I watched eagerly to see whether her imposing appearance would also induce my father to kiss her hand. Quite apart from the fact that it was pretty hard to get my father to kiss anyone’s hand, excepting that of his beloved of the moment, he and Miss Strauss already knew each other. After having greeted her with a formal “Good day,” he contented himself with a dry comment: “Well, this one hasn’t gotten any younger either.’’
She was then — in the summer of 1921—probably about sixty, though we were never able to ascertain her exact age; in any case, she was older than my father, who had been born in 1876. She had come to our then eight-year-old mother in 1898 and stayed with her until shortly before her marriage in 1909. So she would have met my father as bridegroom, wearing his woolen ski cap, in the midsummer of 1908. Magical dates! They troubled me because they were preludes to my sister’s birth — that is, preludes to that special world experience which was her handicap over me. Now, before me stood the Keeper of the Great Seal of this treasure, and I began to watch jealously to see whether my sister, on the strength of her advance in time over me, would try to establish a secret and deeper intimacy with Bunchy, our new and in so many ways meaningful housemate…. But then something miraculous happened: a few weeks later Bunchy went alone with me to the Odaya.
First, however, I have to recount how she gained my confidence. In contrast to children today, we were not spoiled with a surfeit of toys. Christmas and birthday gifts from my mother were always selected with great empathy and were joyfully received, but they were anything but lavish. The legendary ship’s model that foundered in Constanţa belonged to a later period, when we no longer had a true home and my mother tried to compensate for the distance that separated her from me, at school in Kronstadt and desperate with homesickness. As long as the family lived together, we children had contented ourselves with a few stuffed animals from our infancy — and of course, our live pets: dogs, rabbits for a while, two or three broken-winged birds found in the garden, a magpie, a starlet, a robin — until our mother somehow got it into her head that they carried meningitis and tuberculosis. My sister’s dolls moldered at the Odaya; she didn’t want to see them ever again. My “German Brother” was in rags; shortly after the Romanian soldier had thrown him in the gutter, his belly split and a sad mixture of straw and sawdust dribbled out, leaving a slackly empty uniform — the felt it was made of suddenly seemed horribly shabby — crowned by the stupid blond head without its rookie’s cap. My ball with the multicolored circus pictures I had lost to the treacherous seducer from beyond our garden gate. Of my toy saber I had been relieved, after wounding a child of one of our country’s new masters with it, a deed that might have drawn on us down their vindictiveness unto the seventh generation; as to the handful of lead soldiers I had, Cassandra usually kept them hidden in a box, so as not to arouse the wrath of my father (though the real reason for secreting the soldiers was probably that they wore the uniform of Austrian dragoons and as such would be deeply distasteful to any Romanian). Miss Knowles, arriving and vanishing in our lives like a meteor, had introduced us to some indoor games, to be played at a table in sedentary gentility — such as tiddlywinks, which soon bored us after we almost split each other’s heads open over it. Even worse were games like merle or ludo; neither of us was what our bucktoothed Miss called, in her jolly British way, “a good loser.” I ardently wished for a miniature railway set and never got one, though the Christmas and birthday presents with which Mother bribed us became more opulent with the passage of years. From a remote and shadowy time (near Trieste? in Lower Austria?) I also seem to remember a cardboard with holes into which many-colored glass balls could be inserted to form a variety of patterns; all my life certain ornaments, some luminous advertisements and, more recently, photographs recomposed in computerized images have reawakened with almost electrifying intensity the early optical impression made on me by this toy. Any object that we could consider personal property held intense power for a while, a feeling heightened by fear of losing such a beloved object — which probably contributed, in fact, to our frequent losses; our often wounded susceptibility helped to develop a resigned, loose relationship with property. (It may well be that later this was also expressed in matters of the heart.)
The most beautiful present I ever received in my childhood I received from Bunchy. She brought it with her from Vienna, and she took it out of a large cardboard box — the first one she opened after we took her to her room and her luggage was set down. “It belonged to your Uncle Rudolf,” she said as she carefully unwrapped two small wooden boxes from their layers of tissue paper; one was larger and lighter, the other one smaller and heavier. My anticipatory pleasure was so great that I didn’t even care what gift my sister was getting — and now I’ve forgotten what it was. Urged on by the unfamiliar white lady in her white traveling suit — still too overwhelming a presence to be called Bunchy — I carefully opened first one, then the other of the little boxes. The lid of the lighter one was opened and closed by screws that, with a gentle pressure, would squeeze down on some three dozen parallel slots as on a writing block. The heavier box had two compartments, one of which contained a small hand roller and several bottles of variously colored ink, the other one filled to the top with tiny, square-cut pieces of lead. Taking one of these in my hand, I found it showed on one of its surfaces, cut in relief, the letter F; a second one showed a lowercase a. They were the letters of a complete miniature printing press, adapted to my own diminutive size. Our new governess’s black-gloved fingers took the two pieces from me, placed them in one of the slots, selected some more letters from the compartment, rejected some and chose others until she composed, letter by letter, the words “Family Rezzori.” Only then did Bunchy take off her gloves, as after a task well done. “This little printing press comes from America,” she explained. “I shall tell you later how I got it. I gave it to your Uncle Rudolf.” She added offhandedly, “He hasn’t played with it very often.” (Miss Knowles would have said: “We are not surprised.’’) I looked at the line of type and said, “But if I now put a paper on it and draw it off, our name will appear in mirror writing.” Bunchy stopped short, thought for a moment, took another piece from the box and scrutinized it closely. “You are quite right,” she said. “The type has been wrongly cast. That’s probably the reason why your Uncle Rudolf didn’t much like this printing box. You’re a clever little boy to have noticed this so quickly.’’
This remark was more than ample compensation for the disappointment that I would never be able to compose anything on the miraculous printing box that could be read properly and as it should, from left to right. Bunchy’s praise, expressed in front of my sister, was a triumph that initiated the slow recovery of my badly damaged self-reliance. From that moment on, I loved the lady in white and never called her anything but Bunchy. She reciprocated this love. She became a powerful helper during my entire adolescence, as Cassandra had been during my childhood.