I was just thinking of her, in the bathtub. I was looking down at my thin, tough body, still tan from the summer. It lay in the water covered by a floating galaxy of dissolving soapsuds. But from a dark moss bed in the sepia skin, a sturdy stalagmite grew through the greenish transparency of the water. Stella, my star (indeed, that was her maiden name: Stella Stern).

It would not surprise, much less scandalize, Uncle Ferdinand if he knew that I was Stella’s kept lover. Along with the glue of gossip, of the ceaseless informing by everyone on everyone, the unflagging mutual mentioning, naming, citing of all by all, the Middle Kingdom is held together by two further glues: money and a sperm thread industriously spun by everyone, everywhere, up and down, back and forth, in and out. Every man has slept with every man and every woman. Everyone, thank goodness, is rich enough to think of money as a means to the most exciting, most amusing games, and to leave moral considerations out altogether. Every man and every woman have satellites, escorts, parasites, flatterers, whores, floozies, gigolos, catamites, henchmen. Everyone has his little court, and it’s in a courtier’s power to be treated as a lackey or to command respect (yes, experience teaches that members of the Middle Kingdom at some point like being treated rather insolently by some such creatures).

Uncle Ferdinand could not treat me with more exquisite charm and paternal kindness if the ancestral portraits along the walls, the pale Fanariots with the saber-crooked noses and the fiery-eyed boyars with the crooked feathers on otterskin caps, were truly my forebears too and he really were the commander of the garde à cheval in which I had been freshly promoted to cornet. He sits opposite me, watching me dine. He himself eats almost nothing anymore; he briefly pokes his fork into the meager food on his plate and then leaves it untouched. His yellowish-gray spider head over his stiff white shirtfront, which has pushed his bow tie all the way up to his earlobes, is mystically transfigured in the glow of the table candles, like the head of a pagan priest. The glasses of wine before him sparkle like test tubes containing reagent fluids of different colors. He does not touch them, either. His round, thin-lidded eyes are nailed to me. And I sit opposite him, bolt upright, in my operetta uniform, striving to appear as relaxed and casual as possible. I use elegant John as my model—he is a model for me in many respects—and I deceive him.

Yes indeed, Mr. Brodny: such is my innocence back then, twenty-eight years ago. Stella is still alive, and I love her. I don’t as yet know that I shall never see her again. She is with John in Bucharest, and I delude myself into thinking I can hurry into her arms at my next furlough (which Uncle Ferdinand effortlessly obtains for me by way of my regimental commander). Stella, my star! . . .