Be that as it may, he could only welcome the premature termination of his service, since he could now indulge his passion for hunting without restraint. Unfortunately, there was a snag: the “frocked vultures” argued that he had been in their service for merely eleven years, namely from 1919 to 1930, and that he was entitled to a pension for that period only. Pension for the remaining twenty-four years, from 1895 to 1919, he kindly should collect from the Austrians. This was clearly contrary to the provisions set forth in the state treaty regulating the takeover of former Austrian civil servants. But even if the Romanian government had agreed to pay him for that time, it would have meant a severe curtailing of his benefits: eleven years in the service of the church and twenty-four years in that of the state did not equal a full pension for thirty-five years of service, especially if these thirty-five years were to be counted for the customary forty. My father was ready to submit his case forthwith to the courts, where undoubtedly he would have prevailed if he had had the support of similarly affected colleagues. But of these, none was ready to make a move: they were all of shorter service and his juniors in rank, and trusted in some future compromise.
While negotiations in this matter were pending, he was the victim of an additional misfortune. For years he had undertaken to collect and transfer the retirement benefits of colleagues who had been pensioned earlier and who had returned to Austria. By giving him power of attorney for these transactions, they saved themselves the time and the bother of coming back from God knows where to collect their monies. While at the bank collecting this large sum of money, the yearly remunerations of several high-ranking colleagues, he placed the entirety in a billfold next to him on the counter of the bank window and filled in the forms for the transactions; when he was finished, the billfold was gone. He had to make up the money from his own pocket. He always had lived well above his means and was heavily in the red at the bank. The bank proceeded as banks are apt to do: it granted him the credit and in return took everything he still had. The beautiful dream of living henceforth in the woods and only for hunting dissolved.
He was not the sort to lament such strokes of fate. His mood was in a minor key only when he spoke of his diminishing chances for hunting because of the “damn continuous and forever growing depredation of God’s nature by the ever greedier and more numerous human herd.” What then remained for a huntsman but to withdraw to the depths of the woods, where they were still relatively untouched, where one’s last shot and the dog’s barking in sorrow for a dead master would be lost in pristine remoteness…? But he would wait a while longer before taking this step. For the time being, thanks be to God, the Carpathians were still rich enough in trees and game to make the heart of any true huntsman leap with joy at the mere thought of it. Even as he saw his dreams in the Bukovina evaporate into thin air, he began to realize their fulfillment by other means elsewhere. The virgin woods were his only true home and hunting was now his only profession. Count Mikes of Zabola, who owned immense tracts of forests in Transylvania, was looking for a manager to organize high-priced shoots for foreign hunters. My father applied for the position and was accepted.
There, in Zabola, in 1932, he received the news of the death of my sister. He, who was in no way superstitious, reported a strange occurrence in this connection. He had spent the night in the forest under the skies and had been awakened by a something that most tenderly stroked his cheek. He had not doubted for a moment that it had been a message from his dying daughter, even though he tried to explain it away by the touch of a moth: but could there be a moth in early March in mountain woods? a bat? the wing of a wood owl? Whatever: he knew my sister had died, and went down to the village to collect the telegram with the news of her death. Countess Hanna Mikes later told me that he sat motionless on a bench in front of the castle, holding the telegram in his hands, while the tears ran down his cheeks. Then he got up and returned to the woods.
His stay in Zabola was short. He had a falling-out with the count, who wanted to sell shoots of stags that my father considered not sufficiently reconnoitered, let alone securely positioned. They separated in anger. My disputatious father immediately wrote an article, triumphantly printed in a German hunting periodical, in which he warned against misleading promotions of capital game shoots in Romania. The matter was brought before a kind of court of honor of the hunters’ collectives in Romania. Its decision overwhelmingly found in favor of my father on all points, praised the manly courage with which he had uncovered a disgraceful blotch on the national honor and committed it to extirpation. He was presented with a ceremonial hunting knife, which he put away in a corner of his gun cabinet with the comment: “Those arseholes would like nothing better than to stick it in my back.’’
He moved to Hermannstadt (now Sibiu), in the heart of Transylvania. Never for a moment did he grieve for the house of my childhood on the outskirts of Czernowitz. From it he took with him only his guns, his painting gear and his spaniel, Trixy. Even easier to him came his leave-taking from the “Jew city” and the fake “black-red-and-gold Bukoviniensers,” the “frocked vultures” and “Russnyaks and Polacks.” He loved the Saxonians of Transylvania, who for eight hundred years, as he conceived it, in defiance of the wrongs inflicted on them throughout the history of Eastern Europe, wedged in between Hungarians, Romanians, Turks, Wallachians and Poles, had nevertheless managed to preserve a German heritage to his own liking: pre-Bismarck, even pre — Frederick the Great, also pre — Maria Theresa and, in fact, anti-Austrian. He capped the Wartburg pathos of his youthful Sturm und Drang period with this Meistersinger version of the idea of the Reich. That it wasn’t so very different from the Bukoviniensers’ “phony black-red-and-gold Germanistic to-do,” which he despised, need hardly be stressed. But he believed that the evidence supported his assertion that the Germanophilic attitudinizing of the Bukovina Swabians was nothing but presumptuous affectation: they deformed spoken German when they opened their mouths — in truth, it was an ugly dialect — and, generally, got along well with Jews.
Such wrongheadedness in an otherwise intelligent and highly educated person of superior character is less surprising when one remembers the spiritual situation of the period. In those days, the nebulous romanticism that conjured a mystic aura around the idea of a Greater German Reich was an infection spreading like an epidemic among German-speakers in Central Europe, a disease to which not even the Transylvanian Saxonians were immune, even though they were absolutely sure of their unequivocally defined identity. They were first of all Transylvanians, German in origin and language but completely independent and themselves almost aboriginal to the region: deeply rooted in a country they had inhabited for almost a thousand years, with a self-assured culture they had created themselves (and, incidentally, a culture that conferred much of value to the people between whom they lived, the Hungarians and the Romanians). They were connected to the German world of their origin, but no more emotionally tied to it than, for instance, the German Swiss. But when they forgot all this to follow the mythic call to greater national unity trumpeted in its most depraved form, that of the Third Reich, they lost everything: their country, their culture and their identity.
There was, however, quite some time left before reaching that point, though it was only half a decade — time appears short only in retrospect. My father blossomed in Transylvania. The world of the Saxonians seemed to give reliable support for all his psychic needs. Here he no longer had to play the thankless and tiresome role of the leftover colonial master. Though Romanians were Transylvania’s sovereigns, in this region they comported themselves with discretion. The problems of living together and of getting along had been fought over and settled long before. Hermannstadt, a thoroughly German city, prettily centered around its cathedral, was a world apart from Czernowitz, a “town of the steppes” and devoid of tradition. The burghers’ houses were strung together along streets and perspectives of venerable dignity. The gables left over from the late German Renaissance evoked, indeed, an atmosphere reminiscent of the Meistersingers; the baroque and classical façades were of old Austrian vintage. The Saxonians themselves were a solid, upright sort of people, and their broad dialect resembled that of the Baltic with which my father felt affinities. In like manner he was fond of Hungarians; having served in a regiment of Hussars, he spoke Hungarian better than Romanian. The countryside was magnificent, large forests were close by, and the trophies of the bucks were several degrees better than elsewhere. What more could he ask for?