Officially, these disappearances were announced by the sentence: “I have to go on assignment!” This left no doubt as to the importance of the undertaking, since it sanctified it as a fulfillment of professional duties. The “assignment” meant inspection trips to the historic monasteries of the Bukovina and on the upper Moldau, the structural condition and maintenance of which it was his task to supervise. Why he had to take along his rifles and shotguns was an open secret. The Religious Fund owned enormous tracts of forest. My father, who was on equally good terms with the abbots and the local forestry administrators, was granted free shoots in hundreds of thousands of acres of largely virgin Carpathian forest.
When I had grown up enough to have at least a rough idea of hunting, knew how to handle rifles and dogs in a sensible way and only seldom made mistakes in the peculiar esoteric idiom of venery, I was allowed to accompany him on his work at the monasteries. In those days, this meant laborious trips by railway, automobile or horse carriage, or at times by narrow-gauge forestry rail lines that penetrated deep into the remote fastness of the timberlands. Even today, those monisteries on the Moldau (in that section of the Bukovina still remaining in Romania and now a part of Moldavia) are placid islands in the barbaric hustle and bustle of our civilization. In the wind-swept, rustling spaciousness of those forests spanned by majestic skies, green clearings open up with the cloistered churches standing in the center, blazing in color and surrounded by protective walls. Not only the interior but the exterior walls of six of these are decorated with magnificent frescoes in the Byzantine style. I envied my father’s knowledge, which allowed him effortlessly to interpret the pictography of heavenly and hellish scenes, the symbolism of the images of martyrs or of the cloisters’ founders, and to decipher the Cyrillic inscriptions in Old Church Slavonic as easily as if he were reading his morning newspaper. Suddenly this ironic and lighthearted man in hunting clothes, always so ready to jest and frolic, showed the dignified gravity of the scholar. Or rather, it was not that he showed it (though he liked to show off his other skills, such as — alas! — his dilettante daubings) but that it showed itself, without any help on his part. The deep seriousness of his professional routine had the modest matter-of-factness of the former Austrian imperial functionary. It wasn’t the profession of his choice. He had wanted to study chemistry instead.
I often thought that his all-consuming passion for hunting was in reality an escape to and a shelter from the reminder of a truer and unrealized vocation. This seemed plausible when I observed the passivity with which he let venery overrun his entire existence untrammeled. One had the impression that, fundamentally, he had no thoughts other than those related to hunting, that he hardly spoke of anything else, and that it determined all his moods. Without any doubt, his decision to forsake a more rewarding career in the civil service in favor of remaining in the Bukovina and entering the service of the Romanian Orthodox Church had been influenced by the outstanding hunting possibilities of that region. Venery, taking full possession of his many-faceted being, pervaded all his other interests and hobbies. Ever more frequently, the scenes he would draw and paint were of wildlife, though he lacked talent for drawing; his mathematical knowledge served only his understanding of ballistics, and his chemical skills were used only in the mixing of various gunpowders. He was untiring in his correspondence with renowned hunters and writers on hunting, with zoologists and ornithologists, as well as with botanists on questions of game feeding. He wrote articles on game for specialized journals like Wild und Hund (Game and Hound), Der deutsche Jäger (The German Hunter) and Chasse et pêche (Hunting and Fishing) in Luxembourg, and he hardly wore anything but hunting clothes. By nature cyclical and determined by seasonal changes, and by tradition severely ritualized in form, hunting became for him a cult to which he dedicated himself with an almost religious fervor. One was led to think that at some point he realized that the diversity of his talents would lead to a frittering away unless they were made to serve one overriding creative impulse, so he decided to bundle them all together in a single passionate avocation. A gesture of defiance stood at the very origin of his fixation — indeed, obstinate defiance was the determining trait in his character.
This defiance runs like a red thread through what little I know of his childhood, adolescence and young manhood (and how little we know generally of those who have helped make us what we are!). One of my aunts, his younger, undauntingly cheerful and courageous sister, Bettina, told me something typical from their shared youth: she and he, together with his other sister, Sophie, were enrolled in a dancing school in Graz, where my grandparents lived before the turn of the century. The two girls were very beautiful and spoiled by their mother. For the dancing lessons, which were held in winter, the girls were given pretty overcoats trimmed with mink, while he, as the son for whom such luxury would be in poor taste, was measured for something of sober military cut. He hated his coat so much that in protest he behaved badly during the dancing lessons, so badly that he was sent home. He never again danced a single step and all his life avoided balls and other functions involving dancing. That his bride would indulge in the lifelong illusion that her fate had been decided on the dance floor he would have considered a very poor joke of destiny indeed, had he ever learned of it.
His obstinacy destroyed his relationship with his mother. He responded to her strict commands and punishments with an intractability that drove her to even more draconian pedagogic measures. She also thwarted his chemical studies. Because of her he sought a professional field in the vast expanse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy that on the one hand would not be too close to the Ministry of the Interior, where his father labored, and on the other was as far removed as possible from her vicinity. When she died, he was in far-off Bosnia. He shed no tears for her, nor did he ever mention her — not so much as a single word — to me or my sister, though he liked telling us about his father.
Of my paternal great-great-grandfather I own a miniature and of his son, my great-grandfather, a daguerreotype, but of my grandfather I have only a single photographic portrait, which I cut out of a magazine from the turn of the century, where it appeared on the occasion of the opening of a building he had designed. In the correctness of his frock coat he shows an almost fraternal resemblance with my maternal grandfather; although lacking the latter’s short-trimmed beard and overbearing self-importance, he shares the same manly solemnity, stiffened by ascot and starched shirt as if by armor, typical of the period and of Western Europe’s last empires, both Victorian and Habsburg. The amused shrewdness in the corners of his eyes — a roguish hint? — is barely cloaked by the discipline of the functionary; he managed to climb the hierarchic ladder from government architect, by way of privy councillor and department head, all the way to ministerial councillor.
My grandfather hoped for a similar or even more glittering career for his son, but my father’s rebellious disposition ran counter to such hopes. Some of his youthful pranks (painting a moustache on himself with silver nitrate, which took months to wash off) seem to express the fashion of the time rather than individual singularity: the turn of the century has a whole literature testifying to the likes of it. More serious were the conflicts that developed between father and son in my father’s last years as a student.