I viewed myself alone and thoroughly a few times more in the manlier full-length mirror in the tower. At thirteen, after all, it is easy to stand in front of a mirror with a sheaf of chicken feathers in your hair and see Chief Buffalo Horn, with the noble savage’s aquiline nose and his full war paint. It is easier still to project a few deft scars into a round boyish face, a long pipe into the energetically compressed childish mouth, and a foaming stein of beer into the small fist. But my goal was not the hale and hearty fraternity life. What I was trying to experience for myself, feel for myself — in this presumably highly comical imitation of a costume that was nothing so much as the fashionable expression of a sentiment — what I was after was the Germanhood of the corpsmen.
It had to be something corresponding to my own state, my own mood: a sensation composed of the same sentimental elements that kept me tense and restless, a similar urgent yearning with no goal. No, there was a goaclass="underline" a German skushno, in a word. The songs in the drinking book stemmed from many different eras, but they all shared the same restlessness, the same mood of departure no matter where to, and the same bitterness of anticipated futility.
I got Aunt Sophie to play the “Bible” songs I liked most for their purest utterance of this mood. She was a fine musician; in her youth, she had dreamed of becoming a concert pianist. Poor Uncle Hubi had a tin ear, but his help was indispensable when we did not know some melody, for he claimed to have them all fresh in his memory from his fraternity days. As is often the case with people who cannot carry a melody, he himself could not hear how tunelessly he sang; nonetheless, he deployed bombast and volume to replace whatever struck him subconsciously as being off key. For even the simplest ditty, he would blow up his chest like a Wagnerian singer, gesticulating as he bellowed to the four winds, not even pausing when Aunt Sophie threw her hands over her ears and shouted, “For heaven’s sake, Hubi, stop! You sound like a bull being slaughtered!” Nor would he stop if she and I, shaking with mirth, collapsed in each other’s arms, our eyes flooding with tears, our lungs gasping for air. He was too kindhearted, had too great a sense of humor, to resent this.
And so our “musical archaeology,” as he dubbed it, became a sort of rite. Every evening before dinner — at which I was allowed to appear in my improvised uniform — the three of us swooped upon the “Bible” and picked out the songs we liked best, or tried to re-create in their presumed original form the songs that Uncle Hubi’s resuscitation had only inadequately resurrected. Thus arose a family intimacy I had never known in my parental home. I was very happy, and I believe that Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie were likewise happy in their way: they had found, albeit belatedly, the son who had been denied to them.
Such harmony with my surroundings, which I promptly took for an ultimate harmony with the entire world, contributed to the enthusiasm that glowed through me for our newly discovered Germanhood. Hitherto, I had lived in the Old Austrian skepticism, to which, after the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, resignation had been added. I was still surrounded by much older and old-born people. The high civilization of my milieu (especially here, at its outermost fringes, where it was being ground down by another culture) was not in keeping with my age. The ever-polite tempering, the “after you” for anybody at any time, the ironic reflection, the mournful certainty that one lived in a decaying world, the shoulder-shrugging resignation — these were all in physiological contradiction to my age, so to speak. The contradiction was simply unbearable. I experienced this in my repugnance toward a man named Stiassny, who had been a permanent guest in my uncle’s home for decades.
Stiassny was a kind of genius manqué, encyclopedically educated, a doctor in all sorts of occult sciences, a ruins-rummager and fragment-gatherer, “an heir to decay,” as he styled himself. He came from Prague, and his family had once been extremely rich. If you visited him in his room, which was crammed with bizarre objects and rare books, you could inspect the catalogue of the auction at which, shortly after 1919, the family’s entire property had gone under the gavel — not only all the household effects, furnishings, coaches, servant liveries, but also his father’s important art collection. The most interesting pieces were doubtless an early Raphael Madonna and the parlor car in which the Stiassnys had traveled. One brother had shot himself after the auction.
Stiassny did not regard this family misfortune as a stroke of personal fate. “Why, it’s merely one part of the universal dissolution,” he would say with an ashy smile. And it struck him as both natural and logical that he was thus reduced to total poverty and compelled to find refuge “wherever this dissolution has not yet been achieved — or at least not in visible form.” Besides, in our area of the world, in homes of some prosperity it was not unusual for someone to remain as a guest for years and ultimately decades if some unhappy twist of luck had left him in circumstances forcing him to lay claim to unrestricted hospitality.
Russia was a short hike away, beyond the Dniester River; the Revolution of 1917 had washed swarms of refugees toward us; whole families had been taken in by relatives or magnanimous friends. Stiassny exacted this kind helpfulness as a privilege, however, and sometimes he was even rather insolent about it. He caviled at the housekeeping, inserting sarcastic remarks and clauses everywhere; he carped at the food, the service, indeed the behavior, the inadequate education, and the provinciality of his host and hostess and their less lingering guests; and he bawled out the domestics. Yet, he also felt obliged to deploy ironical servility, which garnered him the nickname of “Stiassny Who-am-I.” As though it were a self-tormenting pleasure to act innately humble, merely tolerated in this existence, he began every other sentence with the phrase “But then who am I to expect …” or “But then who am I to permit myself …” —all this merely to introduce some subtly perfidious malice, or some denunciation with a first gradual but ultimately all the more destructive aftereffect. “But then who am I to say that I do not love my fellowmen?” he would say. “I owe my existence in every respect to the generosity of others. It began with my conception—nicht wahr? — a highly unexpected act of mutual generosity between my parents, who quite explicitly despised one another and normally did not undertake such chores together, vigorously as they may have blessed outsiders.”
I must confess I was afraid of him — as one might secretly fear a conjuror with all-too-sinister grimaces. Yet I believe that my blend of repugnance and admiration was something he must have aroused in everyone — except, of course, Aunt Sophie, who had taken him under her care like any creature in need of protection: a jackdaw with a broken wing; a superannuated dray horse that was supposed to be driven to the slaughterhouse; the gardener’s feebleminded son, who could, after all, perform a few useful services, like peeling potatoes for the kitchen or carrying firewood. My father, in contrast, had no sympathy whatsoever for Stiassny’s dichotomous nature, and he bluntly despised him, mistreating him whenever he visited my uncle’s house; even though I felt it served Stiassny right, my father’s rudeness tormented me.