19

He waits for me with the cruelly loving patience of the spider waiting for the fly that strays into its web. He has long since had his tea, and his long, yellow teeth under the straw whisk of his mustache and the parrot beak of his nose are gnawing on a fragment of zwieback. Now he watches as I, with the ravenous hunger of an exhausted young man, wolf down bowls of oatmeal and milk (Miss Fern’s long-missed porridge) and bacon and eggs and black bread and piles of toast with butter and honey and currant jam and orange marmalade. My exceedingly healthy appetite in my drowsiness, my visible freshening with the gradually rising day, the animal physicality of youth in me must repulse him, the rapidly aging man with the delicate stomach and weakened liver. But he doesn’t show his disgust. His round eyes, still gazing sharply with piercing pupils from under their wrinkled, eggshell-thin lids, follow my every movement while his voice speaks to me: gently, in an elegant, tenderly ironic, lightly entertaining, conversational tone, changing language at whim or to fit the topic. Normally, he speaks a much-too-literary Balkan French, and pronounced with affected purity. But occasionally he uses the English of his generation, who, innocently believing that one must speak the King’s English, mimicked Edward VII’s German accent. At times, he lapses into his startlingly natural (albeit borderland-hard) Austrian aristocrat’s German, or even Romanian, whereby an earthy, peasant-like vitality colors his diction.

I cannot escape him and his murmuring talk. He will follow me after breakfast when I stroll through the park, and the trees cover the tangerine-edged mother-of-pearl tones of the winter morning with the fine craquelure of frosted twigs and branches. He will have a servant help him into a fur coat that will enshroud him in otter from the ears to the ankles; the tremendous collar will prevent a heavy cap of the same otter skin from sliding over his eyes down to his nose. And he will walk along with me step for step and talk to me. He will accompany me when I take a shotgun and a couple of hounds and comb the river meadows for wild duck and hares. Why, he will even be at my side when I try to escape him on horseback: two stableboys will lift him into the saddle of an age-toughened, Roman-nosed hunter; his endless skinny legs with straightened locked knees will be rigid in the stirrups, and his globular spider body will still rise bolt upright on a steely spine. Clearly indifferent to the grim cold that brings tears to my eyes, he will stay at the right edge of my field of vision in the swiftly passing winter landscape. He will sway gently when walking his horse, seesaw up and down when trotting, and finally vibrate at a high frequency when galloping—and his voice will be unremittingly gentle, elegant, tenderly ironic, and casually conversational as it murmurs past my eardrum.

There is nothing thematically or even chronologically coherent in what he has to tell me. His talk does not follow the laws of axial structure as in a crystal; it has no beginning and no foreseeable end. This is life immediately rendered, illogical at a longer, wider range, randomly experienced in a fusillade of impressions, arbitrarily plucked out, reproduced in mental leaps and fragments. Yet all these things make for a full world and for reality, so fascinating that I am soon spellbound. I find myself woven into them, more and more densely, and paralyzed by them. I keep thinking of the flies that Stella and I tossed into the cobwebs of an old lakeside bathhouse a year and a half ago (summer 1938) in the Salzkammergut, and the loving and tender care with which the fat garden spiders wrapped them in their threads until they were swaddled like mummies . . .