In accordance with Mother’s instruction (who once had heard something or other about a “kidney shock’’), whenever some small mishap or alarum occurred — which was often enough — we were first of all set on our potties. What we called “peepee” thus became a kind of purification rite to be performed devoutly, posthaste after some fall or injury while still swallowing the last tears, or routinely at night before going to bed and entering the dark world of sleep, and then again in the morning on awakening from the weirdness of dreams. The vessel receiving these offerings became a symbol of well-being. Each of us had our own and guarded it jealously as an emphatically personalized property; if one of us, in haste or by mistake or in mischief, happened to lay hands on the other’s potty, wild screams were heard. Cassandra was in the habit of stirring up these feuds by exchanging, seemingly by chance, the hardly to be confused receptacles: my sister’s classic, spherically rounded and handle-equipped one and my own more masculine, beaked and cylindrical one, or she promoted our own confusions, so that all too frequently the nursery was rent by outraged scream: “He’’—or she—“is peeing in my potty!” Fueled by demonic Cassandra, the emotions then rose to the level of murderous intentions, and often things got so noisy and boisterous as to reach the rest of the house, until the governess of the moment would profit from the opportunity to intervene and put “the savage one,” Cassandra, in her place. (This relation, in any case, was never a good one. It was conflict not between personalities but between different classes and different worlds.) Finally the hubbub reached the earthly proximate Olympus, so that either Mother would come rushing into the nursery like an angered swan and, instead of soothing our boiling emotions, would conduct fidgety interrogations, meting out punishments that diverted our wrath from each other and directed it instead against the despotism of adults and our own impotence; or my father himself — rarely enough, when he happened not to be away hunting — stepped in and staged some humorous “divine ordeal,” a race for the potties or a “noble contest,” challenging us as to which of our toys we would be ready to sacrifice to buy back the usurped right to use the contested vessel. What until then had been a deadly serious conflict, fought with a ferocity all the more embittered as it centered, in truth, merely on the agonizing “as if” of childhood, then resolved into a game, became irrelevant and lost its sharp-edged reality. In return, I gladly accepted any outcome, even though I said to myself that my father patently favored my sister because she was closer to his heart than I.
I could always be sure of one consolation: behind the black silken curtain of Cassandra’s hair, in the baking-oven warmth of her strong peasant corporeality, I found refuge at all times from whatever pained me. I was so obviously her favorite that she was often denounced to my parents and then chided for her undisguised preference for me. The more my sister outgrew the nursery and came under the thumb of a succession of more or less neurotic, pretentious governesses — neurotic because they lacked a man and were unattractive and poor, pretentious because, with their semieducated Occidentalism, they presumed they had been relegated to a Balkanic backwater and degraded to the level of domestics — the more Cassandra made me exclusively her own. I was the apple of her eye.
I granted her all maternal privileges more willingly than to my own mother, without regard to its being disputed whether she had been my wet nurse. Cassandra affirmed it as steadfastly as my mother denied it — out of shame that she hadn’t been able to nurse me, declared Cassandra behind a hand secretively raised in front of her mouth. This, in some perfidious way, was convincing as only such believable fabrications can be. Add to this that Cassandra mourned the loss of a son of her own, whom she allegedly had to desert because of me.
Time upon time she told me — and told me alone, in our private jargon and in a singsong as plaintive as an old folk tune — of the unimaginable poverty she grew up in, the oldest of twelve children. At the birth of the youngest her mother had died, while the father had been crippled by a felled tree; she had raised her brothers and sisters, always on the verge of starvation, and whenever they had a slice of cornbread or an onion, they would thank God “on bent knees’’—all her life, in pious gratitude, she drew a cross with the knife over each loaf of bread before making the first cut. Then came a night “as full of stars as a dog’s pelt is full of fleas,” and a village inn where gypsies fiddled and “the light cast from the windows shone like golden dust,” while crickets chirped in the meadows “like water boiling in the kettle.” Someone passing by plucked her from the fence on which she was perched so as to see and hear the better—“it was our picture show,” she told me (having meanwhile been enriched by urban experience), “and we sat next to each other like swallows in autumn on a telegraph wire, young and old, Granny asleep with the baby in her lap, and only woke when some of the men came out of the inn to fight or throw up.” But then someone had picked her from the fence and taken her into the golden roar of the gypsy fiddles, the clouds of tobacco smoke and men’s voices, given her a drink and then another, and when the dazzling images began to go round and round in her head like the merry-go-round at the kermess, he took her outside and down to the side of the creek where the honeysuckle grows so thick between the tree trunks that “you can crawl and hide in it completely, like you in my hair.” “And then you both squatted down together and crapped on the ground, yes?” I asked eagerly.
Graphically, she described to me the shame of having a belly “as big as a pumpkin.” The girls in the village spat at her when she passed, and her father beat her with a fencepost, so that she hoped she would lose the child. She tried to drown herself in the creek under the tangle of honeysuckle which by then was leafless and gray like cobwebs. But the water was so shallow that she could plunge only her head into it, facedown, and since it was winter, the frost was bitter and she couldn’t hold out long enough to die. Thin ice formed over her face and when she lifted her head out of the water, the glaze of ice broke like glass — and that’s what made her so ugly, she said.
Then the pope came and took her to the monastery, a day’s journey away, and that is where my father found her. “But I had to leave the child behind,” she mourned, “your little brother’’—and once more she laughed impishly. There were times when she sobbed bitterly over the loss of my little brother, usually when some incident made her sad, but she reverted soon enough to her usual spunky jollity. “Nothing but fancy notions,” it was said in the household, “not a word of truth in the whole story. She’s not quite right in the head, anyway.” Nevertheless, I longed one day to meet my milk-brother and be reunited with him forever after in brotherly love. He was stronger, more noble and more courageous than I, and he was unconditionally devoted to me. He would accompany me through all the perils of life like one of those otherworldly helpers in times of distress who are the rightful companions of fairy-tale heroes.