All too soon these gathered dust. Away from home, in Kronstadt and later in Austrian boarding schools, different skills were demanded of me, which I managed to master, albeit reluctantly and with only a modicum of success. I had only enough time to draw malicious caricatures of our teachers, which amused my classmates. Soon any fun I took in this palled. Other and more banal passions supplanted what once had been truly a gift from heaven.
After our separation from Bunchy, my sister remained in constant touch with her in Vienna. Our beloved governess established herself as a private tutor but maintained close relation with my grandmother’s household. I, for my part, found myself propelled out of the family orbit and lived an emotional double life. Between the heavy, vine-encrusted walls of the old rectory in the shadows of the monumental Black Church in Kronstadt, supervised and strictly disciplined by the taciturn and ascetic high apostle of health, Court Counselor Meyer, I pined away in homesickness. Even the bluest summer day was steeped in melancholy despondency. No game, no breathless romping, no adventurous discovery in the adult world (for instance, that a bordello, which we secretly spied on, operated in one of the city-wall towers) could still my longing for Cassandra’s brood-warmth, redolent with the smell of peasant bread, or for the delicate scenting of my mother’s wardrobe — I even missed my sister as an irrevocable loss. The countryside around Kronstadt was heavy with golden corn in the dark embrace of the forests; the town, comfortably embedded in a hollow between low hills, was smiling and friendly; but the high blueness of the sky above, where swallows tumbled, seemed lined in black by reason of the all-pervading bleakness of the Lutheran spirit; it was a firmly grounded world but I had not been born in it, and it was different from mine, different by its greater specific gravity, a higher degree of ethical hardness in comparison with which my world appeared frivolous and flimsy. It was a Protestant world of elders, edifyingly reminded of its own strength by regular and finely wrought sermons, mightily thunderous with pious chorales pacifying the soul — a world in which I felt futile, and as weightless as a pigeon feather tumbling down from the nowhere high above the church steeple, down to the cobblestones of the marketplace. I was of another faith (if any at all), one that in these parts was coolly rejected and one that I betrayed myself: each Sunday I lent my voice to the choir of young voices filling the majestic nave of the Black Church — never my own church — with the praises of God; I could not free myself of the obscure fear that in doing so I burdened myself with a sin. I was never quite free of other guilt feelings, tainted as I was by the ambiguous aura surrounding a child from a broken marriage, which in those days was rare and morally impugnable and which therefore made me precociously and somewhat disreputably up-to-date, a quality that in Kronstadt was repudiated on principle. I missed my sister as a companion in this misfortune and as living proof that ours was a special fate and that I was not alone in daring to be different. When I went home, after the torments of another school year, I forthwith was caught up once again in the inescapable grid of my mother’s anxiety-obsessed injunctions and prohibitions, a net that smothered every expression of vitality and every initiative, numbed all pleasures and, like a Nessus shirt woven of manic precautions, instead of protecting us — as intended — from the wrongs and perils of life, irritated and burned our skin. I would have given anything to be allowed to stay with my father in the woods, but this my mother prevented by taking us to the Carinthian lakes and the Black Sea. The days on which it was granted me to accompany the Great White Hunter on his game stalks were numbered.
Time in Kronstadt then also became a thing of the past — leaving me with another kind of homesickness for its self-assured order, though this one gentler and more readily arranged. Bunchy was far away and had lost her reality, become once more a mythic figure. She belonged in equal measure to the painfully missed nesting warmth of home and, in some way hard to explain, to the firm, quietly confident texture of time in Kronstadt. Where did I stand in all this?
Naturally, I was not perceptive enough to realize that so-called reality encompasses too many aspects ever to be unambiguously that which it professes to be; reality was for me always changeable according to the belief of the moment, and thus dubious in its ultimate effect. Henceforth I looked outside my own existence for the essential. I read adventure stories, as was but fitting at my age. And I came upon Mark Twain. In the wondrous perils and experiences of Huckleberry Finn, I (together with millions of other dream-haunted boys) found everything I longed for, all the freedom I lacked.
I attempted to share this enthusiasm with my sister. (She was reading H.G. Wells then and when I asked her about it, rejected my curiosity with a cold, “You couldn’t understand it,” which led me to read The Shape of Things to Come behind her back; I failed to understand what it was that supposedly I could not comprehend — a frustrating experience.) As to Twain, she commented dryly: “If his own printing press had its letters cast like the ones in your press, no wonder he went bankrupt.’’
I didn’t understand what she was talking about. She explained it to me but not without that subtle malice which took the wind out of my sails and at the same time kept me from — as she liked to term it — “putting one over on the rest of the world.” The miniature printing press that Bunchy had given to Uncle Rudolf and then had passed on to me had come to her originally from Mark Twain: Bunchy had been his lady companion before she came to our mother’s family — it must have been in the years between 1891 and 1897, when Twain indeed had engaged in a failed speculation with a printing operation.
The term “lady companion” allowed for implications that in my eyes gave Bunchy a new dimension. Not that Bunchy was actually Mark Twain’s mistress, even though she remained his companion after his wife’s death. But this chapter in her biography, regarding which she left us in the dark, held a definite romantic allure. Though it was proof of her discretion that she never spoke of it, this rankled in me: we had not become as close as I had fancied. Even my sister heard of the matter only later in Vienna from one of our aunts (the socialist one, I imagine).
The significance of the disparaging undertone that could not be missed in my sister’s disclosures dawned on me only gradually. It referred by no means to Mark Twain, to whom my fifteen-year-old sister generously granted high rank as a writer, and even less did it refer to Bunchy’s role, whatever its intimacy, in his life. On the contrary: what she sought to express was that these personalities and events were entirely outside my ken. In any connection with them, I was conceded a barely marginal and subaltern part, and under no circumstances was I to derive pride from the fact that I happened to own a memento of Mark Twain; it would have been worse than presumptuous for me to imagine that Bunchy thought me worthy enough to be connected, through her gift, to that part of her past. In particular, I was to keep myself strictly outside the legendary period when Bunchy had been Mr. Twain’s companion in Florence. This was preeminent cultural territory, forbidden to Cassandra’s nursling. That Bunchy had felt enough affection for me to give me the miniature printing press that possibly had been a model of the one that had led to Twain’s financial demise meant nothing at all; being given a token, even one so meaningful in its allusions, was far from the same as having access to the Florentine part of her life, spent at the side of the author of Huckleberry Finn. In contrast, Bunchy, long before, had given my sister the poems Michelangelo had written to Vittoria Colonna, and had told her a great deal about Florence, and the connection was deepened additionally by her recent art-historical studies in Vienna…. To all of this I had no rejoinder: every word was true, and thus I was dismissed and could go to continue my little adventures with Huckleberry Finn.