Attempts were made to comfort my poor mother. Residual Catholic doctrines allowing that since my sister had died a virgin (as my mother proudly maintained) and therefore was more likely to reside in heaven than hell were inadequate to reassure her; she required certainty and, consequently, inquired in Vienna whether proof of her child’s well-being could not be obtained from the unknown realm of the defunct; the spiritualistic circle headed by my aunt was fortunately able to fulfill her wish. Since it would have been onerous to travel from Vienna to Czernowitz with the whole staff of the circle, including its leader and mediums, the otherworldly committees that purportedly were in charge of determining how the over-there was to make contact with the here decided to empower my aunt with the required medial qualifications to establish a transcendental communication between mother and child.
My aunt arrived. She belonged to the dark and rather thickset type of my mother’s sisters, my mother being one of the long-limbed, reddish daughters of my ethnically checkered grandparents. In accordance with her pyknic constitution, my aunt was robust, cheery and full of joie de vivre, so it was hard to imagine that she had such intimate relations with the departed that they selected her as their mouthpiece for communications from the realm of the shadows. Yet this was apparently the case. Since I was allowed to witness her mediatory services only from a discreet distance, I cannot tell whether it actually was my sister’s voice that spoke through her or whether it was her own in substitution for those who had conversed with the deceased. I preferred to believe the latter, for when I had seen mediums fall into a trance (so as to lend the empty shell of their body to an astral spirit) it had been anything but an edifying sight; it was bound to frighten my mother, were she to see her sister fainting away unconscious, her eyes rolling upward until only the whites showed, raising herself up after tormented moanings and stammerings, foam on her lips, like a corpse emerging from a coffin, the glance now rigidly directed into nowhere and hands groping as if blinded. Whether my aunt had also been empowered with the ability to transcend into the astral zones, I am unable to say. My mother remained mum on the subject, as well as on the essential portent of the messages she received.
To hold these private séances, we drove to the woody hills outside Czernowitz, which in times past had been the scene for our childish games of hoops and diabolo. I now squatted on the edge of a blossomy green meadow, in the midst of which the two sisters sat down; I soon saw them in close embrace, the dark-haired one, her face lifted to heaven, apparently speaking in tongues, and the red-haired one helplessly sobbing her heart out on the former’s shoulder. After they broke away from each other and we returned to the car, my mother’s eyes, reddened by tears, reflected total emptiness; my aunt, on the other hand, showed her everyday cheery mien, as if nothing at all had happened. I had seen lovers returning in a similar way after indulging in clandestine copulation.
Soon my aunt returned to Vienna. Her presence seemed to have had a beneficial effect on my mother — she calmed down, but after her departure fell into an apathy of dull despair. I myself was as if boneless. I idled the days away and rampaged through the nights with my newfound friends, Romanian students with the typical characteristics of their species: proud and touchy, romantic and foolish, glowing with chauvinism. The tensions between my mother and Philip made staying in the house unbearable. I hardly ever saw my father; he came only rarely from Transylvania and tormented me with suggestions for studies I had no intention of undertaking. I was besotted with a girl whose mind and soul had been bleached to a pale blue cloudiness by Armenian clerics; I quarreled with her constantly about religious questions and she deeply resented my blasphemies. As a means of quelling my cynicism, I looked for some charitable mission and hit upon the crazy idea of replacing my aunt in her transcendental role with my mother: if my will to help her were only pure enough, why shouldn’t I too be granted the privilege of being the messenger between her and her dead daughter, particularly since my sister was surely eager to provide solace from the beyond?
I sat in front of a mirror and stared fixedly into my eyes, intent in utmost concentration on emptying myself of my own being so as to be nothing but a vessel for another spirit. And then something truly uncanny happened: I felt an icy flow rising through my nostrils and into my brain… and I was suddenly terrified and too weakhearted to take the next step — whatever it was. I stood once again as an ordinary self, my heart pounding in my chest, abashed by my craven withdrawal from the threshold of an unimaginable adventure that might have cost me my life or my mind but probably would have enriched me by a new and unknown dimension. Yet I knew it had been my sister’s wish that I should not go further. It would have established an intimacy much more indiscreet than the one I sought by kissing her at our encounter after our first separation. A short time later I broke away to Bucharest, and for the next few years all my passion was centered on horses.
This was how things stood when, finally, back in Vienna in the early winter of 1937–1938, I met Bunchy once more. Those were turbulent days when politics impinged on life everywhere in the world. But since hardly anyone I knew took any of this seriously and since grumbling about prevailing conditions was part of the everyday Viennese atmosphere, I did not grant the events any more scope than that which they occupied on the front pages of the dailies I didn’t read, or in the hurly-burly of the rabble screaming slogans in the streets. I was repelled by all of it. Fortunately, this turbulence had its own tide, and so there were hours, especially in the evenings and during the night, when one was not molested by it. Bars and nightclubs thrived. The ranks of Bunchy’s Jewish pupils and friends were swelled by emigrants from the German Reich, who told of horrible things happening there. One could only hope fervently that these would not occur also in Austria.
The new year began: 1938. I took Bunchy to the theater. After seeing Molnár’s Liliom we were in such a fine mood on the way home that I linked arms with her in the fashion of Liliom, swinging her to and fro and singing: “Come, Louise, my love, come on my swing, there’s lots of pleasure to be had, of our everlasting love we’ll si-hi-hing!” and she almost collapsed with laughter. When we arrived at the door of her house, she coquettishly slipped behind the grille and drew it closed. For the sheer fun of it, I rattled the grille as if I wanted to be taken in — and to my incredulous surprise saw that she took me seriously, that this woman well over seventy actually assumed that I, her pupil of twenty-three, had the intention of bedding her. It amused me to no end, filled me with shame and, at the same time, much affection. I would have liked to tell her that I loved her all the more for this disclosure of the archfemale and all too human bondage to the flesh. So I pretended that I really wanted nothing more than to join her; she laughed until the tears ran down her cheeks, but saw to it that the grille was well closed, threw me a last kiss and then also closed the gate, winking at me through a gap, giggling madly, excited and flattered. Only then did the lock click shut.
Then came March 12, 1938, and Germany’s annexation of Austria. A few days later Bunchy disappeared to parts unknown. It was said that she had moved to the house of friends in the country. Her benefactor in Vienna had been Baron Frankenstein, Austria’s last ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, who refused to serve Hitler and had sought political asylum in England. Bunchy was no longer safe in his house in Vienna, with all her circle of Jewish friends.