The Germans. They’ve got a kind of warfare, called Blitz, that rips enemy armies open like a zipper. They spliced and crushed the Poles, they’ll do the same to the French. And when the time comes—that is, when they can free their dreadful hands for the job—they’ll work the Russians over in the same way. All we’ll have to do is storm after them, spurt a little fire here and there, stick a couple of bayonets into anything that resists. Perhaps we, the cavalrymen, can even mount again and chase our fleeing foes, slicing and smashing them with lances and sabers, so that war will regain something of its old, colorful fun . . . But the war hasn’t reached us as yet. The war too is temporarily frozen; the adversaries are lying opposite each other like dragons, showing their fangs before charging and entangling themselves and tearing one another to shreds. Even the Russians are paralyzed in this hostile lockjaw, prevented from invading Romania by the Nonaggression Pact with Germany. Accordingly, the weather here is still bright and beautiful, almost festive. “Hitler weather,” it has been called since March 1938: days pearling along crisp and cold under an azure sky, yet the woods and fields and meadows, the trees and bushes and groves are covered with a fur of frost, which shouldn’t be mistaken for warmth . . .

I, at any rate, can still play the peacetime soldier, the toy soldier. Uncle Ferdinand has gotten me an apparently unlimited furlough. Naturally, he knows the brigadier general. My regimental commander clicks his heels at the sound of his name. For his sake, I was simply shoved up the ladder from a one-year volunteer recruit to master-at-arms and finally second lieutenant. In his honor, instead of the dried-pea yellow-green uniform at dinner (we are a party of two, served by four footmen) I can wear the plum-blue, gold-frogged, red-braided officer’s uniform, in which I feel like the lothario in a student performance of a classic Viennese operetta.

Uncle Ferdinand goes to bed very late. He finally has somebody to talk to about his Middle Kingdom, tell stories to, show letters, photo albums, and news clippings to. In short, he can now discuss the most urgent matters of the inner circle, the nucleus of this distant reality within reality. The discussion usually goes on until the gray hours of dawn. Finally, liberated at long last from my high boots and the throat-tightening collar of the hussar tunic, drugged with fatigue, numb with much-too-heavy food, far too much wine, coffee, kirsch, whiskey, my head spinning nonstop like a mill wheel, I tumble into the pillows of an English brass bed, which, I would swear, my mother ordered from London during my childhood. And now, the memories slosh over me, inundate me . . .

but the images, the scenes, the moods, colors, sounds, smells that I have carried about, as precise as if engraved in steel, that I have so poignantly preserved, like flowers pressed between book pages, like ribbons, locks of hair, and billets-doux stored through decades in splint boxes—now, all these things turn out to be inaccurate and deceptive; they tumble chaotically, dissolve, flow together and away. . .