Since we were not sent to school like other children when we got to be six or seven years old but were taught at home, and because those entrusted with our education devoted so much of their time and attention to my sister, who showed not only much greater intelligence but also pronounced talent and a sharper thirst for knowledge, I stayed much longer than usual in the world of childhood in which Cassandra was the most constant and direct influence. Cassandra herself was of course illiterate, and if, ultimately, she was able laboriously to form the letters of her own name, she owed this to my own and our shared efforts to penetrate the secrets of the alphabet. At first, neither of us got very far in this endeavor, and when finally I outdistanced her, she gave it up altogether and without regret. Meanwhile I owed her a much more valuable piece of knowledge than I ever owed later to my despairing teachers. It came to me out of Cassandra’s attitude toward the written word.
Cassandra was not one of those semiprimitives who are haunted by hundreds of superstitions but take for real only what they can see with their eyes and grasp with their hands, and for whom any writing belongs to a phony world created by pettifogging lawyers, in which every word is twisted and turned around topsy-turvy as if by sleight of hand. That may be how the dim-witted people of her home village thought. But Cassandra’s superstitious awe of the reality of letters, and her ultimate and voluntary rejection of their decipherment, originated in a much more archaic insight. The serried rows of books on the shelves of my father’s library were truly demonic for her. That certain things had been recorded between the covers of these books which could be grasped mentally and transformed into speech and knowledge by initiates in the shamanic craft of coding and decoding those runic symbols — this could be understood only as a supernatural phenomenon. It irritated her to see that we had lost the sense of its terrifying uncanniness and that reading was an everyday custom, publicly performed, nay, that it could even become a vice, as exemplified by my sister. With the instinctive certainty of the creature being, she felt that such casual handling of the irrational was bound in turn to generate irrationality.
She realized that for those who had acquired it, the ability to read conferred power over those to whom the written or printed word remained a sealed mystery. But she also knew that this was a power pertaining to black magic — that it turns against its own practitioners and transforms them into slaves of the abstract. She saw in it a truly devilish power, since its manipulators, who also were its most immediate victims, were not even aware of its nefarious effects. To be sure, she was unable to say what was meant by the abstract and, even less, in what consisted its peril. Yet she carried within her innermost self — not only since she had left the monastery, where, on the walls of the church, the angels, devils and saints, as well as the tormented or redeemed bodies of the mortals, together with the beatitudes of heaven and the torments of hell were most wondrously and graphically depicted in ocher, red, blue and gold — she carried from her very beginning the clear and unshakable conviction that anything supernatural that does not lead directly to God and His heavenly kingdom must bring about a downfall into damnation. Books were either sacred or devilish, and since almost all books could be interpreted either way, they also could have both holy and diabolic effects. It seemed to her that with the opening of the covers of a book both the gates of heaven and the jaws of hell were being unlocked, and the angel or devil who then emerged from its pages separated the questing spirits according to either their longing for the one and only truth or their susceptibility to devilish, pernicious lies. To expose oneself to such a momentous decision in trite everyday circumstances seemed to her downright sacrilegious. And from that she protected me.
My father’s infatuation with my sister, his loving understanding of her fancies and moods, the constant interest he devoted to all her doings bestowed upon her an exaggerated importance throughout the household, which she also displayed impudently in the nursery in her dealings with Cassandra and me. Everybody thought the world of her cleverness, and all too often my ignorant nurse and I had to acknowledge her unquestionable superiority. She was able to read long before I had learned to speak properly, and she read almost all the time. But when I was five years old and she was nine, she claimed to understand Latin — which she hadn’t yet been taught.
Cassandra and I knew this well enough. But how could we call her bluff? She strutted in front of us, an open book in her hand, and moved her lips as if speaking the words she was allegedly reading, but when we challenged her to read aloud, she only replied disdainfully: “You can’t understand that; it’s Latin!” I was about to jump on her and wrest the book from her hand when Cassandra restrained me, wrapped me in her hair and murmured in my ear: “Don’t you believe her, she is only pretending to read. She’s probably holding the book upside down and lisping nonsense to annoy you.” But against the visible evidence of the purported reading, which we could not contest, this was a mere supposition, further weakened by my father, who, laughing maliciously, made himself my sister’s accomplice by confirming: Yes, what was written in the book was indeed Latin.
The looks I shot at my sister from the haven of Cassandra’s sheltering hair and under the fire protection of her flashing black monkey eyes were white-hot with impotent rage. Nevertheless I exulted in the certainty of a later, all the more powerful vindication — a steadfast faith in the revelatory power of truth which stayed with me and reassured me all my life whenever I saw through some mental sham that, for the time being accepted as valid, could not be exposed because of some vested interest or simply because of general stupidity.
Among the experiences from which we learn nothing that we didn’t know already, there is to be counted the insight that the reality we consider as all-dominating in truth consists mostly of fictions. My family’s fictions were only too transparent: we lived the years 1919–1939 in the illusion of having a pseudo-feudal position in the world; this was based neither on prestige enjoyed in an existing society nor on wealth, but merely on the position my parents and particularly my grandparents had held before the First World War.
This strange make-believe, challenged by no one, was promoted by the leftovers of colonial gentry in which we were left, powerless relics, at the end of the Dual Monarchy. We considered ourselves as former Austrians in a province with a predominantly Austrian coloring, like those British colonials who remained in India after the end of the Raj. Neither my father nor my mother had been born in the Bukovina. My father had arrived there before the turn of the century as a government official of the Empire. My mother’s parents had lived there temporarily, connected with the country by an originally Greek bloodline that over the centuries had become Romanian. (None of this was in any way singular in the great spaces of the former Habsburg Empire. In many ways — but mainly through the constant migration to far-off provinces by individuals of the most variegated backgrounds, military men or civil servants, pioneers or traders or fortune-seeking entrepreneurs — the situation was not unlike that one finds in the United States. Indeed, the fad for all things American which soon was to conquer all Europe fell on especially fertile ground in our neck of the woods.) So as long as we lived there, albeit as citizens of the Kingdom of Romania yet in the presumptuous feeling of belonging to another, superior civilization, the country in which my sister and I were born held only a provisional and specious character for our parents. Even we, constantly reminded that we were born there only by chance and were not real natives, could not free ourselves of a certain skepticism about our homeland, whose “Balkan” character now sharpened noticeably under our new sovereigns.