The Mother
A piece of brocade woven in silver and burgundy lozenges. It may have been part of a harlequin costume that once fitted a female body so tightly as to make it look androgynous, even while accentuating its femininity. I visualize only the body: it has no face. It lies in a treasure chest, the body of a mermaid ensnared in ropes of pearls as if in a net, together with fishes, shells, crabs, starfishes and corals. The mermaid is blind; her world has turned to rubbish. The chest contains the tinsel of a forgotten carnival of long ago. And the mermaid herself is rotting.
A man who admired her when she was a young bride and then as mother — incidentally, a most artistic, scintillatingly witty man who later was to become my friend and teacher, though unfortunately only for too short a time — this man told me once that it was hard to imagine what subtle fascination had emanated from her when she was relaxed and serene or, even more, when she thought herself unobserved and was lost in thought, enraptured in a transfixed expectancy, an inner-directed listening, awaiting some ineffable occurrence. Only in her last days, when she hoped soon to be rid of the burden of her eighty-six years and longed to be released by death, she recovered some of that shy grace, wafted on her tremulous smile, a dream-bemused question, an expression of bewildered but no longer expectant hearkening. What lay in between was a life of continuous disappointments: an increasingly warped and ever more dreary existence in which anxieties both foolish and legitimate, neuroses both real and imaginary, afflictions, terrors and true obsessions were accompanied by uncontrolled outbreaks of impotent rage that twitched her eyebrows skyward and dimmed her glance as if in frozen panic, senses blunted and mind benumbed, head cowering between hunched-up shoulders, motions jittery and her whole being — now brittle and clumsy and always distraught — shackled in fated abasement. Only the fine facial bone structure and the still full hair which never turned entirely white gave some hint that once she had been beautiful.
Her flowering as a woman was short. The early images of her that I hold in my mind are of great comeliness. It is 1919, the First World War is over and we are back in the Bukovina, where there had been hard-fought battles. Here and there rubble is still rotting in ruined buildings; naked walls and yawning gables rise up to the skies, outlined against indifferently speeding clouds. But some things have remained untarnished. After four years of refugee existence in other people’s houses, my mother is finally mistress of her own home once again. I see her in the light of a summer afternoon ceremoniously putting the last touches to the table set for afternoon tea, arranging cups and flowers. Her face is happy; she dreams of an idealized present, not as it is but as it should and could be. Shortly thereafter she is joined by my father and immediately the atmosphere becomes strained and frosty. The tea is drunk in hostile silence, which torments me because I sense that she is suffering. My sister is unaffected and soon scampers away, luring my father after her into the garden. I too should like to escape to the safety of Cassandra’s hair, but my mother embraces me vehemently, and I love her passionately, love her in a way different from my love of Cassandra. She belongs to that promised land beyond my child’s world; I see in her the embodiment of what one day will be entrusted to me when I too will be a grown man and part of her world: the very essence of frail, vulnerable femininity in need of protection. No doubt my later realization of what toughness and occasional callousness hid behind her apparent delicacy did not favorably influence my subsequent attitude toward women.
Her love for me was stormy. I do not care to call it passionate, for that would presuppose impulses and initiatives, and one failed to find anything in her being that emanated directly from her. She lived not according to any immanent motive but by preconceptions. She loved me as “the mother” should, according to a fixed concept of what mother and child were supposed to be, a fickle love that depended on the submission with which I conformed to my role as child. No other torments of childhood were so painful as the intensity of that love, which constantly required me to give something I was unable to grant. She required more than my goodwill to be a well-mannered child, to grow and to thrive under her care. I felt I was expected not merely to fulfill the stereotype of the perfectly educated, well-bred son, unconditionally loving his mother, but in addition to provide something lacking in herself. In her hands, I was both tool and weapon with which to overcome her emptiness — and perhaps also some anticipatory foreboding of her own destiny, whose fated finality she refused to accept.
My mother’s restlessness and nervous insatiability were discharged against my sister even more virulently than against myself. She could not stand this darling of my father’s, even though she claimed maternal rights and also exacted the demands flowing from a mother’s responsibilities in regard to my sister. She could not cope with the rapidly maturing girl whom she had left alone during the first four years of her infancy. It was said that after the birth of my sister she was stricken with a kidney disease which she tried to mitigate but never could hope to cure entirely by protracted sojourns in health resorts. Until the outbreak of the First World War (and my own appearance in this world) she spent the greater part of the summers in Swiss spas and the winter months in Egypt — and it is in the latter country that, for a time, I matured in embryonic safeness. Meanwhile my sister was in the care of well-tried nurses under the supervision of our maternal grandparents in the country house in which she had been born, the so-called Odaya which had been allotted to my mother as a kind of conditional dowry. The girl hung on her father with passionate love and in ever more intense closeness.
Our mother’s frail health and almost yearlong absences from her house (the furnishing of which was only scarcely completed to suit family occupancy), a house she hated, did not benefit her young married life. Nor did the four years of war that followed bring our parents any closer. We had left the house when the Russians arrived, and I believe that their appearance came as rather a relief to her. It was a ramshackle old building, in appearance half monastic and half a Turkish konak located in a most remote region and of a rusticality that only my huntsman father did not mind. My mother much preferred our house in town. In 1918, upon our return to the Bukovina, we resumed our family life in Czernowitz; the family was split into contending parties and, in view of our father’s absences, owed its cohesion only to the permanent old-time domestics — Cassandra; Olga Hofmann, the Bohemian cook; Adam, the coachman; and finally Bunchy, those firm pillars amidst the coming and going of all the others. My parents were already so alienated from each other that for my own part I could not have found any pretext for the formation of an Oedipus complex. Jealousy I felt only toward my sister and her close bond with my father, a relationship from which I was totally excluded.
During my childhood days, my father was more a mythical than tangible figure for me. I saw him as rarely as my sister had seen her mother during her first years. Now he was away from home most of the time on hunting expeditions: Nimrod, the great hunter, whom from afar I marveled at, admired and envied and whom at close range I feared. I grew up among women, and it is through them that I experienced “the female” in three archetypal embodiments: through Cassandra, a brood-warm, protectively enveloping motherliness; through my sister, forever outdistancing me by four years and by nature’s favor or disfavor the superior, the more airy, spiritual, always nimbly evasive figure of the nymph; and through my mother, an iridescent interplay of all archfemale characteristics — sensual excitement paired with the fitful capriciousness of the potential mistress, forever vacillating between stormy tenderness and pretended indifference, between lovingly passionate empathy and cruelly punishing iciness.