Then, quite suddenly, the swallow flew away and the minute hand snapped over to show a quarter past three. Barely a half-hour had elapsed; the sky was blue once more, and the swallows were once again black, like tiny fork prongs flitting to and fro. Once more their tweeting was intense and relentless and once again the sounds of the children could be heard from afar.
My mother visited me at Christmas. She had given up her rural cottage and was vague as to where and how she lived. By means of a small Christmas tree made of green-enameled wire with glued-on green paper needles, which folded out like an umbrella and was decorated with innumerable small candles and lavish silver tinsel, and with her typically thoughtful gifts, she managed to arrange a true Christmas Eve in her hotel room, even though it served only to sharpen more painfully my longings for the festive atmosphere of Christmas celebrations at home. She promised to come back at Easter but in fact came much sooner, this time accompanied by a gentleman with neatly parted flaxen hair, of careful manners and impeccable attire, who attended to her with utmost, even adoring politeness. Upon my suspicious question of what role he was to play in our lives, she disclosed that she had remarried and that henceforth I was to consider him my stepfather.
Then a strange thing happened. Whenever one spoke of family spirit and tribal solidarity, one referred only to my mother’s kin. My father became an outsider, personally related to and loved by no one but my sister and me. But now our solidarity with him manifested itself with an intensity that my mother may hardly have anticipated, at least in me; that my sister would take his side unconditionally was to be foreseen, but my own reaction was equally strong. I would rather have strangled the stranger escorting my mother than concede to him even the smallest of the rights over me belonging to my father. I refused to call him anything than by his family name, persistently addressed him ceremoniously with Sie, the formal third-person plural, deliberately ignored his requests though these were polite and never peremptory, and followed them only when my mother transmitted them as her own. I overlooked his acts of kindness, especially any demonstrations of his almost reverential love for my mother — in which, I assumed, I was included merely to please her. How much I wronged him I perceived only gradually and much later. It took years before I learned to like him truly and before I came to realize that no one could have been more patient, correct, tactful and kind than he showed himself throughout the time we were together. Once, while I was home on vacation, I flew into an uncontrollable rage when Cassandra told me, not without impishly malicious intent, that quite probably I would soon be granted the joy of getting a little brother or, better still, sister. My mother heard of this, and I’m afraid it did not have a salutary influence on her willingness to conform in her second marriage to the rightful expectations that my father’s successor may have placed in it.
He was a well-to-do, highly respected man, in most of his character traits the exact opposite of my father: restrained and dry where the latter was expansive and blusteringly humorous, deliberate and composed where the latter was inconsiderate, spontaneous and gruff. He loved my mother with a shy devotion that never turned into bitterness but merely lost its light, became vesperal and eventually was extinguished as he came to perceive the inherent hardness that made her sweetly evanescent smile so brittle, the underlying violence that suddenly could break through her inner-directed dreaminess and the scornful arrogance that hid beneath her vulnerability. Yet at first she revived under the warmth of his devotion; to begin with, her second marriage seemed incomparably happier than her first. Even though I did not care to acknowledge it, she radiated a kind of nuptial transfiguration: the self-assurance, greatly enhancing her beauty, of a woman who knows herself to be loved and desired and — last but by no means least! — economically secure. It was to remain but a short afterbloom.
We were still in the much vaunted 1920s. In our own Bukovina and in other similarly remote corners of the world, filled by the rustling of corn leaves and the shrieks of buzzards, the decade was dominated less by the art-historical developments of Dada, Expressionism and twelve-tone music than by the triumphal appearance in the Old World of the American life-style. It was the sounds of jazz and the vogue for pageboy hair rather than the Blaue Reiter that penetrated the melancholy spaciousness between the Siret, Prut and Dniester rivers. Movies served as the prime mediator of cultural trends, and the fops of the jeunesse dorée in Czernowitz, Radautz, Suceava and Sadagura even then (when men’s fashions were not yet as parodistic as they are nowadays) liked to dress like silver-screen Chicago gangsters. With their fedoras worn low on the brow and their chalk-striped suits with square shoulders and bell-bottom trousers, their black shirts with candy-pink and pistachio-colored ties, they brought the true spirit of the twentieth century to the idyllic land of pipe-tooting mountain shepherds, perfumed and garlic-chewing operetta officers, and Hasidim sprung from the pictures of Chagall. The house my mother moved to with her second husband — it stood, surrounded by old cherry trees as gnarled as oaks, in one of the last large gardens in the center of Czernowitz — contained the first privately owned radio; its acquisition had required the authorization of the Romanian military authorities. There, amidst static whistles, chortlings and growls mingling viciously with syncopated rhythms, occurred my first love encounter with what, ten years later, was to be given the derogatory term “nigger music” and included in the category of “degenerate art’’: American jazz.
The power of the media — foremost the motion pictures and illustrated periodicals — made itself felt in full force. Following the example of the Americans blithely ignoring their own Prohibition, people took to drinking cocktails; the men who mixed them wore with their dinner jackets small white boaters on their smoothly oiled-down hair. Dream cities in futuristic styles evoked the vision of a golden future in a world-spanning metropolis, enjoying freedom of religion, the equality of all races and social justice. The mood ran high in those years right after the first suicidal bloodletting, and the promise of an earthly paradise and the New Jerusalem arose once more as fresh winds of youthfulness blew across the Atlantic. The American life-style was as enticing as the American optimism it sprang from. Bare of scruples, people set out to make money and, without much regard for obsolete conventional hierarchies, blithely considered a fellow man either a “pardner” or a “sucker.” Girls cropped both their hair and their skirts. People who never would have done such things a few years before danced the Charleston to the tune “Knock on wood that in this life I still have a faithful wife,” speculated on the stock exchange and associated with Jews.
My mother followed these innovations reluctantly. It is true that the long-dreamed-of moment arrived when she was in a position to open her house to a glittering social life — or at least to the backwoods notion of what this would be: shimmering candlelight on the bare shoulders of glamorous ladies, melodic laughter and the tinkling of champagne glasses, and what have you — without having my father appear, to the horror of the assembled guests, surrounded by a pack of baying hounds and dragging behind him through the festive crowd a freshly shot wild boar, all the while repeating an apologetic “Not to mind me, please!” on his way to his room, where, much pleased, he would throw the piece of game out the window. She was now in fact the respected mistress of a house, though a more modest one, and open it she did, though only to learn soon enough how right my father had been not to lend his own house to such diversions.