In earlier years, Uncle Ferdinand made a nice name for himself as a numismatist. But what he is doing now is something more general, more profound, more fundamental. He is transcending into the metaphysical. Uncle Ferdinand makes the world he lived in eternal. Because he sees that it threatens to lose its self-evident quality (thus even were it to continue to exist, it would never be what it was), he captures it in the most beautiful blossom of its existence and transfers it from the transience of the timely to the timelesness of myth. He thus makes himself eternal, becomes an artist: the inventor, after the fact, of his own lifetime. He would never have existed if he did not exist in its chronicle.

The spider at the beginning of the world. Weaver of the world. Squatting in the no-man’s-land of eternity and drawing its threads from time into timelessness, knotting them together there, weaving them back and forth and up and down, making sure that no tiny thread is disconnected from all the others. He has truly given himself over to his mission. (Naturally, he no longer reads any newspapers, no longer concerns himself with the administration of his estates, his foreign possessions, his business dealings; indeed, he no longer even entertains.) As narrow-minded as a spider that builds its web in a cranny where no fly would ever venture, Uncle Ferdinand has withdrawn here, to a remote, wintry, icy Bessarabia, in order to weave the myth of his radiant bon-vivant world, shone upon by an everlasting spring sun. It is an image of utmost faith in God: the spider hanging its web like a sail in the wind of destiny. . .

And lo and behold: against even the most visionary estimation, his web was well woven, and the wind of destiny bore me into it.

17

I repeat: It is the heart of winter in early 1940, toward the middle of February. Earth as hard as iron; one can scarcely believe that it will ever thaw again. No traces of spring breezes, of spring winds shaking the poplars, of pale-blue distances arousing yearning. True, the sky is silky blue now—the same Adriatically deep, spotless, ice-cold blue as over Vienna two years earlier, in March 1938. It is the sky under which the first half of my life froze, God alone may know how and why; I can’t explain it, I can only tell about it . . . the fact is: this country, Bessarabia, the landscape of my childhood, has also frozen, a land of hoar and frost, with white foggy mornings before the icy blue of the sky stiffens the mist into feathery star crystals.

I am walking through an abstracted world, therefore, a world preserved under the glass bell of a well-nigh metaphysical coldness that I recognize and acknowledge as the world of my childhood. I am living again in my childhood home, from which I was torn away (virtually overnight, and not very considerately), from which I was driven for fourteen years (my entire youth, from the seventh to the twenty-first year of my life). Some of the domestics (a daffy lady’s maid; a flatfooted footman, his head and body shaking; a gardener palsied with age) claim to recognize me. It’s not true; they’re just imagining things. One does not recognize the little boy who resembled the daughter of Madame Vigée-Lebrun in this cavalryman who screws the night away through all the hooker hangouts of Kishinev and spends a rueful morning scouring his pubic hair for crabs.