She remained in the country all through the war, and I had no contact with her until 1946. Then a long letter reached me that told of her circumstances and also contained the confession to a “failing.” The manor house in which she had survived the war was now in the British zone of Austria. The owners, who would have been unable to produce proof of their unblemished Aryan origin, had escaped before the war, just in time. Bunchy represented their interests and continued to do so. With the end of the war, swarms of refugees arrived to whom she provided shelter and care. She was assisted in this by the British occupying forces, who supplied her with essentials. They had great respect for the old lady speaking fluent English, who now received testimonials of love and gratitude from all her friends and pupils around the world who had been able to save themselves (unfortunately not all of them, by any means). One day the British regional commander ordered all the inhabitants to assemble in the manor yard. In front of the intimidated assembly, he disclosed that among them an SS leader was hiding who was being sought for having committed major crimes. Of course he was using another name, but Bunchy was presumed to know who it was. If she were to refuse to identify him, all the subsidies would be canceled and the improvised refugee camp would be dissolved. She wrote to me that she had been left with no choice. The fate of too many unfortunates depended on her. Her conscience had to be relegated to a back place and she had to reveal whom she suspected of being the person sought. She didn’t forgive herself for this denunciation and could not sleep.
A year later, came another letter: “… In the matter that has so heavily burdened my soul, I have finally found relief. It has come to me now how I should have behaved. I should not have denounced the man, but I should have appealed to his honor: Mr. So-and-so, step forth! That I now realize this does not absolve me of my failing at the time. But it reestablishes an ethical order: I have learned from it.’’
Another year later, I received the news of her death.
Of Bunchy too I have kept this weird instrument that technology has placed in our hands with which to conjure the dead back to life: a photograph. I cannot look at it without remembering something she told me about long ago on the occasion of our visit to the Odaya, her account of a recollection by my sister from the childhood days she spent there: It is a morning in early winter with no snow on the ground yet, but biting cold has settled in overnight and the world is choking in dense fog. A thin sun fights against the fog and slowly manages to consume it, so that it condenses as hoarfrost on everything; each branchlet of each bough of each tree and shrub, each bush, each blade of grass still standing, each thistle at the wayside wears a white fur that glitters under the sky, which meanwhile has become immaculately clear. My father fetches some skates and drives with my sister down to the river. The river is frozen stone-hard and black, since no snow has dulled the ice. It is transparent down to the bottom of the river, and one can count every pebble lying there. My sister is not much more than four years old; it is the first pair of skates she has ever worn, but guided by her father’s gentle hand, she skates with him down the river, an endless trail, bordered by shores scintillating with rime, the reeds furry and the birches as if spun of glass, and above it all a sky of deepest blue, like the one that soon spread for her over the Adriatic.
I carry this picture in me forever: the big man on skates, clad in old-fashioned stylish garb, his bald head covered by a woolen ski cap, carefully holding the hand of the tiny girl. Her other hand is hidden in her little muff, and her face, pink-fresh from the bite of the cold, is framed by the fur-edged hood of her short coat. Thus they glide through the frost-sparkling world and draw into the black mirror of the ice the thin fishbone pattern of their traces, one in long and widely drawn sweeps, the other shorter and narrower. And all this flows together with the images of Cassandra and the lady in white who told me about it, even though in the picture I have preserved of her she is clad in black, magically arisen from the pool of memory like the shadowy apparitions that slowly took form on the photographic plates in the developing baths gently rocked by my father’s hands.
Epilogue
Czernowitz, where I was born, was the former capital of the former duchy of Bukovina, an easterly region of Carpathian forestland in the foothills of the Tatra Mountains, in 1775 ceded by the former Ottoman Empire to the former Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian realm as compensation for the latter’s mediation in the Russo-Turkish War; the Bukovina was at first allocated to the former kingdom of Galicia, but after 1848 it became one of the autonomous former crown lands of the House of Habsburg.
One can readily see that everything in this quick summary (with the exception of the town of my birth, whose name, in the course of historical evolution, underwent several changes — from Czernowitz to Cernăuţi to the present Chernovtsy) is designated as “former,” that is to say, not in the present, not truly existing — and this invests my birthplace with a kind of mythic aura, an irreal quality. It’s of no use to try to elucidate this mythic twilight by means of historical analysis. That the Austro-Hungarian monarchy has not existed since 1918 is well enough known, yet in Czernowitz-Cernăuţi, people acted as if they didn’t quite believe it. German remained the everyday language of most people, Vienna was the closest metropolis, and no one thought of denying it the rank of capital. Even though the reality of Shakespearean kingdoms like those of Galicia and Lodomeria had become more than questionable, people spoke of them as if they still existed; today they speak of the Bukovina as if it were still a political entity even though it disappeared as such in 1940.
In the days between 1919 and 1940, the Kingdom of Romania governed the Bukovina with a sovereign self-assurance based on the claim that it had been the Romanians’ archoriginal home soil, their Ur-land since the time of the Dacians — a claim that may be questioned. In Czernowitz-Cernăuţi, one did not go to the trouble to doubt it. In fact, that Romanian interlude was hardly more than a fresh costume change in a setting worthy of operetta. The uniforms of Austrian lancers were supplanted by those of Romanian Roşiori, infantry wasn’t worth noticing much anyway, and the whole transformation was given no greater weight than the one accorded the changing scenery at the municipal theater between Countess Maritza and The Gipsy Baron or The Beggar Student. It took barely twenty years before the black-and-yellow on the border posts and the doors of the tobacco-monopoly shops was painted over with the blue-yellow-and-red of the new sovereigns and the double eagle on the steeples of public buildings was supplanted by the Romanian coat of arms. Then, in 1940, Cernăuţi became Chernovtsy and the whole Bukovina became something “former’’; nominally it no longer existed, cut in two by a state treaty between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, concluded in cavalier disregard of the legend about the Romanian Dacians. The region south of the Siret River, together with Moldavia, was allocated to the present People’s Republic of Romania, while the northern part, with Chernovtsy, fell to the Soviet Republic of the Ukraine. As a result, Chernovtsy was no longer a capital, since the capital of the Ukraine is Kiev.
I used to hesitate when asked about my place of origin, and the reasons for this demurral were twofold: first, because the admission that I came from Czernowitz invariably drew the irrepressible comment, “Ah, I see…” This is not limited to former Austro-Hungarians, for whom the very name Czernowitz stands for a standard set of concepts: Czernowitz seems to be well-known everywhere as the setting of most Galician-Jewish jokes and as the breeding ground of an unmistakable type of individual. My hometown gained world fame as the melting pot for dozens of ethnic groups, languages, creeds, temperaments and customs, fused and refined there into a quintessential species of “Slaviennese” rapscallions. To what extent it is an advantage to be counted among them is a moot point. All my life I did what I could to make the best of it. The poet Paul Celan, who said of Czernowitz that it was a place where people and books had lived, has done better than I in this respect.