I think that sharing a mother eliminated a lot of potential animosity between my brother and me. We didn't compete for the affections of our loving matron. His father, with whom the three of us lived, never offered anything of the sort, so it's not as though there was any contest in the paternal department. My own father I saw biannually on routine and unemotional visits when he was allowed to vacation to Marseilles.
I was the product of an unhappy and experimental marriage. My mother, Cesaire Spiegel, née Clemenceau, was a very pretty russified Frenchwoman, who, in desperation of poverty, married my wealthy father (respected party bureaucrat) and in 1953 produced me- Victor Pavelovich Dzerzhinsky. My mother was somewhat of a decadent woman and could not for long tolerate the hardworking mentality of my father and of the Russian people. One simply cannot drop a woman from France of all nationalities into the most industrious country of its time. When she fled with me (as an infant- I speak not a word of Russian) from Leningrad to Saarbrücken, a city comfortably near Alsace-Lorraine, she met Brandeis Spiegel and one year later, in 1955, gave birth to my brother, Ashley Zarathustra Spiegel.
Ashley, from his birth, was a charming child. His brown curls and almost garnet eyes stood out distinguishingly from a cherubic face. As he grew, he became masculine and tall, towering over the upturned eyes of an adoring plethora of young girls- his adolescence was unawkward and his young-adulthood unsullied by alcoholism, debt or disease. (However, he smoked like a chimney and was to succumb to lung cancer at age fifty-two.) His popularity garnished him with a myriad of nick-names, epitaphs and among them, athletic titles, but his closest circle (at the French-speaking catholic school we attended in Saarbrücken), of which I was so graciously a part, referred to him as "Spike."
Distinctly I remember it was in the bleak June of 1973 that he came upon me on the planar roof of our modern home. My skin has never been particularly receptive to sunlight, and from my shelter under the awning, I watched him pace the concrete in his tanned grandeur, the midday light ricocheting off his silver jewelry and Oakley sunglasses.
"Bon matin, Spike."
"Bonjour. Dupuis neuf heures tu restes ici. Qu'est ce que tu lis?"
"Camus. Il était populaire dans les années 1930s."
"Existentialiste merde," he sniffed, his accent heavy with German.
"Tu prefères Kant? Marx? Peut-être Kierkegaard?"
"Shut up. We speak English now."
"But, mein Bruder, you are terrible at English."
"But, my brother, I must practice. I was accepted, yes? To American University! Victor, I get into business school!"
And he graduated five years later with a BA in accounting and a minor in banking. He was immediately hired for a managerial position at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in Ottawa, rising swiftly through the ranks until HSBC Canada could not accommodate his wisdom and success in the monetary manner he desired. So, descending from the mountain, he went on to head Deutsche Bank in New York and, ensuite, Manchester.