All in all, this certainly was not a world of ease and plenty, and it was entirely free of the mad waste and squandering that is the hallmark of late Occidental consumer paradises. There was no sales talk, no urging to buy this or that, nor did anything irritate by junky superabundance. The moderation was pleasing, whether or not it was voluntary. I felt no obligation to purchase or become the user of anything, and this circumstance may have given me the deceptive impression that the people here were possessed of the dignity of those who voluntarily do without and content themselves with little. I could not help thinking that they would have been to Hitler’s liking.
Nor was Chernovtsy entirely without color, as I had thought at first: the sounds of a military band were heard from what was once called Austria Square. In the past, this had been the great downtown market square, whither the rattling peasant carts all converged on Mondays for the week’s market, where — under a fragrant cloud of garlic, freshly tanned sheepskins, sharp cheeses, the smoke of machorska tobacco and cheap rotgut, cooking oil and cow dung — everything under the sun was sold and bought, from cowhides and calico kerchiefs to rusty padlocks, coachmen’s whips, embroidered linen shirts, mouth organs, chickens bundled together by their feet, butter on coltsfoot leaves, baskets of eggs, sandals (the heavy opankas of the region) made of cut-up rubber tires, pocket knives, lambskin caps and innumerable other things of the greatest variety. Under the blue of the open sky, this motley, multifaceted scene resembled nothing so much as one of those drip paintings by Jackson Pollock and, at the same time, the wildly confused swarming of an anthill. There Jews haggled for used clothing, Armenians bought corn, linen rolls and skeins of wool by the carload, while Lipovanians hawked their beautiful fruit and shoemakers vaunted their while-you-wait services. Huzule women would get into a violent squabble with a gaggle of Swabians from Bistriţa; drunks beat up on each other; the blind, lame and leprous went begging; gypsies fiddled, while crafty monte players, shuffling two black aces and one red ace with hypnotizing speed from one side to the other and back again, extracted hard-earned pennies from gaping rustic simpletons as easily as did the ubiquitous pickpockets hustling in the thick of the crowd, always anxiously on the lookout for the police who, at any moment, could arrest them or extract horrendous bribes from them. It had been a place of the most intense life, teeming and full of pungent ferment, the navel of that cosmopolis which Czernowitz was in a much more literal sense than many a world capital.
At present this civic rectangle is a concrete-covered parade ground, wide, empty and painstakingly scrubbed. Yet not entirely gray on gray: one of its narrow sides, where the square slopes down toward the suburb of Klokuczka, has been taken over completely by a gigantic, glaring red billboard. Jumping out from the crimson background in richly golden yellow is a huge, severely stylized portrait of Lenin, dwarfing the four- and five-storied houses on the long sides of the square. A few dozen marching paces in front of it, a handful of notables were sitting at a long table, half of them in uniform, their epaulets glittering with stars, the women among them with blond hair permed in aspiring-Hollywood-starlet fashion. Another two dozen marching paces in front of the rostrum, three military bands had taken up position, each under the command of a bulbous drum major, and one after the other competing in the performance of jaunty marches and musical favorites both cheerful and solemn.
I was told that I was witnessing a competition among garrison bands. Any number of regiments and various branches of the armed services were represented in their parade uniforms. It was a colorful scene, and each band, in addition to playing its regular program, sought to distinguish itself by some optional virtuoso piece, from the Radetzky March by way of the Andreas Hofer tune all the way to the overture of Der Freischütz — in a word, Russian popular music. This had already lasted all morning, a Sunday morning to boot, and I would have surmised that such a performance was bound to attract a fair crowd of onlookers. Yet only a few passersby stopped briefly to look and listen — even when, toward the end, some battalions paraded by in historical uniforms, soldiers of the imperial army that had triumphed over Napoleon, and — less colorful but eerily scary in aardvarklike camouflage — of the forces that had subdued the armies of Hitler. The performance concluded with groups of dancers in regional costume, but these so obviously came from the property department of the local theater that in this place where only a few decades ago such brightly variegated garb could be seen every day and everywhere, they aroused no interest at all.
I too, the foreigner, clearly recognizable as such by clothing and comportment, aroused no interest. No curious glances were cast my way and no sign gave me to understand that I might in any way be conspicuous. It was as if I were transparent or simply did not exist. The feeling of on the one hand being very much and undeniably at home in this place, and on the other being half a century and a whole world removed from it now intensified into the irreal density of dreamed reality. I was there and yet I was not. I dreamed while fully awake — I dreamed not only this tangibly real town but also myself in it. Thus removed from my usual placement in either space or time, I started out to search for the house of my childhood. Let me anticipate right away the outcome: of all the houses in Czernowitz, of which not a stone seemed out of place, my house was the only one missing.
The house of a childhood lying half a century in the past in any case is a mostly airy structure. It consists more of views in and out of it than of solid walls: of partial views of corners, nooks and crannies, certain pieces of furniture, foregrounds and backgrounds — in short, something fragmentary, like the disparate sets in a film studio for a movie shot from the perspective of a knee-high nipper. Nevertheless I well knew — and still know — that our house had been just beyond what had then been the outermost periphery of the city, set in a large garden and giving out on three sides to open countryside. I knew — and still know — that like innumerable other neoclassical villas of its kind, its façade was supported by columns with a narrow terrace crowned by a tympanumlike gable, and that a glassed-in porch at the back looked toward the depth of the garden. It had been reached by a long street bordered by many gardens, Garden Street, in the so-called villa district of the town. I found the street without difficulty. It too was unchanged — at least for most of the way. Of dreamlike surreality, just as I had left it fifty-three years earlier, it ran between two rows of prosperous one-family houses of the kind that had incited Karl Emil Franzos to compare them to cottages in the Black Forest. Some of them greeted me as fond memories; some others, lining the street where in my own time there had been vacant lots, upset me: I knew they had not been there before, but I could not deny their factual presence. They showed no stylistic characteristic, no particular newness or lesser degree of wear and tear to differentiate them from their neighbors. No historical feature distinguished them — neither a nationally emphasized particularity denoting Romanian sovereignty in architectural terms, nor any signs of fifty years of Communist housing precepts. Back of the lilac bushes and mulleins in their front gardens, these houses, in all the idyllic romanticism extolled by Franzos, ivy-clad up to the gables, oriels and bartizans, challenged my presumption that they could not have been built in the same global period of irreality as the rest of Chernovtsy. I began to lose the unerring determination with which I had been seeking my objective. This Garden Street had become longer by a third, just as in a dream a familiar path lengthens into endlessness. And when I finally did reach the end, there, before my very eyes, rose row after row of twelve-, fourteen- and sixteen-story high-rises blocking the view of what had been open country.