Uncle Ferdinand is neither a moralist nor a romantic. He is really an aesthete of a school for which antiquarian value per se does not exist. A man who has grown up among Gainsboroughs and lives with Roentgen furniture will appreciate a Sumerian cowbell or an iron spoon from the Fu-Ku or Shen-Si excavations only if it’s an especially beautiful specimen. And he will, incidentally, always prefer the latest model of a first-class sports car.

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Which, of course, does not explain why Uncle Ferdinand, now, in the heart of winter 1940, is still here in Bessarabia, no doubt in the most uncomfortable, most badly heated of his houses, and the one most remote from civilization. Only the bone-hard, frozen Dniester and thirty-five kilometers of land flat as the palm of your hand separate him from the Russians, who are just waiting to march in and clean house with his sort just as thoroughly as they did at home in 1917. In back of him lies a fatherland, Romania, which in 1919 welcomed Bessarabia’s return to the Kingdom of Greater Romania by dispossessing my uncle of the best of his estates. Now, Romania will soon be blackmailed into putting up no resistance to the new invasion of the Russians; then, forcibly allied with her natural enemies, she will plunge into an escapade that can lead only to losses even greater than that of a single province.

Thus, Uncle Ferdinand would not need to stick his neck out for the heritage that his forefathers have left him here. This legacy is all too wretched compared with what these sage gentlemen have long since taken to more reliable countries like England, Holland, and Switzerland. And it is all too meager next to what he himself (vying here too with his friends from the polo greens and baccarat tables) has multiplied and invested in safe valuables and bank accounts throughout territories with a great future—like Brazil, South Africa, and Canada. Uncle Ferdinand certainly doesn’t have to fear the emigrant’s hard lot as I did or (initially, no doubt) you did as well, Mr. Brodny, my comrade in fate. If he wanted to sell just his coin collection (now in the vault of a private bank in New York belonging to one of his closest friends), the yield would allow him to live tolerably well till the end of his days (which end would no doubt be happily deferred by the necessary restriction of alcohol and luxury foods).

But, for the moment, there needn’t be any talk of such an emergency measure. Even after the loss of his Bessarabian properties, Uncle Ferdinand would still be frightfully rich and could thus live carefree in California or the Bahamas, in Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro. Furthermore, he would be meeting a good number of the people about whose well-being he is occasionally anxious, cut off as he is from their cocktail and dinner parties and galas and often without even news of such events.

Meanwhile, Uncle Ferdinand is staying on in Bessarabia. He prefers it where he is, isolated and exposed, living in rustic simplicity—even without his French chef (who, as a defender of his fatherland, sulks in some bunker on the Maginot Line). The temperature here would freeze the radiator of his Cadillac and is even turning the shooting of wild geese into a dubious pleasure. Uncle Ferdinand holds out, even though without cheerful camaraderie or female companionship he is bored to tears every evening. His life is downright monastic—in a lovely, crazy, lordly gesture toward his friends, as though, by eschewing the chance to be safe with them, he could deny the very idea that for them, for their world, for his world, for their Middle Kingdom, a certain danger is now approaching: the terrible danger that henceforth they will have to camouflage themselves; they will no longer have the security of an unimpeached conscience in enjoying that they were what they are.