Much later, when the truth had dawned on me about many things that I had once considered self-evident but that were, on the contrary, incomprehensible, I wondered how, in a world that suffered day in and day out the most cataclysmic changes, we could have remained stuck for so long in our narrow, blindered complacency — not only our conceits regarding our social position, our assessment of our fellow beings and ourselves, but the overall situation of the world around us. Czernowitz, for us, was the center of the universe and our home was its very core. It was but natural that as growing children we existed in a state of cultural pupation, from which we freed ourselves only gradually, through increasing our knowledge and deepening our insights, shedding layer after layer of childhood’s dream condition and the stereotypes that indiscernibly were part of it, the wrappings that had protected us. And it goes without saying that this process was not a gentle, gradual one, let alone painless or unopposed; it happened rather by sudden jolts and shoves, in insidious evolutions which we perceived only long after they had taken effect.
When we had come to know Bunchy, it astounded us that our mother had been reared by her. Obviously she had assimilated all the rules of proper comportment, the knowledge of languages and art history befitting a “daughter from a good house,” but she had failed to acquire any of Bunchy’s sense of humor or her sound common sense (which she shared with our father, although neither he nor she would have liked to acknowledge this), nor the openness to the world, the lack of prejudice and the intellectual independence of this exceptional woman, not to speak of the generous respect Bunchy showed for other people’s peculiarities. Nor could much of this be detected in our aunts, who also had been Bunchy’s pupils; what little there was, was buried under moronic class prejudices or, worse, collective ideas and opinions. We concluded that one could teach and learn only so long as teacher and pupil shared more or less the same physiological disposition—“chemical concordance,” as our father called it. Slowly it dawned on us that the oddities in our household were in some way effectively the marks of a social class, one belonging to a dying and largely already superannuated caste, and that the only remaining salvation consisted in renouncing all of it. That this did not happen violently and destructively, as was the case with later generations, we owed to Bunchy’s perceptive and considerate guidance.
She never indicated with a single word, an inadvertent gesture, a glance or even a twitch of the eye that she might be disappointed with what had become of her former pupil. She treated my mother with the same even-handed, loving and tolerant care she must have shown to her when she was a young girl, her attitude now heightened by the polite respect granted to the mistress of the house. A more civil tone entered our home, where hitherto emotions had been expressed in fairly unbridled fashion. Even Cassandra straightened up with a pride that had been awarded her at long last and that no longer could be denied her by some miss from Smyrna or some vaguely whorish mademoiselle from Marseilles. Bunchy’s dignity stood watch over our own; withal, we were freer in our manners, we laughed more frequently and less maliciously, and we took whatever still pained us — such as my mother’s regrettable and frequent accesses of temper and manic vagaries — in a spirit of greater tolerance. When a certain pettiness of outlook degenerated into stubborn narrow-mindedness, Bunchy’s determined intervention drew our attention to basic discrepancies between the conception of life held by normal civilized people and that held by us. We then made haste to follow her implicit injunctions.
When she came to us from Vienna in the summer of 1921, I was so confused by her apparition that I had to be fetched with almost brute force from Cassandra’s room, where I had taken refuge, to be presented to her. We had heard of her for as long as we could remember; she was spoken of within the family as a temporarily absent relative, all the more dear because of her absence; she appeared in most accounts of my mother’s youth, that mythic time, even more remote and splendiferous than the period in which I was not yet and my sister already was “of this world.” I would have considered her as a pure fairy-tale figure had we not received from her regular congratulatory postcards, usually reproductions of paintings by old masters, especially those of the Tuscan school (it was said that she had lived for years in Florence), on the occasion of our birthdays, Christmas and Easter; the golden background of those Annunciations lined the place in my psyche where her name was embedded. She had been a living presence in my inner being long before there was any talk of her joining us, and when one fine day this was announced as imminent, it seemed a barely believable miracle, almost a profanation. This witness to the lost glory of our house, a glory in which I had not been allowed to share, this guardian of the irrevocable, whose existence in this world reached back into the secrets of time even further than my sister did, was now to face me in person; she was to become flesh and blood. She had been a participant in the reality that no longer was real but was perhaps only an assertion by those who had lived before me, a reality that was documented solely in a few surviving artifacts and graspable in these only in some moments, in shadowy singular aspects — as in the wrought-iron backrest of that rowboat rotting in the pond at the Odaya…. It was she I was to face and to whom I now was to introduce myself, as so often in the past years and with growing rebelliousness I had done with the misses and mademoiselles flashing by like transient comets. Cassandra washed my hands, brushed my hair and nudged me through the door of the study into the drawing room. There, majestically towering next to Mother, stood the mythic figure of Mother’s family, Miss Lina Strauss, arrived that very moment. My sister already stood confidently close to her and looked expectantly at me — in malicious amusement, so it seemed.
It was a bright summer day and, to my pleasant surprise, Miss Strauss was wearing, not as I had expected, a severely black turn-of-the-century dress, like a child murderess in a wax cabinet, but a white traveling dress; the skirt reached to her ankles, and the short jacket, old-fashioned in cut, was buttoned all the way to the neck. It seemed a garment fitting the resplendent wearer and the radiance filling the room. “So there he is,” she said, as if greeting someone she had known forever, and stretched out to me both her black-gloved hands, one of which I grasped and kissed, as I had been taught was the polite thing to do when being introduced to a lady — though at that instant I realized it was hardly proper to be kissing the hand of a governess, particularly one in a black glove. It would never have occurred to me to do this with Miss Knowles or Mademoiselle Derain (she actually had the painter’s name). Involuntarily I glanced at my sister, but the imposing figure in white had interposed herself between us. Miss Strauss knelt down to me, took me in her arms and kissed me, saying, “He is too polite. We shall settle between ourselves to whom he is to show such courtesy and where this is a bit too much.” When she stood up, she kept my hand in hers, placed the other on my sister’s shoulder and said, “Now show me where I shall be staying. I have to recover from my journey. I’ve been traveling almost two days.” I saw that my mother had been watching this encounter as an engaging spectacle in which her well-bred children showed themselves to best advantage — and in a better light, certainly, than at those costumed affairs she had been arranging for us. We were finally behaving with the grace and poise she expected of us, as in a genre Biedermeier painting, and she basked in the moment. Maternal satisfaction — all too infrequent — brought her a rare instant of true relaxation, and it triggered a mood wholly different from the nervously imperious harshness we were used to. This was a foretaste of Bunchy’s blissful influence on the atmosphere of the household.