I was still forbidden to leave the garden without a very good reason. I had no friends. I wasn’t bored — and I still don’t know what boredom is as long as I’m left alone — but I suffered a kind of poignant pining when I heard those Sunday hummings and fiddlings and poundings from the walled-in chasms beyond the roofs, so near and yet so far; time and again the voice of the trumpet would rise to carry, alone and undaunted, the simple melody into the empty afternoon…. I simply had to find out what these backyards were like, where the homesick boys and girls, cast off in the city, danced as if they were still back on the village threshing floor.
In our garden, surrounded by a group of gnarled acacias, stood some old and now disused stables and carriage houses, adjacent to buildings that opened up to another street. It was not hard to climb the trees, reach the stable roof and then continue to the roofs of the neighboring buildings. From there I still did not have a view into the backyards, but I could see into the back apartments, their windows opening onto narrow light shafts.
My unexpected appearance occasioned some scared surprises and occasional scoldings from those windows. But once it became known that I was not a burglar but simply the harmlessly venturesome child of well-known parents, everybody got used to the strange roof-roaming tomcat. I did my best not to seem indiscreet. I would creep over the hot tin roofs to some shadowed corner against a chimney pot or a high wall, glance through the mildly titillating magazines I had secretly obtained, which were safe from my mother’s methodical searches only up here, or simply crouch in my nook and watch and listen.
The dwellers in those rear buildings were almost exclusively lower-class Jews, and what I saw and heard was the very core of their lives. I watched as the women cooked and laundered and sewed — women who almost always had a cheerful word for me or implored me to be mindful of the dangers of my mountaineering expeditions; I heard them scold their children and joke with their men; I saw them air their bedding and feed their cats; I heard their fathers pray and cough; I looked into the sickbeds of witchlike old grannies. Weekdays, when there was no dancing in the backyards, the old trumpet phonographs would tootle Yiddish pop music—’’Yiddl mit san fiddle” and “Iach bin der Doktor Eisenbart” or “Du bist schain in maine oigen” and the like.
One of the windows — they were, incidentally, open day and night, for the summers in the Bukovina were warm — was of special fascination to me. A lad of about sixteen sat and read there day in, day out. I don’t know whether he was sick, but he certainly looked it, with a highly sensitive, pale face under smooth black hair. He didn’t wear the usual payes—the curly side-locks — of Orthodox Jews, but he was always clad in dark clothes like a rabbinical student and usually had a blanket wrapped around his knees. He would sit immobile and read, turning pages with a sparse motion of his thin hand.
He took no notice of me, barely looking up when I first appeared before him. The roof I crawled on was more or less at the same level as his window: only a narrow light shaft, four stories deep, separated us. The arrogance with which the lad ignored me was a challenge. I reacted very childishly: I brought my own books to the tin roof, sat down facing him and read in imitation of him.
As I have mentioned already, I was no great reader — probably in protest against my sister, who devoured whole cartfuls of books. What I had read up to then had been simple fare: Cooper, Kipling and — secretly — King Ping Meh, in addition to any amount of hunting literature. Occasionally I borrowed books from my mother’s library: Thornton Wilder’s The Woman of Andros (which bored me and which I found incomprehensible), Claude Anet’s Ariane, jeune fille russe, or books of my sister’s — H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and The Shape of Things to Come (my sister, by then sixteen and intellectually and politically “engaged,” had long before switched to the diaries of Lily Braun).
So I dragged these books to my aerie on the roof, where I read against the young Jewish scholar, so to say, in mute competition; a duel in which, however, he refused to participate. Only once did he raise his head — eerily, on the very day I dared to get a volume of Dostoevsky from my mother’s books.
“What’s he reading?” he asked without so much as looking at me and with only a trace of a somewhat contemptuous smile.
“Dostoevsky,” I replied casually.
“A step forward, I’d say,” he commented with cutting irony.
That was all. Nothing more; no word, no further sign of noticing me.
Soon my roof expeditions were found out and placed under strict interdiction. I never again saw my reading companion, but our encounter prompted me to read all of Dostoevsky.
My mother would have been much too proud to admit that she felt hopelessly exiled in the middle of Czernowitz, in a place cut off from possibility, unable ever again to participate in what elsewhere appeared to be the “real” life: a life of ineffable fulfillment, for which the slowly fading memories of Montreux and Luxor and the pictorial reports in the magazines’ society columns were only vicarious evocations, feeble aids to an inadequate imagination that had to make do with atmospheric inducements of what, more or less, young Hans Castorp’s snowbound dream in Mann’s Magic Mountain was: a mixture of an Art Nouveau version of exalted human existence, clad in Isadora Duncan’s Greek tunics, and the bourgeois idea of courtly society in now vanished principalities, with its puffed-up, chest-swelling German self-confidence. A mundane surrogate for this could have been reproduced, after a fashion, even in Czernowitz; but she was too disappointed and too fatalist to transform these wishful images into a living “as if” reality, as those who dance at New Year’s celebrations, amidst colored balloons and paper streamers snaking through champagne giggles, like sleepwalkers waltzing to the choreography of the “grand life.” She did not follow the fashion. She became plump, neglected her good posture and let herself sag into a housewifely pelvic slouch. Her preoccupation with her children’s physical well-being began to impart to her entire bearing and behavior a prosaic obsession with the tangible everyday, a manic concern with triviality.
As she had kept us prisoners in our garden in the past, she now exiled herself to the enclave between the fire walls of the Jewish tenements, in which roses and dahlias granted her the illusion that the outside world, replete with unfulfillable promises and unnamable perils, could be shut out and a kind of retreat be established here for herself, in which Czernowitz was banished from view, sparing her any direct contact. She hardly ever ventured into the street beyond the garden’s enclosure. All the more reverentially was she regarded by her neighbors. Out of duty but also out of kindness she had always an open — albeit stern — heart for the needy, who, as a result, habitually crowded around her. Beggars or handicapped petitioners never left her empty-handed; that she never discriminated against any ethnic group or religious affiliation in her charities — a virtue rare in a town in which the conflicts among these were sharpening — was greatly appreciated, especially by the Jews in her neighborhood. I still can see those white-bearded heads under their fiery-red rabbinical hats trimmed with fox pelts, telling me with approval, their eyes half closed and swaying from side to side: “The lady your mamma, emmes, she is an exceedingly kindhearted lady, may God protect her.” It did not matter that her benevolence was of the institutional, Salvation Army type: warm soup and bread for old rummies, who would rather have had a few pennies to buy themselves a shot of booze and a few moments of bliss; old clothes for camouflaged rag women, who would make her believe that they had half a dozen children to clothe; handing out of alms only on fixed days and never without admonitions to turn to more honorable occupations than begging. In the Fieles Court she was considered a saint. The one who benefited most from all this was her French bulldog, Bonzo, who took every opportunity to slip through the garden gate and yap after the hundreds of roaming cats, to be spoiled with kosher tidbits and to help out every randy bitch in the neighborhood, much to the delight of the respective owner. (“Oy, what a cute little doggy, pretty as gold!” “The young gentleman won’t know me, but through my little Fifi I am, in a manner of speaking, the father-in-law of the khelev of the lady your mother.’’)