Her sense of social duties drove her in the direction in which her emancipated sisters in Vienna pointed her. A lady from the German circles in Czernowitz was an active promulgator of women’s rights, and my mother joined her in these strivings. The activities of these johnny-come-lately suffragettes hardly went beyond some inspiring speeches and various meetings with feminist pioneers from abroad over tea with thin slices of lemon, rum in crystal decanters and petits fours. My mother was given the honor of leading a delegation of ladies from Czernowitz to a congress in Reps, an idyllic small town in Transylvania. She took the opportunity to pick me up in Kronstadt on the way and take me along for the three days of meetings; as a result, I owe to these feminists one of the most enchanting memories of my early life.
While the amazons worked, a playmate was assigned to me, the son of a physician, if memory serves: I no longer remember his name, although I count him among the best of the hardly numerous friends from my youth. It was one of those fortuitous encounters between two boys that represent love at first sight in its purest form and last not long enough to be destroyed by the usual puerile quarrels. He led me to the ruin of a castle on a hilltop near the town, from where we had a fine view of the magnificent countryside all around: a landscape richer and better cultivated (so to say, more German) than my native Bukovina but of equal spaciousness under the deep blue of the Romanian summer skies. Swarms of pigeons circled around the gabled roofs of the town at our feet, and above our heads falcons hovered in the wind that drove the sailing clouds and bent the high grass on the slopes. We chewed on juicy stalks while we lay stretched out next to each other, our arms crossed under our heads, looking up into the clouds, chatting of this and that; then we would jump up and run until our cheeks were aflame, climb over the remains of the castle walls and fill our fantasy with images of a militant past…. I tasted a freedom never known before. As a farewell gift my new friend presented me with a collection of bird eggs, from the magpie to the sparrow hawk, from all the species of finch and titmouse to those of the cuckoo, from the quail to the brown owl — an inexhaustible delight in its wondrous completeness. Blown out, weightless and brittle, they reposed, speckled sky-blue and greenish-gray, doe-brown and ivory-colored, in the fine sand of three neatly carpentered, stacked wooden boxes which I lovingly preserved through many years until, together with untold other things, they fell into the hands of the Russians during the Second World War.
My mother repeatedly apologized that, because of its fragility, she could not include them in her relocation baggage in 1940. No utterance could have been more revealing: it expressed her fundamental guilt feelings as much as her capacity for a lyrically loving empathy. But something else also showed itself in her in those days in Reps, to wit, her egocentrism. Women’s emancipation was not a cause that recommended itself to her because of her own experience and conviction; rather, its impulse was bred in the disappointment of her first and — soon — her second marriage and was too intimately related to the offending husbands to allow her to draw any valid ideological points. For her, women’s rights meant maternal rights, and since no one spoke of these in Reps, she didn’t open her mouth. With a lady’s drawing room smile, she clutched and shook hands, nodded acknowledgment to the sororal militants when they were introduced, replied politely and listened with glazed eyes to speeches and lectures. The congress took place in the auditorium of some public building — I no longer remember which — and during its closing session, I, together with my beloved newfound friend, managed to sneak in. My mother sat with the other delegation heads on the rostrum facing the audience. Under their hats laden with bird wings and fruit clusters, the ladies were of defiant mien, while my mother under her fashionably sober “pot” looked paradoxically frivolous among the others. A lady lecturer pilloried the despotic rule of men — a scrawny person, in type resembling the charmless piano teachers who had instructed my sister without much success; when reaching key dramatic points in her delivery, her voice would break into descant. Some solid male notables of the town were seated alongside us in the last row, and since they did not know to whom we belonged, they neither suppressed their amusement nor minced their words about the pioneer feminists. Of my mother, one of them said: “Picture that one in a motorcar and furs arriving at some peasant hut and preaching rebellion against the peasant husbands! At least she looks as if she had her mind on other things — by the end of her crusade she’d probably have forgotten why she came.” Admirably sharp! Reps marked the term of my mother’s role as a feminist and, at the same time, put an end to her social activities.
From her second husband’s relatives my mother held herself icily distant. Friends from her youth who had remained faithful to her despite my father’s derision toward them now seemed to her as trite as he had claimed. Soon she lived as isolated a life as ever, no longer as a romantic prisoner but merely as someone known to be difficult, haughty and moody.
The only ones with whom she could thus comport herself with impunity were her children. We bore the brunt of her exhausted and jittery inner emptiness — at times in resignation but more often with the helpless laughter that alone made life bearable. We still accepted her behavior as inspired by our alleged needs and endured it with the submissiveness that in those days was regarded as a matter of course toward one’s parents. With acute envy we occasionally noticed how the mothers of our coevals understood their adolescent wishes, dreams and anxieties and made themselves into well-meaning helpmates, instead of acting merely as the taskmasters of a nutritional and pedagogic program. But we overlooked the essential fact: her exclusion from the world around her. Nothing connected her to Philip, her second husband, whose adoration she accepted only as long as her resentment against my father was unassuaged and until she was accustomed to it, after which her irritability once more regained the upper hand. Her maternal militancy allowed him no place in her emotional life. His professional existence did not concern her. According to her concept of how life’s roles were assigned — a concept in no way shaken by new emancipatory ideas — women had no business getting involved in men’s affairs. For her, it was enough to know that his work would ensure a comfortable support for her and for us. (In her eyes, my father was a penniless and irresponsible spendthrift with whom she had always feared impoverishment.) Philip appeared not to have any so-called spiritual interests, and if he had, he would in any case have expected her to take the initiative in fostering them, since he looked up to her in all cultural matters. But to set up a literary salon or offer musical events (thanks to paternal severity, she played the piano well), of that she was incapable. More and more she withdrew into the rusting shell of her unapproachability.
Soon there was no room left for the exercise of her maternal role either. Most of the year now, my sister and I lived away from home. After some youthful misdeeds which prompted the aging Court Counselor Meyer to suggest to my parents that I should better be placed in the hands of a more energetic tutor, I was removed from Kronstadt and placed in a boarding school in Austria. The happy hours spent with my mother in the discreetly lush comfort of the Hotel At the Crown — almost like two lovers — were over. (Whenever we went to the coffeehouse for a hot chocolate, which I enjoyed with an eleven-year-old’s greedy delight, the first violin of the gypsy orchestra that entertained there in the afternoons would play for us, an obsequiously effusive smile on his purple lips, the tearjerker tune “Ay, ay, ay,” supposedly a South American lullaby; in the dining room we were served personally by the maître d’, who in return would ask for one of my caricatures, for I constantly doodled; the lobby boys, with their little kepis held by chin straps and worn on a slant on slicked-down hair, their white gloves stuck military-fashion under their shoulder tabs, dared not respond to my banter, and only when my mother feigned not to notice did they drop their sternly stylized self-restraint and show natural collusion — after all, we were almost the same age.) All this now lay in the past. My sister would soon be sixteen, almost grown-up. When we came home for vacation, we shuttled between the houses of our separated parents; my mother arranged the summer sojourns at the Carinthian lakes so as to have us alone, at least for a while — but we escaped her even more irrevocably there. School had broken the fetters that had bound us. Now we had friends with whom we were on much more intimate terms than with her. With them we could prove how absurdly exaggerated both her anxious solicitude and her ensuing claims for absolute obedience really were. Increasingly helpless, she could do nothing but watch us take flight.