My great passion at the time was to draw, for which I had an undeniable talent. However, he insisted that first I was to finish some academic work regardless, before devoting my time to graphics. In my various attempts to conform to this request — at the Mining Academy in Leoben, in architecture at the Technical Academy in Vienna and by short digressions into medicine and stage design — I lost those years that truly could have been fruitful for an artistic formation. And then I had to return to Romania to do military service. At that point it turned out that my Austrian high school diploma was not recognized in Romania — with good reason, in my case: I was as ignorant as a carp. So I could become an officer candidate and not have to play soldier for three years, I obtained a supplemental Romanian baccalaureate. Only then, at the age of twenty, did I finally learn something of the history of the country in which I had been born and whose citizen I was, and discover the treasures of Romanian language and literature. I did not hesitate to express my enthusiasm for all this in every way I knew, assailing my father with questions regarding the monasteries he knew so intimately. I met with a strangely cool reaction. He understood my sudden thirst for knowledge of Romania as a sign of my defection from the values of Western Europe, perhaps even as my betrayal of himself: with the newfound pride in my Phanariot forebears, I professed, in his eyes, a shift to my mother’s family and thereby also to my Romanian origin. I was strictly forbidden to show myself in Romanian uniform. When I later moved to Bucharest to work there, he wrote me off completely.
But I’m jumping ahead of my story. I still shuttled between confused stays in Vienna, filled with all kinds of other activities and pastimes rather than studies, and vacations in Czernowitz and the Carpathians that were pleasurably eventful with respect to both erotic and hunting experiences. My head was buzzing more generously with tie patterns and lecherous crushes than with useful knowledge, a fastidiously barbered, sleekly slick lounge lizard in pearl-gray chalk-striped double-breasted suits and suede shoes, blindly absorbed in the trivial doings of bars and nightclubs, in the boudoirs of demimondaines and the beds of dubious hotels. For the latter, my father showed tolerant understanding. When I then declared that I wanted to give up my studies for good, he made one last, lame attempt to persuade me to study what he himself had missed out on: chemistry. After which he gave up. It was too late to make an educated man out of me in accordance with his own standards. From then on he considered me an ignoramus, a mere consumer of illustrated periodicals, a harbinger of the barbarians who, he foresaw, would soon engulf all of Europe.
He perceived this barbaric invasion as advancing from two sides: from Bolshevik Russia as much as from an America dancing in worship around the Golden Calf. “To fashion present-day Americans from the Pilgrim Fathers, we sent them our human dregs,” he was wont to say. “Jefferson’s America was drowned in the flood of human riffraff flushed in from Ellis Island. With the conquest of the West by the immigrant rabble, the greed for possession has become epidemic. Any act of violence, any fraud, any whopping lie is all right as long as it serves the pursuit of money, success and power. And it infects us all.” These were controversial words at a time when America was regarded as the rising star of all future hopes. My mother dismissed them with a shake of the head, as she did with all his oddities.
As for the Russians, no comment was necessary. They were the murderers of the tsar’s family, butchers of the flower of their nation. The rabble of the entire world found in them not only a horrible model but a political objective, more bestial, more inimical to life and more alien to reality in its utopianism than the calamitous French Revolution. Moreover, the Russians were threateningly close. The border of Soviet Russia was only a few dozen miles to the east, on the other side of the Dniester, a stone’s throw for a motorized army. Sooner or later a little excursion to a neighboring country would be made — that he foresaw with certainty. A chain of events in his personal life made it easier for him to draw his own conclusions. The first of these and the most personal affected him grievously.
My sister had finished her studies and in the course of these— true to tradition — had found the “man of her life’’: in her case, unfortunately, quite literally the one and only. That this might be merely a harmless school flirtation can be ruled out; the young gentleman showed honorable and serious intentions, and she no less. Nothing could be said against him. He was the scion of a prominent Austrian family who would one day inherit lands in Styria and Galicia, and he had trained — like her — for the diplomatic service. They did not plan to marry right away; after graduating from the Consular Academy, he had to obtain a law degree and spend a year at an American university; his grandmother was American, a fact my father could not carp about, since she was a southerner and, in addition, wealthy. Nevertheless he behaved as if a Lebanese white-slaver were about to kidnap his daughter, and treated the presumptive suitor accordingly when he came to pay his respects and introduce himself.
My sister was deeply wounded. She found it hard to accept that her beloved father could show so little perception, and she held it against me for a long time that, in his most childishly defiant manner, he dropped her forthwith and turned to me, by then a tolerable hunting companion. We spent an unpleasant summer, riven by dramatic tensions — partly in Jacobeni, my mother’s newly acquired property that was meant to be transformed into a sanatorium, and partly at the deserted Odaya. Before it was over, the second and third events occurred that were to ease greatly my father’s departure from the Bukovina.
The supreme authority of the Orthodox Church in Romania issued a decree according to which administrative officials not belonging to the church hierarchy could be retired after thirty-five years of service instead of the customary forty. My father claimed that this totally arbitrary decree had been promulgated only to get rid of him, but he was not the only person whom the Church had taken over from the former Austrian civil service. He may not have been wholly wrong, however, in believing he was the main target of the decision to cleanse the Religious Fund of all foreign elements. Greater Romania, the product of the 1919 Treaty of Trianon, was at the peak of its vainglory and did not like to acknowledge that, together with its minorities, it had been bequeathed their cultural heritage. My father never let an opportunity pass to proclaim this loudly, and on one of these occasions he had precipitated a nasty dispute with Professor Jorga, pope of all Romanian historians, an effrontery equivalent to lèse majesté and defilement of the national flag.