The next day she failed to wake me up. The luckless person to whom my mother had assigned the role of governess to my sister had to take care of this task in her place, and she did it with the tips of her fingers, as it were, as if she had been expected to clean out the rabbit hutches. Cassandra had gone into town first thing in the morning, she explained. We gave it no further thought. Toward noon, when I was in the garden, my sister staggered toward me, tears in her eyes, hardly able to speak. Finally she managed to gasp: “Come, come right away! Cassandra…” She had to take a deep breath before continuing: “Cassandra — bobbed her hair!” A new paroxysm of laughter cut her short. She had to hold on to me, bent double by laughing.
I ran to the house, followed by my sister. At the sight of Cassandra, we both succumbed. She looked like one of those dwarfs whom Spanish court painters place as pages at the side of princes. Her glorious hair had been cut off in a straight line over her brow and at her neck. What remained stuck out at a slant on either side of her wrinkled simian cheeks, jet-black and oily, like the blubber-stiffened pigtails of an Eskimo woman, and its effect was all the more comical as she, in expectation of our appraisal, had raised her arms at the same angle, so that she stood there, legs spread wide, like a Samoyed in her furs. She looked like nothing so much as an Eskimo in a soccer gate ready to ward off a penalty kick. Our irrepressible merriment infected her forthwith, and she too began to laugh until tears ran down her face. She raised the corner of her apron to wipe her cheeks, slapped her thighs and boomed her raucous peasant laugh: “Hohohoho! Have become modern lady now!” That it was meant as a symbolic act of vengeance, we all forgot.
It was in those days that my mother had put an end to the constant succession of misses and mademoiselles by calling to the rescue a Miss Lina Strauss. Strauss in German means “bunch of flowers,” and therefore it was but natural that soon she was nicknamed and lovingly called by everyone in the household das Strausserl, “the little bunch,” or Bunchy for short. Bunchy had been Mother’s tutoress and she combined in her person all the talents and qualities that, singly, had been hoped for in her innumerable predecessors. Unlike those “English” and “French” governesses, perennially dismissed in short order, she did not originate in Gibraltar, Tunis or Smyrna, but in Stettin, in Pomerania, which, however, did not prevent her from teaching good French, English and Italian, as well as the history of art, and from soon establishing herself, thanks to her clear-eyed intelligence, poise and experience, and, last but by no means least, her sense of humor, as an undisputed figure of authority in the household. That this household held together at all was due largely to her conciliatory presence. Nevertheless, distinct encampments began to take shape, even though much crossing over occurred between them. My father and sister stood together as ever before; and although Bunchy was in a certain sense an heirloom of my mother’s, she had to be counted willy-nilly with this alliance because of her unconcealed affection for my sister and her respect for my father. On the other hand, my mother felt somehow betrayed by Bunchy and thought to compensate for this by trying ever more jealously to get a firm hold over my own person, lining up in a close though competitive collusion with Cassandra, who, in actual fact, “belonged” to my father — the way each of our dogs belonged to one of us and thereby became “mine,” “yours,” “his” or “hers.” Thus, the pecking order in our family was constantly shifting and from now on was fought over openly, as in a kind of class struggle.
Heretofore my mother — together with her following — had had the upper hand. Strangely enough, her windblown irrationality counted for more than my father’s overbearing jolliness, malicious wit, and vitality, his knowledge and his skills. Her physical frailty and delicate nervosity, though it concealed a steely toughness, made her seem superior to my father in all his booming robustness; her sensitivity endowed her with greater depth than my father’s naive huntsman’s sentimentality. But as a group, the opposing party now gained a tremendous advantage as a result of Bunchy’s towering cultural superiority over Cassandra, “the savage one.’ While Bunchy was reading with my twelve-year-old sister the poems Michelangelo addressed to Vittoria Colonna, Cassandra was feeding me, the eight-year-old, her inexhaustible fairy tales — telling them in her very own patched-up patois, gathering words from all over to form her linguistic collages, randomly found vocables, scurrilous verbal creations, word-changelings, semantic homunculi — I never again encountered language in such colorful immediacy. The fairy tales themselves I met again, it is true: in conscientiously compiled collections of folklorica, in prize-winning anthologies, one of them even by Dostoevsky; Cassandra knew them all and a few more to boot that have nowhere been recorded — and what’s more, she knew how to tell them as if they were happening right in front of your eyes.
I need hardly expand on the enormous legacy she thereby bequeathed to me. But at that time, the “culture of the Occident” conveyed by Bunchy was regarded as more valuable. In this respect our parents were of one mind: we did not belong to Romania, which had surrendered to its Balkanization and was therefore part of the East. It was the year 1922; Europe was not yet divided, as it was to be after 1945, yet even then we felt definitely and consciously that we were “Occidentals.” That this would make us doubly homeless we were to experience later on, when we moved to the West and in many respects felt like Easterners there, felt this even more acutely at a later date, when our homeland irrevocably became part of an East that was fundamentally and ideologically separated from our own world. The disintegration of our parental home preceded by two decades the disintegration of Europe.
For Cassandra this meant what in the ugly legal parlance of today is termed “deprivation of existential legitimacy.” It started for her with the appearance of Bunchy. Cassandra came to realize that she had become superfluous, for I too was leaving the world of the nursery forever. In truth, there was no longer any use for her. She helped out here and there and temporarily, in whatever it was, but pretty soon she mainly took care only of the dogs. And the dogs themselves felt that something was amiss — as they always sensed whenever a trip was planned on which they were not to be taken along or when one of us was banished to his or her room as punishment or was about to be taken sick — and reacted with dazed distress; some forgot that they were supposed to be housebroken and all of them were disobedient and irritable, at times even biting each other. Troll, the old stubby-haired setter who had been placed as a puppy in the cradle of my newborn sister, was almost throttled to death by my Airedale, who had been my first birthday present and was thus younger by four years. This prompted my sister to conduct a fierce vendetta against me that lasted for months and also was directed at Cassandra, who still loyally stood by my side.
My memories of that period are clouded. I was rebellious and must have been greatly trying to my father. I usually committed some infraction during his absences when he was off hunting or at what he called “business assignments,” with which he legitimized his week-long disappearances, and these infractions were deemed too grievous to be judged and punished fittingly by the household’s female judicial system. Because he was annoyed by the very fact of being made to play the family bugaboo, his punishments generally turned out even more severe than his hotheaded temper in any case would have dictated. Such things sank too deeply in me to be amenable to Cassandra’s consolations. Though she managed to come up with comforting pleasures, such as a choice tidbit secreted for me in the kitchen, or puppies from a new litter: Mira, my father’s favorite pointer bitch, was as fertile as a queen bee, and Cassandra was as merry and efficient a nursemaid in the kennel as she had been of old in our nursery.