I am also familiarized with the secrets of those spherical hierarchies: the innermost circles from which the closer and farther circles of friends radiate, intersecting and intertwining with the closer and farther circles of other inner circles—I know them all as intimately as if I belonged to each circle right at the center and nucleus . . .

of course, I know them so intimately only from hearsay, albeit very thorough hearsay. After all, John and Stella talk about them constantly, naming, mentioning, quoting someone or other whose renown and guaranteed wealth plus no doubt quite reliably similar outlook on the world and on life would place him, as a matter of course, in some system of rings of friends in the Middle Kingdom (the manner in which they are named, mentioned, quoted, hints at differences in rank and degrees of intimacy down to the finest nuance) . . .

and this could mean that even John and Stella, incessantly and almost against their will, at any rate without the slightest intention, are weaving away at the myth of the Middle Kingdom—John and Stella, the independent ones, the completely unconcerned ones, without the slightest social ambition, who demonstrated ironic indulgence, at best, toward the conspiratorial innermost circle of Uncle Ferdinand’s playboy world, and who do their assiduous best to avoid other, more rigorously closed systems of circles of friends of the upper ten thousand (for instance, with very few exceptions, the North German aristocracy)—even John and Stella, I say, did their bit in weaving away at the myth . . . and I can’t believe they did this only because their wealth, background, and education automatically made them part of the cosmos of these rich, renowned, and influential people and sent them wandering like nomads through the closer and farther circles of their world within the world.

20

This makes me pensive, and I have the leisure to brood about it when I am permitted to retire for three quarters of an hour before dinner in order to bathe and change.

A guest of this reality, which seems more and more unreal (hostile armies are deploying behind each of the inner circles of Uncle Ferdinand’s Middle Kingdom), I lie in the huge, old-fashioned tub in the middle of the bright, cheery, spacious room that my mother fixed up as a bathroom for me. In the fourteen years of my exile from the world of wealth, I never tired of describing it in detail to my cousin Wolfgang, because it was so utterly different from the damp, narrow hole in the wall, smelling of detergent, with its cold tiles and dripping, half-rusted water pipes, in the dark Viennese apartment where we bleakly vegetated through our dreary days (together with Cousin Wolfgang’s parents, my foster parents—Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha—as well as Aunt Selma, my real foster mother). There, the bathroom was a place in which those tasks necessary for physical hygiene and regarded as important in one’s general philosophy of life had to be performed behind locked doors as an embarrassing necessity to be discharged quickly and prudishly. Here, it was an almost sensuously cozy room filled with comforts that pointed more to play and dawdling than to harsh cleansing, and you left as if you had just stepped out of a bandbox, with an aura of fragrant freshness, whereas there you came out steaming and scrubbed red but tired and tending to sweat. Chattering with Cousin Wolfgang, I gushed on about my childhood bathroom in Bessarabia. I was no less enthusiastic about it than about the park “in the faraway Balkan land,” as Uncle Helmuth called it, sarcastically. I described the sumptuous delights of that bathroom: the huge, prewarmed bath towels, in which one could wrap oneself from head to toe; the gigantic sponges, feather light and crunchingly brittle when dry, heavily dripping when soaked in water; the fragrant soaps and pungently prickling colognes . . . but this, of course, elicited merely a disparaging shrug from Cousin Wolfgang, who was above such mollycoddling and used the toilet as a study where he could be relatively undisturbed.