And I also was lived by the anguish of sexuality. This is not the place to confess when and how I lost my so-called innocence — I lost the innocence spiritually long before losing it in the disappointing physical act. To keep this innocence for any time, I would have had not to be raised in Czernowitz; it may well be that the cynical — or more accurately, incorruptible — sense of reality which is one of the boons derived from such East European schools of life, made my approach to the subject “man and woman” even more prosaic than it would have been, given my natural disposition. Nor did it require my father’s sharp aphorisms, barely lightened by humor, on related themes. From Cassandra’s earthy closeness to nature, through Mother’s shifting, flickering professions of tenderness alternating with explosions of rage and cruel punishments, all the way to my sister’s icy distancing from me, my childhood held nothing that would have promoted a gushing romanticism. Nevertheless, and as a docile son of the West, I did whatever possible — though perhaps not my best — to conform to the accepted norms. Love was a myth to which everyone clung all the more intensely the more reason there was to render it suspect. The reality was as the pop song lyrics had it: “Alas, love is but a fairy tale….” Whoever has offered me the apple of knowledge, I have chewed on it contentedly in the gratified realization that the lost paradise was nothing but a cloud-cuckoo-land peopled by mischievous goblins.
Apart from the time I spent in the festering atmosphere of my spartan schools, with their hard benches and besmirched bed sheets, I lived as a teenager surrounded by women, in an ambience of women’s dresses and perfumes and toiletries, to which my father’s guns, dog collars and spring-traps provided only a somewhat inadequate counterweight. My fantasies were feverish. I was spared — thank God! — such early traumatic experiences as those of the Wolfman, while my anguish at not knowing how Cassandra and her cavalryman managed to “crap on the ground together” without leaving any visible traces lay buried deep in the past. But the needs of the flesh remained unassuaged, after the Fall just as much as before it. And it wasn’t flesh alone that tempted and troubled, attracted or repelled; behind that lay something mysterious that required, through enactment, deciphering. This has nothing to do with love. While my sister was cramming with her Fritz for her brilliant final exam in the little coffeehouse near the Salesian church, I roamed through Vienna seeking to get to the bottom of the mystery of the flesh. Certain experiences should have taught me that this search would be in vain. One of those occurred much earlier.
I was very fond of my grandmother. Not because she might have shown me much grandmotherly affection but — on the contrary — because she was less rhetorical, more sober and at the same time more frivolous than the other members of my maternal family, from its idolized head, my despotic grandfather, to his caricature, the youngest offspring — foolish, handsome, conceited Uncle Rudolf, whose nose had been bitten off by my father’s dog. My grandparents’ five daughters, all of them cantankerous, with cast-iron convictions and outlandish notions, formed a self-righteous and irascible clan that would not acknowledge anything that did not conform to the narrowest traditional concepts or currently accepted platitudes. Grandmother came from an airier environment; foreign blood had made hers flow more freely. Small and dainty, with exceptionally fine-chiseled features and beautiful hair, she had been all her life the object of rapturous admiration; as a consequence, she had little concern for the fate of her fellow human beings and all the more interest in her own.
She had every reason to be satisfied with it. Except for the drastic curtailment of her means toward the end of her life, a curtailment that she took as total impoverishment, she could look back on an opulently well-provided existence. She had fulfilled all of her life’s duties in exemplary fashion; she had been an unconditionally devoted wife (concerned mainly with questions of proper appearance), mistress of a large household, the by no means exhausted bearer of eight children (two of whom died in infancy), and an adequate mother who appeared to her children as a model of evenly distributed maternal love and rigorously applied pedagogic supervision. Apart from that, her head was filled with little but fashion and, later on, solitaire. There survived something of the eighteenth century in her. I loved the canny cleverness with which, with no pretension and much deftness, she knew how to conceal her unabashed frivolity behind the façade of Perfect Family Mother. Her unsentimental comments, which in comparison with the rest of the family’s self-righteousness let in some fresh air, were balm to my heart. Her little vanities delighted me as much as her well-hidden petty barbs. I am certain that it was with some satisfaction that she declared she had handled her own life better than her eldest daughter had, even though at times she would add pointed remarks to the chorus of voices lamenting my mother’s hard lot, for which my father was unanimously blamed. Only much later did I realize how many of her character traits my sister inherited.
My insight into the insidious ambiguity of her character was, as is usually the case, less the result of years of observation, of carefully collected and reviewed impressions, than the rich revelation of a single moment. Once — it must have been the year after our parents’ separation and my own separation from my sister — I burst into my grandmother’s dressing room in her house in Vienna without being announced. And there she stood in her underwear like an erotic vignette of the past century, her waist tightly cinched by a corset, puffy underpants tied under the knees with pink silk ribbons and, below their lace edging, elegantly shaped legs in black stockings and high-heeled strap shoes. She turned toward me in surprise but without the slightest embarrassment, her hair carefully coiffed, a full-bodied iron-gray hair which, held in a transparent bonnet, appeared as if still blond in the light slanting in through the angled louvers of the Venetian blinds. All kinds of morning noises reached us through the open windows: the melodious calls of street hawkers, the hoofbeats of fiacre horses and the rumblings of motorcars (in those days individually discernible), the jingling of streetcar bells and other signals of awakening urban bustle. Together, all this had an electrifying effect upon me. I had come from the rural Bukovina to the capital with high-strung expectations. Babylon’s pulchritude lay spread before me in all its wickedness and I was eager to savor it. So there I stood all the more perplexed; surely I was not mistaken when I thought I detected in my grandmother’s sharp question whether I had not learned to knock before entering a room a coquettish undertone that was already addressed to the future man in the grandson. The glance between us — I a malicious imp of barely ten, and she a sixty-year-old as frivolous as a drawing by Félicien Rops — was unmistakably one of shameless mutual recognition. Only too clearly did I see before me an inveterate seductress, ready to be seduced, and even the twin taboos of incest and the difference in age failed to inhibit her from acknowledging this: it struck me as equally comical and disturbing. Years after, a similar incident with Bunchy convinced me that the flesh never entirely renounces its domination nor completely reveals its secrets — but of that later, in its own place.
This was but a small pebble in the mosaic of my erotic enlightenment that provided, as in a Klimt painting, the background for the drama (tragedy? comedy? penny-dreadful?) of my actual sexual experiences, which threw me into disarray and alienated me forever from my sister. With the cool gesture with which she had distanced herself from me after our first separation, she placed herself in an enclave of untouchability, not merely for me but for the world at large. I was unable to imagine her in any erotic constellation whatever; she remained the personification of an asexual ladylike entity, a romantic ideal bereft of true reality. In the years that were to be the last of her life, the impression of irreality, even implausibility, in my own existence — and perhaps in that of all of us — led me to harbor extravagant notions. Among these was an almost magical obsession with matters sartorial— though I shared this aberration with many others; it was, one might say, a collective neurosis of the era. But hand in hand with this went a general propensity toward a make-believe attitude in the whole life-style, as if anything might happen merely for the sake of appearance. While I thus impersonated the ideal of the dandy, my sister presented herself — in all the youthful radiance of the promise of her life, perky, spirited, intelligent, ambitious and purposeful — a splendid specimen of a girl, in comparison with which my immature foppishness was bound to seem all the more fatuous.