Cassandra had no tears. She brought me to her little room in the attic, rummaged in one of her drawers and produced from under a pile of laundry a photograph of the cavalryman: it showed him in the traditional lady-killer pose, leaning on a rudimentary birch-lattice fence (the standard background of the while-you-wait photographer at the entrance to the public park), one arm bent akimbo, the sleeve embroidered with a filigree of gold braids and his hand nonchalantly holding a pair of white cuff-gloves, the saber hanging low in the belt. Cassandra placed the picture on a table, lit a candle in front of it, knelt down, crossed herself and started to pray… at first in a murmur, then ever louder, first in deep seriousness and apparent piety, then ever more satanically, her rising rage driving her into demonic merriment, praying ever more wildly and interjecting into her prayers increasingly terrifying invectives and the most shocking gestures… until she finally grabbed the picture, drew a pin from her hair and with it pricked out his eyes, drove it through his heart and time and time again at the juncture of his legs; then she tore the picture into small scraps with which, after lifting her skirts, she wiped her behind, finally burning each scrap separately in the flame of the candle.
At first, I was deeply frightened. Cassandra, the piously strict, for whom God the Father, Jesus Christ and all the saints were part of the world as real as the mountains, the rivers and the trees in the forest where she had been born, all of them as firmly grounded in her life as the walls of the monastery in which she, a sinner, had found refuge, she who never failed to make the sign of the cross before speaking the name of something holy, she who had led me into every church that happened to be on our way— she now celebrated right here before my very eyes a black mass, she sinned in the most blasphemous manner imaginable, she indulged in shamanic magic and invoked satanic powers for the lowest of purposes: to take revenge on one whom she had loved. It was so monstrous, so unexpected and so baffling that, irresistibly, it reverted to the comical. I ended up raked by laughter. I could not wait to tell my sister about it and I rejoiced in anticipation of that moment, even though I knew this would constitute a betrayal of Cassandra and our twin togetherness. Our family storehouse of anecdotes had gained another pungent Cassandra story — and I had lost one more part of my innocence.
Retrospective perception of the milestones of life, which tends to make you see existence as divided into distinct phases, leads me to see this episode as marking the end of my true childhood. After it I could no longer identify myself with Cassandra naturally and spontaneously. For the first time I “saw” her consciously and perceived her through the eyes of the others to whom I betrayed her. I had left the safe haven of her hair, in which I had been sheltered from those others, and I had switched over to their camp. We still lived in a time in which an almost unbridgeable gulf gaped between the so-called educated classes and the so-called common people. My family’s situation, based on the abstract image of a once privileged position — mainly the myth of former wealth, which encouraged us to live beyond our true means and to indulge in expensive habits we could no longer afford — placed us absurdly far above the “common people,” who, for the most part, lived in abject poverty, a poverty borne humbly and with eyes raised in admiration to their “masters.” For the first time I thought of Cassandra as belonging not to my own lineage but to that other race of the poor, the know-nothing and the lowly. At the same time, there awoke in me a sense of the social pecking order. The longings for my putative milk-brother began to fade. Had I met him then, I would have felt separated from him by the same gap that set me apart from the neighborhood children with whom we were forbidden to play.
It may be that this event was preceded by another less spectacular one that had an even greater impact, an initiation of a different sort, the dark terror of which, though belonging wholly to childhood, at the same time presaged its end. My magpie died. One afternoon she lay dead in her cage. That very morning she had been hopping around as gaily as ever. I could not believe that this cold and rigid piece of rubbish that lay in the sandy gravel at the bottom of her cage was she. I trembled with sorrow. My sister was all eagerness to arrange a solemn funeral, but Cassandra with bewildering roughness forbade any such un-Christian nonsense and saw to it that the little corpse was discarded with the garbage. In so doing she was seconded by my mother, who thought the magpie had died of tuberculosis and might possibly infect us; this only increased my grief. For the first time, Cassandra was not my ally. My lamentations went for naught. Cassandra remained coarsely peremptory, as if, faced by the unavoidable fact of life and death, her unbroken peasant sense of reality revolted against citified fussing. “Dead is dead,” she said gruffly. “One day you too will be dead.’’
Had she said what surely I had heard before—“You too will have to die one day” —it would have remained in the abstract. When hearing such sentences, comprehension glanced off from the purely verbal, but “being dead” meant what was clearly manifest by the bird’s corpse on the garbage heap. I understood. Terror struck at me like a dead weight. I saw myself stretched out on my bed, rigid and cold, rubbishy in my cerements, rotting underneath, something to be discarded as quickly as possible, like the dead magpie. Around me stood my sobbing family. I saw the hearse carrying me away and, behind, my sister in black veils, triumph in her eyes dutifully red from crying. I saw my grave and my dog refusing to leave it. All that was unavoidable, inescapable. It could happen tomorrow or many years on — but it had to happen, and against that no revocation or merciful exemption was possible. I was overcome by great fear. Clouds like black cinders stood over cooling embers in the scarlet evening firmament. I felt like fleeing — but where? Wherever I might go, this fear would go with me. This death fear would henceforth be with me, inextinguishably and forever, and it would hollow out my whole being: even if fleetingly I might forget it, it would rise in me at some moment and gnaw at my happiness or joy, or be ready to sink down to the bottom of my soul like a heavy stone; henceforth I would always know what it meant when someone told me that I too was mortal. In utter despair I asked Cassandra whether this was truly so, whether it had to be irrevocably so. Cassandra was incorruptible: “Everything has to die!” she said. “Your father too, and your mother and your sister, and I too, we all have to die one day!” And I knew she was telling the truth: Cassandra, the seeress.
I cannot dissociate the memory of Cassandra from that of the landscape that produced and nurtured her, the land whence she had come to us: the melancholy spaces of a landscape peopled with peasants and shepherds through which the silver band of a river meanders lazily, edged by hills and mountains shaded by forests. The view from the windows of our nursery carried the eye over the green humps of the treetops in our garden, out to the two rows of poplars bordering the big arterial road which led straight as an arrow to the pallid blue remoteness where the great forests stood. It may well be that the apelike sorrow in Cassandra’s jet-black eyes originated in her longing for the stillness of those forests, filled with the drumming of woodpeckers and the scent of waving grasses in the meadowed clearings, and that her impish merriment was meant only to shield this incurable homesickness. Whenever her glance happened in that direction, it clung there, stretched out to the vague faraway somewhere, which, like an incontrovertible fate, exerted a steady undertow on our own souls as well. Cassandra could not turn away from that perspective without a deep sorrowful sigh, as if she saw herself as a wanderer on the wide dusty road between the poplars, forever drawn by her own inescapable destiny. And each time she would clasp me in her long simian arms only to thrust me away abruptly, as if pushing me out of her life. Even I — that God-sent gift replacing her own child, the sweetly restored core of her life — even I she saw merely as a short-term wayfaring companion on her road through life, the road that ultimately she had to travel alone. And because I sensed this in my innermost self, I also took up life as if it were but a succession of leave-takings in the course of a long journey.