My sister and I heard of all this when we came back “home’’— whatever that meant. She had come for a few days from Galatz and I from Leoben for summer vacation, which I was to spend hunting with my father. I fetched her from the train station and drove her to his house — we were kept away from our mother’s for the time being, in order to spare us unpleasant scenes. Once we were there, I told her what had occurred; together and in tears, we sank to the floor in paroxysms of laughter. When my sister recovered, she went to the bathroom and threw up.
She returned to Galatz without having seen her father, who was away hunting. I myself stayed with him only a short while and spent the summer in Czernowitz, one of the happiest summers of my whole youth: unsupervised and carefree, playing tennis in the “Jew club,” as my father called it, in love without the usual gnawing obsessiveness, unencumbered even by embarrassing arguments between my mother and Philip, which disclosed ever more and deeper discrepancies than those that were the immediate consequence of the collapse of Jacobeni. Then, in autumn — oh, the blue-golden autumn days of those years! — I returned to Leoben, still lighthearted and unencumbered, so frivolous that even today I remember that period of presumptive studies with conflicting feelings. On an evening after the usual boozing with fellow students, I somehow ended up in the kermess booth of a fortune-teller. Her gaze rigidly directed at some far-off point, as in a picture book, clad in a wrap decorated with the signs of the Zodiac, her smooth, shining black hair severely parted in the middle, she was surrounded by the complete instrumentarium of prophecy: the glass globe, tarot cards, astrological tables and, behind her on the wall, the picture of a turbaned magician with glowing eyes, surrounded by flowing rainbows. Smirking, I sat down across from her, and she took my hand, peered into its palm and said, “Soon someone who is very close to you will die.” I wish I could swear by something exalted that would invest what I am about to say with the seal of gospel truth: at the very instant the seeress intoned those words, I saw my sister’s green eyes before me. The next morning I got a letter from her: “I’m a little bit sick.” We never had written to each other, least of all when we had a cold or an upset stomach. I knew it was she who would die.
Soon she had to give up her position in Galatz and return to Czernowitz. A small swelling of a gland behind her left ear enlarged. My mother brought her to Vienna. We saw her leave, my father and I, in the train station where so many of our arrivals and departures to and from our schools had taken place. My sister, laughing, looked down at us from the window of her compartment, and my father joked boisterously, unconcerned by the reaction of strangers and bystanders, as was his wont when he was in a jolly mood. The train started up slowly, we exchanged some final farewells, we waved good-bye, my father took off his hat and then, turning abruptly, said, “I’ve seen her for the last time.’’
In Vienna, she was treated by a Professor Sternberg. The lymphogranulomatosis, as her affliction was diagnosed, in those days was called “Sternberg’s disease.” But even the efforts of this preeminent authority were of no avail. She wasted away, and soon the tumescence expanded over her neck and down to her shoulder. Once she said to me, “If Father were to see me in this condition, he would help me.” I knew what she meant.
To my mother, she showed great tenderness. She saw how much the poor thing suffered for her. At times, when my mother was sharp with me because of her, our eyes would meet and we couldn’t suppress a smile. Once I caught her unawares as she was observing her mother’s glance sliding off, as happened so often, from the here and now into an indeterminate remoteness. Once again our eyes met, and I understood something unfathomably deep: her expression was hard; she had always feared and hated the threat of slipping away into this indefinite vagueness. Had she realized that this was why she had renounced the poetry of her childhood myth at the Odaya? She gave me a brief nod: it was an admonition.
We became true siblings once more. I left Leoben and stayed in Vienna, where she lay bedridden in our grandmother’s house. I became friends with her kind and gentle Fritz; our close friendship was to last for many years past her death and until his own. Fairly soon it was clear that there was no hope for her. Because she loved the mountains, she was brought to a sanatorium near Hall in the Tyrol, in beautiful surroundings. It bore the somewhat creepy name of Gnadenwald, “Mercywoods’’—an occasion for more of our macabre jokes. She herself had no illusions about her condition. Although her suffering reached almost biblical proportions, she lost none of her courage or her readiness to laugh at absurdity. When I visited her for the last time, she drew me close and whispered, “I must tell you something that will make you laugh. I myself can’t anymore. It hurts too much.” The tumescence had fused her head and shoulders; her hair had fallen out; while receiving radiation, her larynx had inadvertently been burned and now she coughed incessantly; her whole body was covered by an itching rash. What she told me was something that in times past would have united us in laughter.
My mother would not tolerate that any of the sanatorium’s friendly, well-trained personnel took over the care of her daughter. For weeks my sister could not sleep and my mother would keep vigil with her, barely resting between periods of wakefulness. Finally her exhausted child fell asleep, and my mother, almost blinded by fatigue, was about to retire and find some rest herself. But as she stood up, she noticed with horror that a spider was lowering itself on its thread from the ceiling precisely over my sleeping sister’s head. Spiders always had been an abomination for her; there was nothing she found more loathsome. And now here, floating above the face of her deathly sick child, this creature appeared to her as the embodiment of all the evil that had befallen her. Mindless, on blind impulse, she took off her slipper and squashed the spider to the wall with it — with the obvious result that my sister woke up in shock and could not sleep again for weeks.
My sister feasted on my laughing to tears. She whispered that she’d like nothing better than to follow suit — for wasn’t it one of the funniest, most characteristic episodes, typical of her mother’s always misguided good intentions?
A few weeks later we buried her in the cemetery of Hall in the Tyrol.
Bunchy
In a cameo set as a brooch, a melancholy faun, sitting under an olive tree, blows on his panpipe; above him are seen the three richly flowing feather panaches of the crest of the Prince of Wales, together with the device Ich dien. The brooch lies in a velvet jewelry box in the lid of which, tipped open, the warrant of arrest for Landru, mass murderer of women, has been pasted. There are ice-flowers on the windows, and some newspapers in cane frames are lying on the marble tabletop of a Viennese coffeehouse. The lady in the back, behind the cash box, wears her short-cropped hair brushed down over her brow and is clad in a wasp-waisted dress; as with “The Lady Without a Lower Half” in a circus sideshow, only her upper trunk can be seen. She holds a magnifying glass in her hand which she discreetly hides whenever someone looks at her.