My sister in particular, who was eight years old when the old Austria fell apart in 1918 and who thus spent the formative part of her childhood in the ambience of a bygone era, never managed to feel at home among the sheepskin- and caftan-wearers, the spur-jingling operetta officers and garlic-scented provincial dandies. I, for my part, had no difficulty in that respect. I loved the land and its beauty, its spaciousness and its rawness, and I loved the people who lived there: that multifarious population of not one but half a dozen nationalities, with not one but half a dozen religions, and with not one but half a dozen different tongues — yet a people showing a common and very distinctive stamp. I could not have been connected to it more intimately than through Cassandra.
Our house stood at the edge of Czernowitz in a garden which on one side bordered the spacious and attractive public park and on the other, the botanical garden, also under the city’s administration. This embeddedness in park greenery, and the nearby opening out into agricultural countryside, conveyed an illusion of living in something like a manor — a fair deception, strengthened by the severe isolation in which we children were kept, without any contact with our coevals. A large arterial road bordered by poplars and leading out into the country separated us from the extended grounds of a cavalry barracks where, in Austrian times, lancers and, after 1919, Romanian Roşiori were quartered. Not-withstanding the barely concealed scorn of my father for those “victors” who, as he was wont to say, “pounced on the dying old monarchy at the very last minute,” I myself was passionately attracted by their uniforms, their weapons, and their manly and self-assured demeanor, in short, by everything that demonstrated the lethal seriousness of their profession.
Cassandra shared this passion with me, though not for the same reasons. I was never alone when I rushed to the garden gate to see if the sound of hoofbeats announced merely the passage of a hackney or the spectacle of a lieutenant riding by with his orderly, or perhaps a sergeant major with the fierce mien of a bronco tamer. In her eagerness, Cassandra was almost quicker than I. The officers were in the habit of visiting in the neighborhood and liked to show off their horses to the ladies living in the nearby villas. Cassandra, of course, was out for lower ranks. When the weather was bad, I did not have to beg to be let into the front drawing room or onto the balcony, so I could see better whenever a squadron, rain-soaked or dust-covered, returned from its exercises: Cassandra, alerted by some sixth sense, would already be at my side and take me by the hand or lift me up in her arms, and together from the best vantage point we watched the oncoming ranks in rapt silence, following them with our eyes long after they had filed past, our emotional harmony as perfect as that shared by art lovers before a masterwork.
Soon we harbored a common secret: during one of our walks (my sister was at home doing lessons), a noncommissioned officer accosted Cassandra. We already knew him by sight: in his squadron he rode a white horse that I especially admired. For several weeks we met him regularly. He wasn’t much taller than Cassandra and at least equally unprepossessing, bowlegged, with arms hanging almost to his knees, a diminutive pitch-black moustache of exactly the same width as the nostrils under which it was glued, framed by two sharp wrinkles like two parentheses. Whenever he opened his broad mouth in a friendly grin, his big teeth shone white like an ape’s. He could have been Cassandra’s brother. But his tunic glittered with gold braids, spurs jingled on his boots, the spit-polished shafts of which were decorated with brass rosettes on heart-shaped cutouts below the knees, and it was with the unmatched verve of the experienced Lothario that he raised his arm to his shako in salute. I resolved to imitate all this in due time: this was supersharp and had true class; this was the right way to deal with women. I kept secret even from Cassandra that I exercised these gestures at home in front of a mirror.
The encounters were not limited to strolls along the so-called Nut Lane in the public garden — the name derived from the thick hazelnut bushes bordering the path, bearing to everyone’s delight a profusion of fruit, almost always stripped bare before they could ripen to their full doe-brown, glossy hardness. Fairly soon our chaste perambulations ended with the three of us in our garden, into which a narrow door in the wall gave access and where a small pavilion, hardly more than a toolshed, invited strollers to rest. There the cavalryman, to my joyful delight — so overpowering as to make my temples throb — took off his saber and handed it to me to play with. I quickly withdrew to the remotest corner of the garden, where I could relish to the full the agonizing thrill of drawing the naked blade from its heavy, dull-metal scabbard, letting it glitter in the sun and then using it for nothing more martial, to my sorrow, than the beheading of nettles. My fantasy was excited even more passionately by the gold filigree of the saber knot, which in a most tactile way manifested the reality of the military world, making me realize all the more acutely the mere “as if” of the world of my games.
It was, alas, only a borrowed reality and it mocked me: I could not include it in the world of my games without feeling that I was deceiving myself — especially since I knew full well that I had been bribed by Cassandra and her corporal to get lost. I also knew that by letting myself be seduced so willingly, I was giving them time for their own games — games of factual reality, not make-believe ones. I did not have the slightest doubt that I had become their accomplice in something prohibited, though what this was I could imagine only vaguely. According to the degree of my enlightenment at that time, it could hardly be anything else than that these two were now squatting together to crap on the ground. After I had been called back and had returned the bribe and both of them had gone on their way, I felt impelled to return secretly to the pavilion, where I searched for the traces of their encounter. But when I failed to find any, my conscience was not appeased. The secret that separated the world of adults from my own make-believe one remained impenetrable, even though it seemed to be present, shimmering provocatively, everywhere and in everything.
The idyll was not to last long. One evening we strolled in vain along Nut Lane: our cavalryman did not appear, nor did he come the following day or the day after that, and so on for a stretch of one or two weeks. Then, quite unexpectedly, we met him once more. The verve of his salute was restrained. No, he could not accompany us to our garden but allegedly had urgent business in the opposite direction. A violent argument ensued between him and Cassandra, the words flying out so fast and vehemently that I did not understand any of them. Suddenly he hit her brutally across the face. I screamed. The impulse to throw myself at him lapsed in futility, for as he hit her he turned and walked away quickly, almost at a run. Cassandra loosened her hair and wrapped me in it. The jingling of his spurs was lost in the distance. She took me by the hand as I sobbed uncontrollably, and silently she walked me home.