It never entered his mind to think of himself as impoverished. Curiously enough, his painting earned him some rather substantial pocket money, though the pictures no longer consisted exclusively of mate-calling capercaillies and bellowing stags. He produced pleasing watercolors of the churches, which he knew better than anyone else: his impressions of Voroneţ, Dragomirna, Suceviţa and all the others found buyers in friends with a taste for folkloristically accented art. In fact, a series of these paintings of monasteries, done for the Bishop of Hotin, is now shown with great pride in the Museum of Arts and Crafts in today’s Chernovtsy. And he did have friends. He no longer scorned contact with the locals as he had in the Bukovina. A friend of old was the Saxonian bishop Dr. Viktor Glondys. Another was the royal Romanian hunt marshal of that time, Colonel von Spiess, a Ganghofer type in folksy flowing pelerine, eagle wings adorning his Lettow-Vorbeck hat, and an open Schiller collar worn with a jacket that, thanks to an abundance of stag horn and oak leaves, combined the glamour of a marshal’s uniform with the woodsiness of a forestry apprentice’s jacket, and that, in its modishness, might have incited the envy of Emperor William II or Hermann Göring. Colonel von Spiess had a bevy of charming daughters, with whom my father surrounded himself as with a garland of flowers. These beloved friends stood as assurance that he could feel welcome in his new surroundings.
He lived modestly in a small house with a housekeeper, Mrs. Agnete, who — as was to become apparent later — knew how to feather her own nest. There wasn’t much to be had. Occasional remaining artifacts of his once expensive life-style showed his insistence on quality even in reduced circumstances. He had always lived rather abstemiously: he liked good wine but drank only moderately, and smoked each day four or five cigarettes which he rolled himself. One pocket in each of his jackets was lined in doeskin: in it he kept long-fibered blond Macedonian tobacco and some very thin cigarette paper. I never overcame my envious impatience as I watched him lower one hand into that pocket, listening almost pensively to its hidden manipulations, and come up a few moments later with a perfectly rolled cigarette, the paper of which he merely had to moisten with the tip of his tongue to close it before lighting up. My efforts to emulate this sleight of hand led only to a disgusting mixture of crumpled paper and tobacco crumbs that could not be brushed from the pocket seams. When I asked him how on earth he managed to accomplish it, I got as answer, with the same astonished shaking of his head that my and others’ inadequacies elicited from him: “How else can you do it when you’re on horseback holding the reins in one hand and have only one hand free?” It was left to me to ponder whether some Catholic priest in China might give me a more illuminating explanation in Latin. His hands, incidentally, were like rough paws, coarse and red from sunburn and frostbite, but his nails were regularly cared for by a very pretty manicurist.
Whether it was because he relished the idyllic and easygoing yet by no means narrow-minded town of Hermannstadt, or because his mellowing sunset years mitigated his harsher traits, he seemed to me more amiable and relaxed and less aggressively eccentric. His figure soon became an integral part of the town-scape of Hermannstadt, for he was set in his habits and these led him, day after day, through the same streets — he called them his “runs’’: easily recognized from afar by his height, his rural clothing and his old hunting hat, he walked with deliberate steps, his feet pointing slightly outward (a dandy’s affectation from the turn of the century, which one can see in the caricatures of Caran d’Ache) in his mirror-polished, rakishly narrow custom-made shoes, one of the expensive relics from better days, his black-and-white cocker spaniel, Trixy, following at his heels like a shadow. That he now wore a short-trimmed ice-gray beard did not diminish the hardy freshness of his cheeks. His blue eyes flashed above cheekbones that a fine web of small red veins transformed into rubicund apples. Whenever he lifted his hat in greeting — which he always did with an ironically wide flourish — his shining head would appear like a dark ivory billiard ball. He always looked as if he had just emerged from his bath, the blood circulation still invigorated by the ice-cold shower, scrubbed dry with rough towels, and the skin freshened by sharp lotions. His fragrance was not ostentatious but unmistakably individuaclass="underline" a highly masculine, acidulous scent, composed of good soap, leather and fresh linen from a closet in which he also kept heron feathers, an ermine skin, a little box with medications (some of them highly poisonous) and pistols emitting a faint whiff of gun oil and gunpowder. He no longer practiced pistol shooting in the first light of dawn; his present dwelling was too confined for that. But it was now his pleasure to let a visitor select a green nut on a tree in a neighboring garden that he then would shoot off its stalk with unfailing accuracy.
It goes without saying that he was not entirely free of his old crotchets, oddities and paradoxes. Any talk with him might be diverted toward a dead end by his pedantry. All too often he would interrupt a general conversation to leave the room and return with a pile of lexica and encyclopedias, so as to ascertain a disputed word or an ambiguously defined concept, or correct a wrongly spoken name. His lack of self-criticism in the matter of his painting was disarming, but it seemed inexcusable and irksome that he also stuck to the most incomprehensible prejudices and fixed ideas. Among these were several that he himself breached in practice, especially those involving women. In his world order and following Nietzsche (and his favorite author, Péladan) in an interpretation rather more naive than philologically accurate, he classified the weaker sex as belonging to a species predestined for bondage and submission. But when actually confronting a woman, he would suddenly emerge as a compliant knight, extolling the virtues of his chosen one to the heavens. His tendency scornfully to dismiss whatever did not conform to his expectations in no way contradicted his basic inclination to faithful devotion. I was not surprised that he asked me to propose to my mother that she might return to him should the discord between her and Philip become unbearable.
She took it with a hint of a sarcastic smile around her slightly compressed lips, which at the same time drew down at the corners in bitter disdain, and there was even the beginning of a contemptuous nasal snigger, as if she understood only too well the true motive for this belated contrition: past middle age, impoverished and deserted by his “other females,” he would try to come back to her in repentance. Nothing could illustrate more clearly how deeply she had misunderstood him all her life. To be sure, he had not always been considerate of her, he had failed to behave well, scarcely mindful that he had married not a mature, experienced woman but a dream-besotted child, rigidly educated according to prevalent doctrines that she then followed meekly as a lamb, in both thought and deed. In all their life together, she had never understood that he too thirsted to be redeemed. And though he would have liked nothing better than to show her this, he would have done so with deplorable awkwardness. His lovable traits — his limpid lightheartedness and playfulness — drummed down on her as something frightening. Everything about him was a size too large for her, too impetuous. Significant for this was the moral indignation with which she complained, even decades later, that he had not understood her loathing of his physical advances. (She did not speak of this often, but at one time or another everyone she considered an intimate — an ally — learned of it.) She spoke with the tight-lipped restraint she considered appropriate to so delicate a subject, summed up in the verdict: “In a word, a man of uncontrolled animal instincts.” Had she not had to witness how her husband, his amorous approaches rebuffed by her, disappeared for hours into the darkroom with one of her cousins, whom allegedly he instructed in the art of photography? She shared the opinion of him that presumably she was accepted in Czernowitz: cold, arrogant, vain and mad, but mostly mad — an opinion that probably is held all over concerning those who tend to react to stupidity, provincialism and philistine narrowness of mind with acts of jocular rebellion à la Till Eulenspiegel.