Pia Brînzeu, Family Journal, Manuscript

Stop 3: The row of palaces in Al. Mocioni Square

July 4, 1937 Mother is seventeen years old. She’s getting ready to go to Innsbruck, to spend her holidays at her grandmother’s. She’s packing. She will take all the little dresses made by Mrs. Traxel: the linen dress with tiny blue flowers, the red velvet dress and the black silk dress, for special occasions. She won’t forget the white trousers, a novelty which she is very fond of. Grandfather would not let her wear trousers, she looks too extravagant in them, but Mother won’t listen to him. She feels good in those trousers, she is free to move as she likes, and they are very comfortable when hiking on the mountains.

My mother’s grandmother lives on Meran Street, at number 4. It’s right in the city centre. Tante Mizzi and cousin Helmuth live on the floor underneath. At five o’clock, mother is always invited to coffee, and cannot wait to go downstairs to see them. Several of Helmuth’s friends come usually and through them she gets to know the upper class in the city. At Easter, Fritz, a fragile, talkative young man, wanted to meet her. He invited her out for a walk and then he suddenly disappeared, claiming he’d been called by his grandfather to the factory. They had manufacturing problems again. Since March, when Austria was annexed to Germany, they have been making not only jewelleries, but also lenses for binoculars, telescopes and magnifying glasses. All for the Wehrmacht, all for the war.

Fritz will also come at five o’clock. Grandmother urges her to be nice to him, since she knows his entire family. Mother doesn’t really like Fritz, she’s more into Manfred, his brother, but Manfred already has a sweetheart. Still, she drinks her coffee fast and pleases her grandma, joining Fritz for a walk through the city. The only thing the young man seems to be doing today is talk about his grandfather, a simple apprentice from Bohemia, obsessed with the shining of glass. When he was young, he used to spend his entire day in his workshop, thinking about how to polish the stones more easily. When he found a new method, he patented it and thus he could become independent. He began his journey around the empire to search for waters which would provide him with the necessary energy for a factory and settled in Wattens, near Innsbruck.

“Glass stones shine like the eyes of girls who are in love”, Fritz whispers to my mother, “and girls who are in love become good wives, don’t they?” “Not at all”, my mother replies, “the eyes of girls who are in love shine like diamonds, not like beads of coloured glass.” That’s why, she says to herself, she never wore the bracelet she got from Fritz. It lies untouched in a jewellery box back home, in Timişoara; it’s too obvious that it is made of glass. And that’s the very reason why she would not marry him. Why would she want to be surrounded all her life by people enslaved to coloured glass? “A genuine precious stone, no matter how small”, my mother continues out loud, “is more beautiful than the fanciest synthetic stones.” “You’re wrong,” Fritz contradicts her, “many, many shiny stones create the illusion of stars in the sky and women love to be surrounded by them, to feel like they can fly among the stars. You can’t do that with diamonds, it’s too expensive...” That’s the temptation that Fritz’s grandfather relies on, and his grandson agrees with him, he likes the old man’s philosophy and believes in it. It will certainly bring them a lot of money. What he doesn’t like is the edelweiss flower chosen as a logo for their jewelleries. When grandfather can’t oppose him anymore, Fritz will replace the edelweiss with a white swan. Delicate, graceful and with a long neck, just like the first letter of their family name, Swarovski...