31

No one knew this better than he, my brother Schwab, and he accepted the consequences and kicked the bucket. I, however, have survived.

Even though the parasitic egg of having to write was laid in me and has been devouring me for nearly two decades, I have survived. I have survived him just as, to his consternation, I survived my romance with Dawn and, two years later, with Gaia. Just as I survived Cousin Wolfgang and Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha and Aunt Selma. And presumably Uncle Ferdinand and ultimately John too. Just as I had survived Stella, although surviving her was the most shameful of all.

That is what prompts me to think back so often to the winter of 1940 in Uncle Ferdinand’s home: my innocence back then! The fullness of a world that had not yet gone under in the Ice Ages. The world of the first half of my life, which I had not yet survived.

Uncle Ferdinand is still alive.

I sit across from him at a long table. I am wearing the uniform of a good regiment, which may not be the same one in which he once served his old Fatherland—a Fatherland that is no longer his and indeed is hostilely facing his (and thus my) present Fatherland—but no matter! Uncle Ferdinand’s real Fatherland is the Middle Kingdom, and he counts me as part of it. He treats me with the paternal camaraderie that the commander of the Imperial Russian garde à cheval would show toward a cadet who had just been promoted to cornet.

I am grateful to him, with mixed feelings. True, I am sitting at a table at which I sat as a child, waited on by servants some of whom claim they knew me back then. I sit beneath ancestral portraits that in depicting Uncle Ferdinand’s forebears may possibly be depicting mine—but none of this matters. We haven’t seen each other for fourteen years. Uncle Ferdinand is certainly enough a man of the world to see right off how much or how little is left of Miss Fern’s upbringing, but he cannot really know who I am. Anything might have become of the child that was once troublesome enough as a hanger-on (or even worse: a charitable gift) of a delightful mistress. The child that once annoyingly ran underfoot and has now surfaced again, a young blade sent to his home by his old friend and confrere John, to whom he is deeply attached, whose father he once knew and on whose estate he, Uncle Ferdinand, shot the most unforgettable grouse of his life, but a man whose diplomatic missions have always been rather obscure, suspect particularly now that he is married to this bluestocking Bucharest Jewess. Pretty, yes, spirited, and to be seen everywhere, elegant, witty, quick, but—well, you know.

I wonder if Uncle Ferdinand knows that I am Stella’s lover. I wish he did. I have a guilty conscience toward John, but I’m proud nevertheless. I love Stella. Love her intelligence, her wit, her maternal tenderness, her unerring frankness, her fairness and honesty. I love her with all my senses. I love her taut body, the dull-shimmering olive tone of her skin. She is fourteen years older than I, and I love her ripeness, her experience, the mellowness of her beauty, her sharp spiritedness, the first gray threads in her black thick-stranded desert-Jewish hair. (Absalom supposedly was blond, but one of my most beautiful erotic fantasies is to see Stella dangling from a branch by this black shock and to ride toward her to bore through her with my lance.)