Mother’s arrogance, occasionally erupting from the constantly smoldering fire of her repressed rage, paralyzing her at such moments into a mute and rigid statue, did not improve her dealings with the people around her in a setting that was going to seed. Ever since the pillaging bands in the first weeks after the breakdown in 1918, she suspected the entire population in both city and country of waiting only for an opportunity to turn into marauders, to slit the throats of their betters, to skewer the children. It was obvious to her that this ragged and unwashed populace, coughing and spitting and pissing against the next-best fencepost, was composed of militant carriers of infectious germs. Any and all occasions for us to come into contact with ordinary people were restricted to an absurd minimum.
I know of no children who might have grown up in comparable isolation. We were never for an instant without supervision. When we played in the garden, the fence of which we were strictly forbidden to trespass, there was hardly ever another child present, and the colorful outside world was known to us merely through the images, rapidly flitting past our eyes, of animated street perspectives: an exotic travelogue through which we were transported in hasty processions of coaches, dogs, nurses and governesses from one enclosure to another, from the city to the country and back again to the city, shuttling between watchfully secluded confines. When a child did chance to penetrate our isolation, grotesque precautions were taken before and after its visit: Formamint and permanganate were lavished on us in extravagant profusion. Once an unfortunate pair of siblings borrowed some books from us and soon after came down with scarlet fever, whereupon the books, on their return, were placed in quarantine and we were not allowed to touch them for a year. I still recall my welcoming joy when once again I opened one of them, outside in the blazing sun, so that the sharp black print on the white page suddenly appeared grass-green to my eyes — and my ensuing alarm, for I imagined that the scarlet fever had poisonously discolored the lettering.
Yet all the images I have from that period are of an incomparable well-being — not a corporeal and even less an emotional one: we were more frequently unhappy than happy and more often rebelling against repression than enjoying a feeling of freedom. But even our unhappy times were filled with a self-assurance that I cannot ascribe to any other source than the innocence of life — not merely the innocence of childhood, nor the lighter emotional freight of an era not yet so guilt-ridden as the present, but rather and in large part the innocence of my mother. Her restlessness, her volatility, her occasional unfairness and even her rage and her almost vindictive manner in meting out punishments were all the result of a desperate attempt to realize an ideal, namely that of the perfect maternal head of family (irrespective of the fact that the paterfamilias refused to play the obligatory counterpart role), so everything she did, whatever its surface appearance, stood under a kind of ethical blessing. All her actions, even the most aberrant ones, were undertaken with pure intentions and to the best of her knowledge and belief. While in other households likenesses of the Madonna might hang on the walls — or nowadays portraits of Che Guevara, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Pope John XXIII — our youth was dominated, so to say, by a lithograph of the categorical imperative. Our well-being was rooted in the security of ethical and moral incontestability, whatever objections may be raised to the methods used in our upbringing.
This sharp blade of pure intent was hardly ever wielded by my mother with unadulterated logic. Yet strangely enough, everyone submitted to her, even my father. Nannies and governesses were as powerless against her as we: they groaned and called on their maker to witness the extent of so much senselessness — her outlandish directions, her eccentric regulations regarding attire and nourishment — but almost always yielded to her. That one should not eat crawfish in the months whose names are spelled with an r is a generally acknowledged rule; but that in those months one was also prohibited from sitting on the bare ground or on a stone because vapors emanating from the soil generated infantile paralysis was a belief singular to our own family hygiene. Governesses with different notions about the physical strengthening of their charges either shrugged in resignation and conformed or were replaced by others who cared less for their own ideas than for gaining respite from their employer. To drink a glass of cold water when one was overheated was fatal. Melons and figs were the source of pernicious gastric fevers; we were allowed to eat them only when we had reached adolescence. Even when we thought of ourselves as grown-up, it would have been out of the question for us to drive even a short distance in an open car without wearing fur coats and hermetically fitting leather driving caps — and this too in the blast-oven heat of Romanian summers.
Little by little these quaint fancies, once seen merely as gratuitously imposed torments, began to erode the ethical and moral certainty of our world. In the face of one of my mother’s extravagant fantasies, the commitment to the categorical imperative began to yield to a skeptical impatience bordering on cynicism. I recall a dramatic scene at one of the mountain lakes we used to visit for our “aestival recoveries.” I was almost thirteen and had taken the liberty — imagine it! — of renting a rowboat on my own and of rowing out alone on the lake. When I returned to our hotel, my sister, with bloodless lips, told me that my mother had locked herself in her room to commit suicide.
I have to confess that this threat did not really alarm me. It had been used in the past — once, for instance, when I had come home from ice-skating after dark, even though I should have known that the most baneful vapors rose in winter after the setting of the sun; and another time when I secretly had acquired a magazine that today would be considered a harmless family journal but was then regarded as the vilest pornography because it contained drawings of scantily dressed ladies and photographs of bare bosoms. So I sat down quite unconcernedly on the hotel terrace and waited for the return of my sister, who had hastened to my mother’s room and surely would be summoning me for sentencing. Half an hour and then a full hour went by without anything happening, and the fear rose in me that this time the threat might have been carried out. I could not stand it any longer on the terrace, but when I reached the lobby I was stopped by the concierge: my mother and sister had departed, he told me.
The embarrassed expression on his face was hardly needed to make me perceive the hoax. I calmly returned to the terrace. My earlier experiences had made me callous. The only thing that hurt was that my sister had allowed herself to be party to these shenanigans.
Occasional vacations on the Black Sea also offered opportunities for my mother’s threats of self-immolation, her sharpest pedagogical means. The beach at Mamaia, where today a phalanx of horrendous tourist caravansaries of crumbling concrete provokes nature (only meagerly favored, as it is, with a bit of sea and sand and dune grass there) to lament her lost innocence, then — I speak of the end of the 1920s — was an empty expanse, excepting two or three bathing huts and a wooden pier, of miles of golden sand and tiny pink shells. This fine-grained sand, several yards deep, was blown landward into high dunes behind which lay the then still deserted steppe of the Dobrudja, and on the other side sloped imperceptibly into the sea, so that one waded for miles through shallows before the water reached one’s navel. My mother nervously patrolled the glittering edge of the sleepily lapping waves. Her kidney ailment forbade her to enter the water. Our supervisory Cerberus of the moment, usually one of the dubiously English governesses from Smyrna or Gibraltar who were supposed to enrich our linguistic knowledge (the subtle differences in intonation of the English o in the sentence: “O Homer, what homage do we owe you!’’), was sent out to the end of the pier to watch our doings from there. It would have been simpler had she come into the water with us to carry out this supervision, but my mother did not trust these ephemeral guardians, usually replaced after only a few weeks, to be conscientious, and believed they might not watch us if they were allowed to indulge in the pleasure of bathing. Posted as lookouts at the end of the pier, they were obliged to scan the sea while my mother, intent on protecting our books and toys, the beach umbrella, the plaids, the picnic basket and all the other paraphernalia from the thievery of roaming gypsies, ran to and fro, calling and signaling, all the more frantically the farther we moved out to sea: “a hen who has hatched ducklings,” as she put it. Whenever she lost sight of us because we finally had reached water deep enough actually to swim in and when occasionally a wave covered our bathing caps, she alerted the miss or mademoiselle on the pier. If she was unable to obtain reassuring news of our condition forthwith, perhaps because Miss was engaged in a flirtation with a passing Lothario in bathing trunks, she sent the lifeguard to rescue us or, when he soon refused to pay heed to her repeated panicky alarums, the next-best complaisant bather.