Cassandra became more easygoing and, if not engaged in one of her clownish pranks, exhibited a somewhat comical but undeniable dignity. She held herself stiffly erect — as much as she could with her short neck and huge, lopsided head — erect “with the pride of a Stone Age female who has discovered that she can stand on her hind legs,” as my father used to say. Sometimes the family thought of marrying her off — “to a blind man, perhaps,” it was suggested maliciously. Bunchy even thought of the possibility of further cultural improvement, although she knew of the failed attempt to rid Cassandra of her obstinate illiteracy. “How about an educational trip to Florence?” wondered my father in ironic allusion to Bunchy’s own past. “If only she were a little smaller, we could get her hired in a circus sideshow,” quipped my saucy sister, who always maintained that Cassandra was in reality a giant dwarf.
Cassandra herself would have acknowledged this collective racking of brains with incomprehending surprise. What, after all, was wanted of her? Surely we could not think of depriving her of her claim to residence in our house! She lacked nothing. She had a roof over her head — even a room to herself, with a bed, a cupboard, a table and a chair; she had plenty of good food and as much fun with the dogs as she could wish for. She was alive. She’d had enough of men, once and for all. Of her children, one was lost and the other was about to go his own way, as was but naturaclass="underline" such was life. In passing, I began to notice ever more numerous silver strands in her bobbed hair.
When my parents separated and my sister and I were sent to schools abroad, so that two separate households were established, Cassandra at first stayed with Father. There she exhibited hitherto unknown talents which enabled her soon to transcend her duties in the kennel and assume brilliantly her new and rightful place as housekeeper. She became expert at just about every household art: she knew how to cook, how to clean rooms, how to sew and iron, how to set a table and how to serve; she knew how to manage the linen closets and the pantry, how to tend flowers, harvest the fruit of the orchards and train servants. When in doubt, she visited with my mother to get advice. Because my father was even more frequently absent, the house remained almost exclusively under her sole management. When my sister and I came for a few weeks’ vacation, we found almost everything as it had been — though somewhat airlessly inanimate, as in a museum, and pervaded by that peculiar boiled-cabbage fustiness which creeps into houses deserted by their masters. “There’s a smell of servants’ quarters,” said my sister. Cassandra herself was much too keen-witted not to notice this herself. One day she declared that the time had come for her to leave. “Is come my tshyass,” she said: her hour had struck. She repeated it for weeks and months, but then one day the hour really came. A widower with three small children needed her more urgently than we.
I could never have imagined a day when she no longer would be in our house, and it is not to my credit that when the day came I accepted it as a matter of fact. She spared me seeing her leave. She was there when I left for school, and she was gone when I returned. But by then so much had changed in my world that I considered this disappearance of Cassandra as a kind of logical sequel. I was thirteen years old, an age when one doesn’t look back. Although I suffered homesickness when I was away at school, I also found myself being homesick when at home. I guess this was probably due to that persistent undertow emanating from the wide poplar-lined wayfarers’ roads that crisscrossed our countryside, leading to a dove-blue never-never land that filled my soul with nostalgia for something forever lost, something I had already lost the moment I was born. When I asked about Cassandra, I was told that she had found a noble task in life with the widower’s children and had every reason to be happy. Czernowitz being so small, I did not have the impression that Cassandra had disappeared from my world. She occasionally visited us when her responsibilities toward her new foster children allowed.
She raised those children. When their father died, she stayed on alone and worked her fingers to the bone for them: flourishing children, two pretty girls and a dark-eyed boy who may have reminded her more than I of her own lost son. I saw her for the last time shortly before the Second World War, in the winter of 1936–1937. She still had her sterilized nurse’s costume, threadbare by then, a bit slovenly, and not so scrupulously clean as when she was with us, yet worn with great self-assurance. Her ugliness may have been frightening for someone who had not known her, particularly when she stuck out her gigantic dwarf’s head and laughed so that her white teeth — set in pink gums and by now showing some gaps — seemed to jump out of her dark simian countenance. Her hair was as straggly and Eskimo-like as ever, but by now it had turned iron gray: “Like tail of white horse my accursed corporal rode — does Panitshyu remember him?” She called me Panitshyu, or “young master,” and when I reproved her, she replied in her own patchwork language: “How else shall I call such a tall young gentleman? Nowadays I would no longer be allowed to hold the potty for you — would I?” She laughed her full-throated peasant’s laugh: “Hohohoho!’’
A friend who was with me at the time and who knew nothing of the role she had played in my life, asked in surprise: “Who is this Cro-Magnon female?” “My second mother,” I replied.
Two years later the Russians were in the Bukovina, this time for good, and I never learned what had become of her.
As I recall her now, there is one scene that stands foremost in my mind: a day in winter; it must have been immediately after the end of the First World War and upon our return to the Bukovina after four years of nomadic refugee existence. Cassandra and I are on our way to fetch fresh milk from a neighborhood farmstead. It is surprising that my mother has allowed me to accompany Cassandra, for it is bitterly cold. But fresh milk is a prized rarity and Cassandra has probably taken me along so as to exact compassion — as she had done earlier, during our first flight from the Russians in 1914. The open country into which the large gardens at the edge of town imperceptibly merge lies under heavy snow below which one senses earth in the icy grip of winter. The frost bites so sharply that we are more running than walking. To distract my attention from the cruel cold, Cassandra cuts all kinds of capers, turning us both around, so that we walk a few steps backward, our new tracks now seeming to run parallel to our old ones. Or she makes me hop alongside her, holding me by the hand, first on one foot for a stretch and then on the other, and pointing back she says: “Look, someone with three legs has been walking here!” And then, when I tire, she does something that intuitively I feel is not a spontaneous inspiration but rather the handing down of an age-old lore, a game with which numberless mothers before her in Romania have transformed for their children the agony of the wintry cold into a momentary joy. She places the bottom of the milk can in the snow so that its base rim forms a perfect circle in the smooth white surface; then she sets four similar circles crosswise on both sides and at the top and bottom of the first circle, intersecting it with four thin crescents — lo and behold! a flower miraculously blossoms forth in the snow, an image reduced to its essentials, the glyph of a blossom, such as are seen embroidered on peasant blouses, where these fertility symbols are repeated in endless reiteration to form broad ornamental bands. I too insist on an ornamental reiteration and, struck by this magical appearance, I quite forget the strangling cold. I do not tire of urging Cassandra to embellish our entire path with a border of flowering marks, an adornment of our tracks which I wish all the more to be continuous and without gaps, since I know full well that these tracks will soon be blown away by the wind and covered by the next snow, ultimately to be dissolved entirely in spring with the melting of the snow and thus fated to disappear forever.