They separated after thirteen years of marriage, in 1922. It happened rather precipitately. One day our mother packed up her things and her children and brought us all to Vienna. Those came with us who, in any case, had been eager to leave the household in Czernowitz: her erstwhile and presently our own governess, Miss Lina Strauss; Mrs. Hofmann, our housekeeper, who for reasons of age returned to her native Bohemia. Cassandra remained behind, for my mother intended henceforth to keep me for herself alone.
My father let us leave in good faith. He expected us home after a few invigorating weeks at the Carinthian lakes and after some spiritual regeneration at the hands of our Viennese relatives. He was to be proven wrong. The choir of my mother’s kin, which had always provided the tonal background for my mother’s tribulations, as is traditional in tragedies (“exile under the yoke of slavery’’), was jubilant: her sisters, whom the war and the hard years thereafter had made independent and self-sustaining, notwithstanding their consonance with the collective spirit of the family, had adopted the rhetoric of the new era. (Most of the catchwords so freely used by feminists today had already been hatched at that time.)
My mother considered the war, the uncertain postwar period, the disintegration of the old world and the dawning of the new (from which, up to then, she had felt excluded) as penal extra aggravations to her imprisonment in marriage. She now heard this awakening call of the new spirit of the age from the mouths of her younger sisters as a clarion call promising final freedom. These nestlings seemed to her to be taking wing like a covey of larks flying toward the sun. That her barely grown-up youngest sister was to become an artisan in the newly formed Wiener Werkstätte seemed to her as bold and spirited as that the next youngest professed herself a theosophist; that the third youngest was a pioneer of women’s rights; and the fourth, the eccentric bluestocking in the family, went so far as to endorse socialism. All these fresh, confusing breaths now blew in unison into the horn of emancipation, particularly that of the liberation from the marital yoke. A sensitive, high-minded and physically frail woman had been deprived of her right to a fulfilled emotional life and to social evolution; moreover, a passionately self-sacrificing mother had been saddled by a mentally unbalanced (the woolen ski cap!), monomaniacal (the hunting!) and amoral (lack of respect for his father-in-law!) egotist and brutal sensualist.
My grandmother somewhat reduced the ideologically high-flown polemics against the fiend who held her oldest daughter under the yoke of serfdom, by declaring that, yes, she too never had liked him but that, as a Catholic, she had to exclude any thought of divorce. My grandfather, on the other hand, already then in the habit of commenting on events around him only with abrupt barks, his decrepit head leaning on the spastically clutched crook of his cane, asserted bitterly that in view of the present proletarization of the whole world and the general decline in manners and morals, “nothing matters a damn anyway,” and everyone should do whatever he felt like doing or not doing. This was the backing with which my mother sued my father for divorce. With great understanding, my father did his best to facilitate the proceedings. The marriage was annulled with the provision that both parents were to share equally in the rights to the children. My sister and I coped with the confusion ensuing from this arrangement in the years to come with the patience of the much tried and with, of course, occasional outbursts of laughter.
It would have been understandable if my mother had used her freedom to start an entirely new and, if possible, active life in Vienna. But Vienna was desolate for her in those years; her parents, distraught over the loss of their fortune and the proletarization of their world as a result of war and inflation, led a very secluded life. She had grown out of her own family and had become alienated both from her parents and from her siblings, who were trying to adapt themselves to the times to an extent beyond her own capabilities. Also, she may have had already some inkling of what, twenty years later, was to become bitterly evident — namely, that her family’s vaunted cohesion was merely rhetorical in nature and the cohabitation of all its members under one roof did not go as smoothly as one would have hoped in the case of like-minded, devoted kinfolk. Just about everyone in the family had either inherited or acquired by imitation from the head of the tribe his inflexibility, foremost his eldest daughter, our mother. Although forever conscious of her inadequacy, she, after all, had managed her own household for thirteen years, and it was unthinkable that she might conform to the stiflingly conventional concepts and customs of her family; even less was it to be expected that she could adapt to the radical new notions inherent in the spirit of the times. On the other hand, it was also out of the question for her to live alone. All unmarried daughters lived as a matter of course under the guardianship of the family and under the parental roof; now that she was once again unmarried, she was counted among them: the independence of a young divorcee — she was thirty-two at the time — was considered as something shady, almost disreputable.
She got off the horns of this dilemma by returning to the Bukovina. An admirer, the same who years later told me of her peculiar fascination, placed at her disposal a quaintly but tastefully furnished peasant’s house in the midst of a magnificent landscape an hour’s drive from Czernowitz. It was distinguished by an attractive collection of Romanian folk art, leather and ceramics, roughly woven rugs and hand-carved wooden table utensils, and by a total lack of bodily comforts. Even today my bones ache from the unforgivingly hard bedsteads, and I still can smell the sharp fumes from the hearth and the sooty clay of the open fireplace, the odors of rancid mutton fat, charred thyme, and garlic, and I am haunted still by the fly-infested lapidary hole provided in a wooden plank over the cesspool. But to my mother the little house, with its thick straw-covered roof, its crooked whitewashed loam walls, the rural knickknacks in the three small rooms, may have appeared as something playful out of a fairy tale, maybe even as an expression of emancipation, given the newfound taste for folklorica.
She could have moved to the Odaya. The rural property, from the estate of her Phanariot great-grandmother, belonged to us all — to her mother, to her and her siblings, and to all the grandchildren — and thus to no one in particular. Because it was in a remote location on the left bank of the Prut River and was not productive — a few Easter lambs and some Christmas carp from a muddy pond were among its meager farm produce — it was despised as not worth the price of its upkeep. All the same, the house was there, on the estate that in 1909 had been intended to shelter my mother’s new family and whence we had fled the Russians in 1914. In Romanian, odaya means “room,” and I did not know that the word derives from an older one meaning “estate,” or “property’’; I didn’t understand why such a fairly spacious building and the holdings around it had the name. Perhaps it was a term used only within the family, but in any case, the factual anonymity indicates how little pride of ownership was involved when we spoke of it. Even my father did not think much of it: as part of his bride’s dowry, he had considered it almost insultingly puny, even though he liked to shoot hares and ducks in the wetlands of the Prut. Mother’s hatred of it was unconcealed; for her, it represented exile, the scene of all the horrors of her first marital years, whence she had fled as often and for as long as possible to Switzerland and Egypt. It was there, in the Odaya, that, in danger of her life and under great pains, she had borne my sister and, in the attempt to avoid repeating that ordeal, had almost lost me. She had never thought it worthwhile to bother about its furnishings.