In the image I hold of her in my mind, she is part of the prospect from the window of our nursery. She moves in front of it in all her scurrilous and farcical animation, haunting and weird even when sad, angry or moody, reminding me of a figure in one of those Turkish stick-puppet shows: the female counterpart of Karagjös, the jester. We never were able to determine her nationality with any degree of certainty. Most probably she was a Huzule — that is, a daughter of that Ruthenian-speaking tribe of mountain Gorals, who, it is said, are the purest-bred descendants of the Dacians who fled before the Roman invaders into the impenetrable fastness of their forests. Yet Cassandra just as well could have been a Romanian — that is, a product of all those innumerable populations who coursed through my country during the dark centuries of the decaying Roman dominion. She spoke both Romanian and Ruthenian, both equally badly — which is not at all unusual in the Bukovina — intermixing the two languages and larding both with bits from a dozen other idioms. The result was that absurd lingua franca, understood only by myself and scantily by those who, like her, had to express themselves in a similarly motley verbal hodgepodge. Even though it may be questioned whether I was actually fed at Cassandra’s breast, there can be no doubt that linguistically I was nourished by her speech. The main component was a German, never learned correctly or completely, the gaps in which were filled with words and phrases from all the other tongues spoken in the Bukovina — so that each second or third word was either Ruthenian, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Armenian or Yiddish, not to forget Hungarian and Turkish. From my birth, I heard mainly this idiom, and it was as natural to me as the air I breathed. Just as naturally, I repeated guilelessly everything I heard from her, at least at first, and only when I was constantly corrected, when some of my expressions brought on irrepressible laughter while others were greeted by an uncomprehending shake of the head and yet others severely prohibited, did I begin to realize that Cassandra’s and my way of expressing ourselves was something out of the ordinary, a secret idiom within the general means of communication, albeit one with so many known patches that confidentiality itself was somehow full of holes without, for all that, being readily decodable.
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.