He did not begin his vocalizing when he threw his pajamas at me. The next procedure, during which I had time to overcome the initial drowsiness that follows a rude awakening, took place to the accompaniment of other noises. Faucets were opened in the bathroom; water bubbled, rushed and roared. A descant howling was heard, not unlike the wintry sound of Carpathian wolves howling at the moon; this was my father showering for ten minutes in ice-cold water.
Then he appeared, all six-foot-two of him, clad in a hooded bathrobe reaching to his feet and giving him the appearance of a militant monk, with which he rubbed himself with jittery hands — here and there, up and down, left and right, front and back, as if he had been stung by a swarm of wasps and was desperately massaging the stings. As he rubbed himself dry, his shining blue eyes checked whether perchance I had not gone back to sleep. With a shake, he threw back the hood so that his round head appeared, tanned and glossily bare. He was almost entirely bald. The sparse fringe of hair at the back of his head, he shaved off. The smooth, freshly showered and rubbed-down skin exhaled an aura of intense health and cleanliness. He was brimming with life like a Cossack by Repin.
While he proceeded with the complex ritual of his shaving, he would talk. Dreams made him voluble: he would impart droll, drastic and scurrilous excerpts from them. His dream life was as filled with fanciful imaginings and humor, as illustrative of his shrewd cleverness as his way of grasping reality when awake — again I cannot think of a better term to describe it than “bright,” even though occasionally this could darken and shift to ill humor, irritability and even rage. His moods were all of a piece, never equivocal. I could not imagine him losing himself in daydreams, as my mother so often did. He experienced the given moment too wholeheartedly, though never prosaically. His lyricism was of another kind than hers, more Dionysian, to express it in Nietzsche’s terms (whom, incidentally, he considered his great brother in spirit: in this he was wrong, as he generally was with respect to himself).
His dreams were a vivacious, topsy-turvy farrago, and usually most amusing. Occasional nightmares did not seem to frighten or oppress him. He spoke of them as if they were performances he had attended: they might be exciting but, after all was said and done, were merely fantasies. He was vastly intrigued by a dream in which Miss Strauss, Bunchy, appeared to him as a man, even though as our governess she had always comported herself in a most feminine manner and dressed in the dignified fashion of a turn-of-the-century matron. To find out her true sex, he — still in his dream — had thrown an apple at her lap, for, as he explained, “to catch something thrown at them, men will close their knees, so that it won’t drop through their thighs, but women open their thighs so as to catch the object in their skirts.’’
As he told these stories, his shaving brush would whip up rich bubbles of white snow from the English soap in its wooden bowl, which he then applied, carefully and with much skill, on his cheeks, chin, throat and the space between lips and nose. All my life I regretted that with my many resemblances to him I had not also inherited his full lips. My own have taken after my maternal forebears: thin and with the tendency to become pinched, particularly with age. In a photograph taken a year before his death — he had grown a short badger-gray beard toward the end — his lips protrude as they did in those far-off days from the snowy foam of his shaving soap: carnal, sensually joyful, firm without being grim, and closed with an expression of reliable virility.
I always enjoyed watching how his expression changed as his razor scraped off the foam from the delicate spots on his upper lip and in the corners of his mouth, the dimple in his chin, and the throat above his Adam’s apple. It wasn’t merely a full catalogue of his mimetic abilities but a manifestation of the eloquence of the mute mouth per se — from bacchanalian amusement through mild benevolence, serenity and humility, to arrogance, derision, contempt, fury, horror, and then bitter disappointment and deep sorrow — all this magically produced in reaction to the sharpness of the blade, in lightning-quick changes that flitted by like a play of shadows.
Like everything he did, the shaving every morning was of a ritual regularity that could have been called maniacal if it had not also been so obviously playful. It always started with the selection of the blade. He had seven of these in a leather case, ordered from London in conformity with the Anglophilia of his generation, each of them engraved with the day of the week on which they were to be used: MONDAY, TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY and so on to SUNDAY, the handle and back of which last blade was gold-plated to distinguish it from the others. Though the choice could, therefore, hardly be arduous, he first tested the sharpness of several blades with the tip of his thumb before removing the one scheduled for that day from the dark purple velvet of the box and stropping it with a few quick slapping strokes. The blades were profiled concavely from the back to their cutting edge, a mattely mirroring, dangerously sharp steel that I was forbidden to touch as a child. I cannot say what more vividly remains in my memory: the mixture of the various smells of soap and leather, the delicate fustiness of the velvet lining of the case, the biting sharpness of the alum stone and the aromatic essences with which he rubbed his skin afterward; or the foamy crunching sound, testifying as much to the toughness of his stubbles as to the sharpness of the blade with which, after first setting it delicately and then drawing it down resolutely, he bared broad bands of suntanned, leathery, manly skin from the snowy richness of the shaving foam.
This used-up foam, accumulating on the blade, was then stripped off with his left index finger and proffered to the dogs assembled around him. Shuddering with disgust, they licked it up to the last smear. They seemed greedy for it each morning and would fight each other for the privilege of getting the biggest balls of soap from the master’s stubble. He laughed heartily when the dogs shook in revulsion, and he laughed even more when they nevertheless scrambled for the suds. He would have laughed still more if one of them in greed and anger, forgetting his slavish adoration of his master, had attacked him — and he probably would not then have hesitated calmly to cut the dog’s throat with the blade. His temperament was as bright as the sky over Naples, but just as that sky always showed some threads of smoke from Vesuvius to remind one of other, more primeval subterranean forces, there were reasons to believe that in him too something deep down lay in readiness over which he himself had no control. And this threatening plume of smoke was perceptible even in the usually unperturbed serenity of his matutinal hours.
Meanwhile I managed to disengage myself from the comfort of my lair and also repaired to the bathroom. While I opened the faucets of the tub and drowsily tested the temperature of my bath, I would be struck by the blue flash from his eyes in the concave shaving mirror. Only a single eye would appear in the circle of the mirror, as he brought the various parts of his face close to the magic concavity to ensure that not the slightest hirsute remains had escaped the blade; there was no doubt that this monstrously enlarged eye searched only for singular hairs and did not apprehend me at all. Yet to me the eye appeared as if it belonged to a resident of Brobdingnag, ironically observing his dwarflike toy through a hole in the little box in which Gulliver was held prisoner.