At the opposite end stood Cassandra’s full-blooded animal vitality. Her almost frightening merriment — like my father’s hardly ever dampened good spirits — was perhaps nothing more than a robust physical disposition’s natural consonance with the surrounding world. While my mother and sister were both incomparably more frail, Cassandra and my father both enjoyed the rudest health, the best of appetites, the most perfect digestions and therefore also the sunniest of temperaments, ready at all times for jokes and laughter. That this readiness to make light of life resulted from insights into its inscrutability at least as profound as Mother’s can be only surmised and hardly proven. To recognize what is absurd and to accept it need not dim the eye for the tragic side of existence; quite on the contrary, in the end it may perhaps help in gaining a more tolerant view of the world.
Our excursion to the refreshing breezes on the hill was probably as chaotic as most undertakings that had their roots in Mother’s rather touching intention to rearrange the world for us as it had been in her own childhood at the turn of the century. We drank cold tea with the metallic taste of thermos bottles, ate sandwiches that had fallen into the sand, played with our hoops and balls, jumped rope and did charades until we became cranky and bawled and scuffled with each other. Soon a storm came up. Our excursion had to be curtailed and we returned to the city sooner than anticipated. The house seemed deserted. The door stood open. The first rooms we entered were in a terrifying state of devastation. Our immediate thought was of robbery. Then Cassandra appeared, naked as the day she was born, out of breath, her chimpanzee face congested to a scarlet hue, her hair loose and barely covering her nudity: a Lady Godiva with a pitch-black mane. She had taken advantage of our absence to have her fill at romping with the dogs all afternoon — bare-assed, a beast among beasts. The wild chase had gone through the garden and the house, and our premature return had left no time for the riotous bacchante to tidy up. She was not in any way embarrassed, but merely declared that the dogs occasionally needed such an untrammeled spree. My mother was on the point of dismissing her right then and there, but my father, who as usual was away hunting at the time, on his return took Cassandra’s side. With that the “scandal,” as my mother saw it, took its place in the long list of humiliations which it was her lot to endure. To her, Cassandra once more had been declared the winner in a decisive either-or situation. We, on the other hand — Father, my sister and I — saw in the bizarre happening not merely proof of the untamable nature of our strange housemate but also something mystical, almost mythologicaclass="underline" the primeval essence of our country embodied in one of its own chosen daughters. For us she was imbued, henceforth, with the power of an arcane native priesthood. When I think back to the house of my childhood, which my memory places in a bright, wide-open landscape, surrounded by birches, beeches and rowan trees (in style somehow akin to the pagan neoclassicism of paintings like those of Franz von Stuck), there is always present in it the image of Cassandra, running wild and naked, and behind her the pack of dogs snapping at the black banner of her mane.
Cassandra’s hair, the beauteous counterpart of her homeliness, was one of the delights of my childhood. She usually wore it tied in two braids, thick as arms, coiled on top of her enormous head and crowning it like a flattened Kurdish turban, a style — she told us — favored by all the women in her village so as to serve as a kind of pillow on which better to carry heavy baskets and pitchers. When she loosened her hair, it would fall down over her shoulders and back in a silkily crackling, glistening wealth, reaching down almost to the hollow of her knees. To grab it and dip my little hands in its dry flows was for me an inexhaustible pleasure. Evenings, when she undressed me to put me to bed, I would stand on the nursery dresser in front of her and take the pins out of her hair, unwind the braids and cover her face with them. Laughing and joking, she let me have my way. At times I would wrap myself entirely in its folds, hiding myself as behind a curtain, and call to my sister — already in bed and usually reading a book — to come and find me. Blissfully I inhaled its pungent smell of almonds and frankincense. Such flowing hair has remained for me the epitome of the sweetly voluptuous darkness in all that is feminine — once more in perfect harmony with the late Art Nouveau style of the era I was born in, but in antithesis to that other, more problematic and refractory feminine element, so different as to be almost inimical to the first, which found its purest incarnation in my mother’s and sister’s ethereal skin and all but translucent eyelids.
This puzzled me later on, since it seemed inconceivable to me that I ever could have perceived in Cassandra anything that could be defined as sexual, let alone the quintessence of “woman.” For me she belonged to those objects and beings of my own, most intimate childhood sphere, among which some — my dog, my magpie, my rabbit or a favorite toy (my teddy bear, an elephant made of some rubbery substance from which I hardly ever was separated) — were especially “soul endowed” through the strength of my love for them. To all these objects I was tenderly attached and I would mourn their loss bitterly, but they had nothing to do with the factual, real world I was growing into: the world of adults, who guarded the secrets of sexuality and death. Cassandra was of my own world, and if I discovered that my domino set was the object of erotic fantasy, this would not have seemed more absurd to me than if this were claimed to be the case with regard to Cassandra.
Naturally, I was not without libidinous stirrings. Thoughts of the feminine rose in me early. Even as a six- or seven-year-old, I was perennially infatuated: with a youthful aunt; an elegant lady who had come to visit; a pretty girl I had seen in passing; or merely a picture in some illustrated journal; the daughter of our physician, more or less of my own age; and many more. My imagination was replete with images of blissful embraces, tender kisses exchanged in fondly silent togetherness, even temporary misunderstandings between myself and the loved one, and the ensuing all the more delightful reconciliations, when all would be cleared up once more — to my own satisfaction, of course. But such emotions were purely “platonic,” in the parlance of that period—“chaste,” as my mother would have said. They had no connection with the signs of budding sexuality that my infantile body exhibited upon chance arousals — much to the delight of Cassandra, I need admit, who on such occasions, with loud praises, half derisive and half in earnest, accompanied by much laughter, was wont to show me off in my proud condition to the cook, the chambermaids and whosoever else happened by or readily could be called to witness the spectacle. This too I saw as nothing but a boisterous prank, all the more so since the chambermaids, almost all of them — like Cassandra herself — barely domesticated daughters of Carpathian shepherds, fled screaming with laughter from this exhibition. Nevertheless, adherents of Professor Freud may find some satisfaction in knowing that then my direst nightmare consisted in my sitting on the potty in an open passageway, exposed to all eyes and unable to flee since, on rising, my naked behind would be fully revealed. The feeling of self-inflicted distress in this dream was every bit as terrifying as the recurring nightmare of a treacherous murder I had supposedly committed, which frequently haunted me as an adult.