Still, this never happens without John and Stella’s instantly apologizing and hinting that these are matters that could not possibly be of general interest but that must, alas, be briefly discussed (by them). They leave no doubt that only one part of their existence belongs to this world within the world—the worldly part—and that neither their egos nor their true interests have settled there. John and Stella wish very much to be treated as individuals and persons, quite independent of membership in the grand world of society (which is actually a very small world)—even if they can’t deny that, within this particular world within the world and its reality, they live in an ever more abstract and unreal reality. Still and all, they live in it; they speak of something that is alive.

Uncle Ferdinand is altogether different. He identifies fully with his Middle Kingdom. Never for a moment does Uncle Ferdinand think of himself as outside it, for he is intergrown with it in every fiber of his being. And yet he speaks of it with utmost indiscretion. He exposes the most humiliating facts, reveals the most compromising circumstances, does not spare the most personal and intimate details; but he does all this with a reporter’s sobriety, which is disarming. He narrates even the worst scandals in a matter-of-fact way that allows any judgment, makes no moral or aesthetic evaluation, but simply testifies to something that exists, like life itself.

Above all, Uncle Ferdinand speaks with this relentless scientific detachment to me—an outsider. True, he pretends to take me for granted as one of his own kind, to whom he may assume that his world is not alien and whom his tales would not strike dumb, like the fables of Sinbad the Sailor of the copper city to which the roc carried him. But the thoroughness with which Uncle Ferdinand exposes each bit of trash (Toto’s wheelings and Cloclo’s dealings) in every kind of connection with other bits of information both trivial and significant—demonstrating, explicating, dissecting—merely betrays how well aware he is of dealing with a nonmember who must be taught the rudiments.

Uncle Ferdinand is deliberately telling tales out of school because he wants to transmit what went on in school. He wants to instruct me about his Middle Kingdom as minutely and precisely as possible. Whether he seeks to understand his aims and motives is debatable. He probably never asks himself. Something urges him to it. It might be his loneliness and nearly monkish isolation from the world here in threatened, wintry Bessarabia, his yearning for his friends, the other paladins of the Middle Kingdom, his homesickness for them. But his exile here is voluntary. And so it is to be assumed then that something urges him to it as well: perhaps the clear insight into the nature of the time, perhaps an instinctive sense for it. When Uncle Ferdinand feels the urge to talk about the Middle Kingdom, then it is not really he who is speaking—something speaks out of him. The Middle Kingdom wants to speak through him. Uncle Ferdinand must speak his world, for otherwise it no longer is and will never have been.