On one occasion his prejudice caused me such intense embarrassment that I began to doubt all his notions. It was prior to the great depression of 1929; I was barely fifteen years old but was considered an equal by my father, while my mother still treated me as a petted child. I saw myself somewhere in the middle of those two contrasting attitudes, each of which probably held some truth. As a boy, I played at cowboys and Indians; as a moony adolescent, I saw myself playing the role of future worldling and ladies’ man. The movies provided the models for those dreams in the persons of Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks or Lionel Barrymore, according to one’s mood. The female dream goddesses were Lia de Putti, Louise Brooks and, ultimately, Greta Garbo. Out of sight of my father, I brushed brilliantine in my hair and wore white-and-brown co-respondent shoes with baggy white Oxford trousers. Among the young ladies of whom I was enamored, one was the local tennis champion. In those days, one did not yet play in bathing suits. The headband and white skirts ending above the knee featured by Suzanne Lenglen lent even to young girls a feminine allure that compelled us, their young male partners, to observe a gentlemanly comportment all the more pronounced in its punctilious correctness for being precocious.
The president of the tennis club was a Jewish banker, the fashionable man in town. He had known my mother’s family for decades and treated me with the most engaging courtesy. That he was also a hunter goes without saying: there hardly was a sport in which he did not participate. That to my father hunting was not a sport but a sacral act was another matter. In any case, the two Nimrods had never met. It so happened that a big drive shoot was arranged on which I was allowed to accompany my father. When we arrived at the meet and got out of the car, my father froze in his tracks. Among the guests who had arrived before us was the Jewish banker. My father turned to me and said cuttingly, “I’m afraid we’re in the wrong place. We were supposed to come for a shoot, not to the stock exchange.” He turned on his heel and went back to the car. Before I could follow him, the banker came up to me, shook my hand most politely and said, “I trust we’ll see each other soon for tennis.” I bowed in agony and hurried after my father. He spoke not one word to me on the way home or for the next few days.
It need hardly be said that such eccentricities did not make him friends. But the prevailing tolerance in a region distinguished by so motley a mixture of ethnicities, where everyone accepted the others with all their peculiarities, with either a sardonic smile or an indifferent shrug, conferred a kind of fool’s license on mavericks like my father. Few had much esteem for him. He made no bones about the fact that he counted Romanians (after Czechs and Poles) among the body-strippers of the corpse of the defunct Dual Monarchy. Russians, Poles and Ruthenians were mere colonial populations. He saw himself as a leftover functionary of a liquidated empire. “We have been left here as a kind of cultural fertilizer,” was one of his favorite sayings. With violent abhorrence he rejected any identification with the local ethnic Germans of the Bukovina, whose black-red-and-gold Teutonic affectations, elastically adapted to Romanian conditions, seemed to him as presumptuous as the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich philistines. Aryan zealotry and hatred of Jews were not hallmarks of the aristocracy: quite the contrary; in those days they were the characteristics of the newly risen bourgeoisie. Withal, he had an inkling of the dangers inherent in such pettifogging fanaticism. “Such people always tend to exaggerate,” he would say.
At that time, however, he could still count on many people approving of his peculiar ideas — though not my mother. His thoughtless excesses and oddities she would counter with the terse comment: “One’s mind is well rested when one has so little in it’’—one of her few ironic remarks. On the whole, she thought of him as literally insane and of his insanity as directed maliciously against her. That there were other women who found his traits amusing enraged her. She hated him too much to be jealous, but she felt ridiculed by the pleased complicity with which these other women laughed and carried on in a lightheartedly cheerful manner with him. During their life together she suspected him, probably with good reason, of extending his frequent professional assignments not merely to hunt but also to spend part of his time at various estates where he was on equally — if not more — intimate terms with the lady of the house as with his host. That he never even suggested taking my mother along was a social affront that she held as much against the innocent hosts as against him.
I don’t believe that his escapades were accompanied by much passion. He was sensual but unsentimental in his relations with women. Yet those who knew him well knew that he could be unreservedly affectionate. In this too his defiant contrariness was involved. He too had experienced a youthful infatuation he had not gotten over — with a highly musical young lady by the name of Olga, who all her life kept contact with my sister and me. This unfulfilled love — which in his case surely meant a love not killed by marriage — left him disappointed, with a scornful attitude toward women.
The admixture of self-irony could be misleading. He frequently advertised his crushes with such abandon, for all the world to see, that one could hardly deem them serious even when they were. He serenaded the lady of his heart of the given moment in his early-morning vocalizings, praised her beauty and virtues at the top of his voice, showered her with flowers and the disastrous products of his painterly zeal, and was offended if she did not decorate her rooms with his capercaillies bubble-plopping their mating calls in the rosy dawn or his stags bellowing in autumn mists. Not all women were willing to become his desired playmates; when one or the other obliged him, he soon carried the game to such lengths that she was forced to break it off if she did not wish to be hopelessly compromised. I recall a significant episode from my childhood: one of my mother’s sisters came from Vienna for a visit, my much beloved Aunt Paula. She, my mother, my sister escorted by her temporary English — or French? — governess and I holding on to the hand of Cassandra are taking a demure walk in the People’s Park. Along one of the avenues my father approaches from the opposite direction, in the company of a lady. The exchange of salutations between the grown-ups is icy. I can’t understand why and notice only that my father and the lady are dressed precisely in the same way: both are wearing traditional Austrian costume, which was beginning to be rare in the Bukovina but was nevertheless worn occasionally, especially by hunters. I am innocent enough to see in this harmony of attire — gray loden with green facings and side braidings, and stag-horn buttons — nothing more shadily significant than an entertaining masquerade, and I cheerfully crow my discovery that even their cuff links are identicaclass="underline" stag teeth set in gold. Without a word my mother tears us from our escorts, turns on her heel and majestically sweeps us away, followed by the crestfallen aunt, the deeply shocked governess and an incomprehending but amused Cassandra.
When my father observed greater discretion in later years, he did so mainly out of consideration for my adolescent sister. If one assumes that there really is such a thing as a “single great love in life,” then my sister was his. Surely he also loved my mother in his unromantic way and would have known how to invest his feelings with greater affection if only she had met him halfway. That he was not insensitive to her charm he revealed on many occasions: with the gifts he gave her, the books he sent her even after they had separated, such as, surprisingly — in some way as a counterweight to his mating capercaillies and bellowing stags—Sonnets to Ead by Anton Wildgans, and also, almost as antidote, the scandalous diaries of Franziska von Reventlow. Unfortunately, he could not dampen his humorous impulses; he had overpowered her with indomitable vitality from the very beginning of their marriage, provoking ruffled resistance, then stiffness and ultimately anger. Rarely can there have been a more unhappy combination of temperaments, and when he said, “It’s all chemical, anyway,” he spoke a heartrending truth. They were certainly not well matched.