobbed her hair!” A new paroxysm of laughter cut her short. She had to hold on to me, bent double by laughing.

I ran to the house, followed by my sister. At the sight of Cassandra, we both succumbed. She looked like one of those dwarfs whom Spanish court painters place as pages at the side of princes. Her glorious hair had been cut off in a straight line over her brow and at her neck. What remained stuck out at a slant on either side of her wrinkled simian cheeks, jet-black and oily, like the blubber-stiffened pigtails of an Eskimo woman, and its effect was all the more comical as she, in expectation of our appraisal, had raised her arms at the same angle, so that she stood there, legs spread wide, like a Samoyed in her furs. She looked like nothing so much as an Eskimo in a soccer gate ready to ward off a penalty kick. Our irrepressible merriment infected her forthwith, and she too began to laugh until tears ran down her face. She raised the corner of her apron to wipe her cheeks, slapped her thighs and boomed her raucous peasant laugh: “Hohohoho! Have become modern lady now!” That it was meant as a symbolic act of vengeance, we all forgot.

It was in those days that my mother had put an end to the constant succession of misses and mademoiselles by calling to the rescue a Miss Lina Strauss.
Strauss
in German means “bunch of flowers,” and therefore it was but natural that soon she was nicknamed and lovingly called by everyone in the household
das Strausserl,
“the little bunch,” or Bunchy for short. Bunchy had been Mother's tutoress and she combined in her person all the talents and qualities that, singly, had been hoped for in her innumerable predecessors. Unlike those “English” and “French” governesses, perennially dismissed in short order, she did not originate in Gibraltar, Tunis or Smyrna, but in Stettin, in Pomerania, which, however, did not prevent her from teaching good French, English and Italian, as well as the history of art, and from soon establishing herself, thanks to her clear-eyed intelligence, poise and experience, and, last but by no means least, her sense of humor, as an undisputed figure of authority in the household. That this household held together at all was due largely to her conciliatory presence. Nevertheless, distinct encampments began to take shape, even though much crossing over occurred between them. My father and sister stood together as ever before; and although Bunchy was in a certain sense an heirloom of my mother's, she had to be counted willy-nilly with this alliance because of her unconcealed affection for my sister and her respect for my father. On the other hand, my mother felt somehow betrayed by Bunchy and thought to compensate for this by trying ever more jealously to get a firm hold over my own person, lining up in a close though competitive collusion with Cassandra, who, in actual fact, “belonged” to my father—the way each of our dogs belonged to one of us and thereby became “mine,” “yours,” “his” or “hers.” Thus, the pecking order in our family was constantly shifting and from now on was fought over openly, as in a kind of class struggle.

Heretofore my mother—together with her following—had had the upper hand. Strangely enough, her windblown irrationality counted for more than my father's overbearing jolliness, malicious wit, and vitality, his knowledge and his skills. Her physical frailty and delicate nervosity, though it concealed a steely toughness, made her seem superior to my father in all his booming robustness; her sensitivity endowed her with greater depth than my father's naive huntsman's sentimentality. But as a group, the opposing party now gained a tremendous advantage as a result of Bunchy's towering cultural superiority over Cassandra, “the savage one.' While Bunchy was reading with my twelve-year-old sister the poems Michelangelo addressed to Vittoria Colonna, Cassandra was feeding me, the eight-year-old, her inexhaustible fairy tales—telling them in her very own patched-up patois, gathering words from all over to form her linguistic collages, randomly found vocables, scurrilous verbal creations, word-changelings, semantic homunculi—I never again encountered language in such colorful immediacy. The fairy tales themselves I met again, it is true: in conscientiously compiled collections of folklorica, in prize-winning anthologies, one of them even by Dostoevsky; Cassandra knew them all and a few more to boot that have nowhere been recorded—and what's more, she knew how to tell them as if they were happening right in front of your eyes.

I need hardly expand on the enormous legacy she thereby bequeathed to me. But at that time, the “culture of the Occident” conveyed by Bunchy was regarded as more valuable. In this respect our parents were of one mind: we did not belong to Romania, which had surrendered to its Balkanization and was therefore part of the East. It was the year 1922; Europe was not yet divided, as it was to be after 1945, yet even then we felt definitely and consciously that we were “Occidentals.” That this would make us doubly homeless we were to experience later on, when we moved to the West and in many respects felt like Easterners there, felt this even more acutely at a later date, when our homeland irrevocably became part of an East that was fundamentally and ideologically separated from our own world. The disintegration of our parental home preceded by two decades the disintegration of Europe.

For Cassandra this meant what in the ugly legal parlance of today is termed “deprivation of existential legitimacy.” It started for her with the appearance of Bunchy. Cassandra came to realize that she had become superfluous, for I too was leaving the world of the nursery forever. In truth, there was no longer any use for her. She helped out here and there and temporarily, in whatever it was, but pretty soon she mainly took care only of the dogs. And the dogs themselves felt that something was amiss—as they always sensed whenever a trip was planned on which they were not to be taken along or when one of us was banished to his or her room as punishment or was about to be taken sick—and reacted with dazed distress; some forgot that they were supposed to be housebroken and all of them were disobedient and irritable, at times even biting each other. Troll, the old stubby-haired setter who had been placed as a puppy in the cradle of my newborn sister, was almost throttled to death by my Airedale, who had been my first birthday present and was thus younger by four years. This prompted my sister to conduct a fierce vendetta against me that lasted for months and also was directed at Cassandra, who still loyally stood by my side.

My memories of that period are clouded. I was rebellious and must have been greatly trying to my father. I usually committed some infraction during his absences when he was off hunting or at what he called “business assignments,” with which he legitimized his week-long disappearances, and these infractions were deemed too grievous to be judged and punished fittingly by the household's female judicial system. Because he was annoyed by the very fact of being made to play the family bugaboo, his punishments generally turned out even more severe than his hotheaded temper in any case would have dictated. Such things sank too deeply in me to be amenable to Cassandra's consolations. Though she managed to come up with comforting pleasures, such as a choice tidbit secreted for me in the kitchen, or puppies from a new litter: Mira, my father's favorite pointer bitch, was as fertile as a queen bee, and Cassandra was as merry and efficient a nursemaid in the kennel as she had been of old in our nursery.

Cassandra became more easygoing and, if not engaged in one of her clownish pranks, exhibited a somewhat comical but undeniable dignity. She held herself stiffly erect—as much as she could with her short neck and huge, lopsided head—erect “with the pride of a Stone Age female who has discovered that she can stand on her hind legs,” as my father used to say. Sometimes the family thought of marrying her off — “to a blind man, perhaps,” it was suggested maliciously. Bunchy even thought of the possibility of further cultural improvement, although she knew of the failed attempt to rid Cassandra of her obstinate illiteracy. “How about an educational trip to Florence?” wondered my father in ironic allusion to Bunchy's own past. “If only she were a little smaller, we could get her hired in a circus sideshow,” quipped my saucy sister, who always maintained that Cassandra was in reality a giant dwarf.

Cassandra herself would have acknowledged this collective racking of brains with incomprehending surprise. What, after all, was wanted of her? Surely we could not think of depriving her of her claim to residence in our house! She lacked nothing. She had a roof over her head—even a room to herself, with a bed, a cupboard, a table and a chair; she had plenty of good food and as much fun with the dogs as she could wish for. She was alive. She'd had enough of men, once and for all. Of her children, one was lost and the other was about to go his own way, as was but natural: such was life. In passing, I began to notice ever more numerous silver strands in her bobbed hair.