She did not give up easily, however. When we were apart, she attempted — sadly and unilaterally — to keep in close epistolary contact by bombarding us with admonitions, sartorial instructions and hygienic advice, requesting full information on everything we did, even mobilizing supervisors, spies and informers from afar. This abstract and vicarious sharing was as futile and tormenting as her helpless attempts at the Black Sea to control us from the remoteness of the shore.
The more independent we became, the more nimbly we eluded her remote-control guardianship. Now she was reduced to imagination, which had always fostered panicky alarms. The perils to which she presumed we were now exposed greatly increased. Permanganate and Formamint alone no longer sufficed. It was no longer a matter of guarding against scarlet fever or against polio. Much worse now threatened: syphilis! The danger was not so acute for my sister as for me. In theory, young ladies educated at Sacré-Coeur were chaste and shielded from the pernicious insinuations of free spirits like the Russian ophthalmologist. Moreover, the danger of infection from drinking glasses or toilet seats was small. I, however, had reached the difficult stage of puberty and had entered the zone of immediate sexual temptation. More and more often I would find sex-education material in the mail or on my bedside table, strongly recommending total abstinence as the only safe protection against lethal venereal diseases and the loss of sight as a result of masturbation. (“Young men, rejoice in your full testicles!’’) However, it was possible that I had been infected long before without knowing it; after all, primary symptoms are easily overlooked at the pimply age. To determine whether I had dallied in more than innocent play with one of the maids, my mother alleged that she had had to fire the girl because she had been found to be contaminated. I gave no sign of blanching terror at this news and condemned Mother to continued uncertainty. She was equally helpless with regard to bronchi, flat feet, the people we associated with and the abominations with which we were threatened by professional perverters of youth. Half a continent away, she hotly fussed about our woolen underwear, while her own life trickled away.
The halo of her martyrdom gained one more prismatic color ring. She disliked her new house; its confined middle-class setup gave her a feeling of social déclassement. She had brought with her most of her own furniture, including the blond galleon of the Second Empire bed, as well as the baroque chests of drawers and Art Nouveau chairs. But the rooms in which this recycled dowry was placed were too small. The tiny windows were positioned so low that on the garden side their lintels were at chest height. (“If you bend your knees,” said my sister, “you can stick your head right into the house.’’) Nor was it any consolation that there was so much greenery around that the house resembled one of those quaint ivy- and dog-rose — covered cottages in the English style, dear to us from the cocoa tins and puzzles of our childhood. Unfortunately, it was located not in the Cotswolds but in the very heart of Czernowitz, a remnant from the city’s founding period, less than a century before.
All too rapidly Czernowitz, built in the time of the Emperor Joseph II, had grown into a provincial capital. Around the house, originally a farmstead, five- and six-story apartment buildings had mushroomed. The garden with its old fruit trees and mighty acacias was enclosed on three sides by forbidding gray fire walls; an oversize wooden fence separated it from a heavily frequented street, its boards covered with circus posters, announcements of meetings and soccer games, political manifestos, official decrees and proclamations, and the homemade ads of job tailors and matzoh bakeries. At the entrance to the garden stood a kiosklike gatehouse, through the perennially open door of which an old Ruthenian hag, Mrs. Daniljuk, watched over anyone who entered and left. Across from it stood Fieles Court, a complex of low buildings in which, in the days of the Austrian monarchy— nowadays it is hard to believe — a fashionable dance school had found its customers among the jeunesse dorée of Czernowitz. A passageway connected it to the city’s main thoroughfare, Transylvania Avenue. All these buildings, including the high-rises, were occupied by Jews, and one of them was a prayer house from which on Friday evenings a stream of bearded Orthodox clad in black caftans, with long side-locks under their broad-rimmed black hats, and black-bordered white prayer shawls around their scrawny or stocky shoulders, swarmed out in order to greet the first star on Friday evening, which initiated the Sabbath. During the week it was the playground of hordes of motley-colored cats, who bred in the nooks and crannies of the district, which they permeated with the biting reek of their urine. Commingled with it were many other odors — the fumes of the horse apples on the bumpy pavement, the smells of onions from kosher kitchens, odors of spices and herbs, the vapors of cow and sheep dung from the neighboring Hay Market — together forming a rich broth of miasma-laden vitality, to which audible expression was given by the twitterings of myriads of sparrows, lending a phonetic background to the soundless scrabbling of lice in the sheepskin coats of the peasants who came to town on market days.
Even though all this was only a few hundred yards from the city center — the Ringplatz, with the city hall; the line of dozing hackneys in front of the Liberation Monument, on which an aurochs, heraldic animal of the Bukovina, thrust its forehooves into the breast of a fallen double-headed eagle, symbol of the vanquished Habsburg domination; the hotel that unconcernedly continued to be called At the Black Eagle; the Byzantine dome of the Great Synagogue; the half-dozen shops that brought to Czernowitz a whiff of Occidental luxury — it nevertheless had the slovenly, deeply backwoods, leadenly nostalgic character, heavy with empty longings, of the no-man’s-land between the cultures of West and East. My father, when speaking of my mother, never missed asking maliciously, “Well, is she comfortable in the Yiddish shtetl?” But for myself, I liked staying in that house when I came home from school.
At that time, city noises had not yet fused into a single continuous and deafening shriek of machines and roar of engines. Urban noise still had a kind of human dimension, composed of voices and natural sounds, the rumble and rattle of peasant carts, the crack of whips and the warning calls of coachmen, the clip-clop of the horses’ hoofbeats, all of them ebbing away at eventide to make room for the great silence of the night, in which one could even hear chirping crickets and croaking frogs in the wide-open land all around.
Almost as quiet were the long Sundays; only in the afternoon could one hear, at times, rising from one of the backyards beyond the walls, the tenor call of a trumpet signaling the startup of a band accompanying the heavy, hopping dances of soldiers with their girls, mostly maids in service dressed in their colorful rural garb. It was as if life’s melody penetrated the space of my solitude only from very far away; it is probably the special elegiac magic of such hours that contributed to making me a melancholy choleric.