I needn’t bother saying that my actual attempts at openly approaching the people merely unleashed a fusillade of insults and vile imprecations. One of the mothers whose children I ventured to speak to pounced on me because their screams made her think I was trying to attack them. Furiously she grabbed my hand, yanked me up the stairs, and delivered me at our apartment door to Aunt Selma, paralyzed by such an affront to her, a lady. The mother poured out a verbal torrent, and since my German was lacking in those days and the barked-out Viennese dialect rendered it all the more unintelligible, I could only just make out that my relatives were well advised to keep this piss-elegant young dandy under control, otherwise there was no guaranteeing my safety.

Two or three years later, I did manage to break through after all. This happened in the course of a friendship I quickly formed at school with a boy who, to Cousin Wolfgang’s endless and scornful delight, was the son of a trolley conductor and lived, not far from us, in the rear building of another tenement. By now I recollect very little about this friend; I can barely remember his face. I recall only that his features darkened sadly when Cousin Wolfgang, who, as a gymnasium student, also despised us for attending the much less highbrow real-schule, shouted after us, “Next stop Wieden, transfer to the Circle Line, please don’t push, keep the aisle clear! . . .” But I will never forget a summer Sunday that I was permitted to spend with the trolley conductor’s family in a suburban garden near Mödling: a day of Maupassant-like nostalgia and enchantment, woven entirely of trivial things, with a picnic on the grass, during which the father’s undershirt and the mother’s stockings, rolled up under her fat knees, did not arouse any feelings of social repulsion. Rather, they made me forget about the bad clothes I had to wear after outgrowing the Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit I had arrived with from Bessarabia. We had a hearty sip of wine with our sausages and munched green apples from a tree and did airy gymnastics on a shed the roof of which Father Trolley Conductor had nailed down with fresh tarpaper. We spent hours fishing for tadpoles in a small brook and then drank a delicious glass of clotted milk in the evening, while Mother Trolley Conductor hollowed out a pumpkin for us, cutting eyes, a nose, and an enormous, toothy mouth, so that we could stick a candle inside and frighten the neighborhood children. First, however, to my great delight, Father Trolley Conductor gave an artistic performance. He placed the candle in front of the wall, and his hands created the most entertaining shadow pictures: barking dog heads and ear-wriggling bunnies and similar delightful things.

When I returned to my relatives, who excitedly recounted a hike through the woodlands of the Rax, I had my first fistfight with Cousin Wolfgang, which made Aunt Hertha say I had the makings of a criminal: all that had preceded it was a remark that Wolfgang had arrogantly tossed at me when I finished the blazing description of my day: “From a castle park to a garden plot—should this step be viewed as descent or progress?”