doings bestowed upon her an exaggerated importance throughout the household, which she also displayed impudently in the nursery in her dealings with Cassandra and me. Everybody thought the world of her cleverness, and all too often my ignorant nurse and I had to acknowledge her unquestionable superiority. She was able to read long before I had learned to speak properly, and she read almost all the time. But when I was five years old and she was nine, she claimed to understand Latinâwhich she hadnât yet been taught.
Cassandra and I knew this well enough. But how could we call her bluff? She strutted in front of us, an open book in her hand, and moved her lips as if speaking the words she was allegedly reading, but when we challenged her to read aloud, she only replied disdainfully: âYou canât understand that; itâs Latin!â I was about to jump on her and wrest the book from her hand when Cassandra restrained me, wrapped me in her hair and murmured in my ear: âDonât you believe her, she is only pretending to read. Sheâs probably holding the book upside down and lisping nonsense to annoy you.â But against the visible evidence of the purported reading, which we could not contest, this was a mere supposition, further weakened by my father, who, laughing maliciously, made himself my sisterâs accomplice by confirming: Yes, what was written in the book was indeed Latin.
The looks I shot at my sister from the haven of Cassandraâs sheltering hair and under the fire protection of her flashing black monkey eyes were white-hot with impotent rage. Nevertheless I exulted in the certainty of a later, all the more powerful vindicationâa steadfast faith in the revelatory power of truth which stayed with me and reassured me all my life whenever I saw through some mental sham that, for the time being accepted as valid, could not be exposed because of some vested interest or simply because of general stupidity.
Among the experiences from which we learn nothing that we didnât know already, there is to be counted the insight that the reality we consider as all-dominating in truth consists mostly of fictions. My familyâs fictions were only too transparent: we lived the years 1919â1939 in the illusion of having a pseudo-feudal position in the world; this was based neither on prestige enjoyed in an existing society nor on wealth, but merely on the position my parents and particularly my grandparents had held before the First World War.
This strange make-believe, challenged by no one, was promoted by the leftovers of colonial gentry in which we were left, powerless relics, at the end of the Dual Monarchy. We considered ourselves as former Austrians in a province with a predominantly Austrian coloring, like those British colonials who remained in India after the end of the Raj. Neither my father nor my mother had been born in the Bukovina. My father had arrived there before the turn of the century as a government official of the Empire. My motherâs parents had lived there temporarily, connected with the country by an originally Greek bloodline that over the centuries had become Romanian. (None of this was in any way singular in the great spaces of the former Habsburg Empire. In many waysâbut mainly through the constant migration to far-off provinces by individuals of the most variegated backgrounds, military men or civil servants, pioneers or traders or fortune-seeking entrepreneursâthe situation was not unlike that one finds in the United States. Indeed, the fad for all things American which soon was to conquer all Europe fell on especially fertile ground in our neck of the woods.) So as long as we lived there, albeit as citizens of the Kingdom of Romania yet in the presumptuous feeling of belonging to another, superior civilization, the country in which my sister and I were born held only a provisional and specious character for our parents. Even we,
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