Whether he considered later developments with an equally consistent perpiscacity and saw in the Third Reich of Hitler (whom he termed a “vagrant housepainter’’) the ultimate debasement of a Prussian pseudo-spirit and thereby the true betrayal of his much beloved concept of a Greater Germany is a moot point. He could not express this in letters; even then, any mail reaching the ever larger realm of Greater Germany from abroad was filtered through a censorship that never would have permitted such heresies to go unpunished. Still, I had many reasons to assume that he was greatly pained by what he saw as a profanation of once pure and stimulating ideas, which were then further perverted by misuse. His quixotic disposition prompted him to translate these convictions into action. When the Transylvanian Saxonians became infected by Third Reich delusions, their leader, a Mr. Roth, managed to extort from the Romanian government, under pressure from the German authorities, the privilege of issuing special passports to German-speaking ethnics in Romania. My father declined such a passport with an expression of thanks. He declared that he was a citizen of the Kingdom of Romania and intended to remain loyal to this allegiance. Unfortunately, the Romanians too no longer had much comprehension for such an attitude. As a result, he remained without a passport. But he had no intention of leaving the country.
The year was 1939 and war had broken out. Russia’s initially peaceful occupation of Bessarabia and the northern Bukovina took place in 1940. The state treaty that made this possible neither surprised nor deceived my father. “Remain where you are,” he wrote to me in Vienna. “One has to go into cover.” He too remained where he was. He still hunted occasionally and cultivated a special friendship with a Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, born a Nabokova — member of a family with whom I was linked by many independently formed friendships. And then his health began to fail. The irony of fate ordained that the illness that felled him was the one of which my mother imagined herself to be the victim: a kidney ailment. In his case, its origin was clear. While visiting friends, he had contracted scarlet fever from their children. That he survived at all at his age bordered on the miraculous. Without waiting for his complete recovery, he then had jumped into an icy river in the dead of winter to recover a piece of game — he wanted to spare his dog. In September 1943 he took to bed with uremia. It was his wish that I not be informed. Dying is the most private of matters. When he realized he was going blind, he resorted to one of the “strong remedies” from his medicine box in the linen closet.
His friend Bishop Glondys had visited him on the preceding day. To his question whether, after all, there was a message for me, my father replied: “Yes. Please tell him I’m sorry to be dying in a year in which the wine in Transylvania promises to be so outstanding.’’
The Sister
A child’s paintings on some sheets of paper: large, wondrously dark-shaded flowers, stemless and floating in space as in the world of the blind. Next to it an owl with reading glasses on its round eyes — a sort of student joke, and also a finely chiseled, very pointed stiletto. All this framed by a branchwork of mistletoe twigs in the Art Nouveau style and inscribed with a name, forming an ex libris. The name sounds neo-Romantic, as from a knight’s tale of the turn of the century: Ilse.
Now that I write this down, she has been dead for fifty-six years and not one of those years has gone by without her being close to me in an almost corporeal way — not in the abstract sense of a lovingly preserving memory, but in a well-nigh physical presence, often anything but welcome. Whatever I do or fail to do, whatever happens to me, she stands constantly in front of me, next to me, behind me, observing; at times I even call her to make sure she’s there. For fifty-six years — a whole life span — there has not been for me a single happy or unhappy moment, neither success nor failure, no significant or even halfway noteworthy occurrence on which she might not have commented. She is mute but she is there. My life is a wordless dialogue with her, to which she remains unmoved: I monologize in front of her. In the sequence of images in which I experience myself in life, she is included in every situation, as the watermark in the paper bearing a picture: she has the face of a twenty-year-old, clear eyes watching me with an amused air, one brow raised skeptically, full lips, inherited from her father, ironically angled at the corners. The watchful expression is constant; it is always there.
I would not know where to look in me for the key traumatic experience that generated this obsession, nor do I know how I could find it. With psychoanalytical methods? I don’t quite believe in them. In the 1930s in Vienna, when I still could have consulted the great Sigmund Freud himself, I came across a copy of his case history of the “Wolfman.” I could not imagine how the distraction of this unfortunate man, scion of an assiduously suicidal family, widower after the suicide of his wife as well, a former millionaire whom the Russian Revolution had driven into exile without a cent, saddled with a hysterical and ailing mother who refused to die, himself afflicted with an exemplary checklist of neuroses — I could not imagine how the derangement of this poor devil could be traced to nothing more than that, as an infant, he had accidentally witnessed his parents engaged in coitus a tergo. Even today I find myself unable to deny my skepticism about such allegedly scientific assumptions, especially when I’m supposed also to believe that the discovery itself would induce the healing process (which, incidentally, was not the case with the Wolfman).
Nevertheless, deference to the spirit of the times prompted me to push my investigations in that direction — most inadequately, no doubt, since I undertook them on my own, using only the rather crude means at my disposal. With a fine-toothed comb I went through our jointly experienced infancy, as well as through the adolescent years during which I was separated from my sister, all the way to her death at twenty-two — I was eighteen at the time. All I could have come up with on the notorious oilcloth-covered analytical couch was an expression of gratitude to my parents for having arranged — although not millionaires (not Russians either) — for our nursery to be far enough removed from the scene of their (fairly infrequent) sexual activities, to spare us early traumas. Even if this had not been the case, I would have observed such a happening with the same clinical interest with which, instructed by Cassandra, I witnessed similar activities between dogs, cats, rabbits and other animals; the experience left no lifelong repercussions in my psyche. I should add, though, that the nonsexual tensions between our parents and their uninhibited explosions in front of us triggered a fairly complete anthology of neuroses. My efforts to deal with these on my own, without professional rummaging in my unconscious, greatly enriched my life. Insofar as my sister is concerned, however, it may well be that they contributed to her early death.