32

All that I have survived. And not only that but also the farewell from the park of my childhood, when the Russians came to Bessarabia with the summer. A little later I survived the bombs on Berlin when, on a highly suspicious pseudodiplomatic mission, I avoided a heroic death on the front. I survived Stella’s disappearance when she—the Jewess, the wife of an Englishman in a position both important and mysterious—hit on the insane idea of trying to enter Germany unrecognized from Switzerland in order to see me once again . . .

and I also survived the shameful rat-flight the length and breadth of the German lands, the ludicrous game of hide-and-seek with the authorities and draft-dodger hunters: I survived the second Ice Age in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe and Nuremberg, where John hit on the insane idea of calling me as a witness to Stella’s murder . . .

and in Schwab’s eyes all these things were a remarkable wealth of enviable experience, which I absolutely had to get down on paper. I began to believe him and divided myself (already reduced by half a life) into two further halves, of which one half, the potential author of the masterpiece novel of the era and future Nobel laureate, set about systematically to undermine the life of the other self-half, a pioneer in the reconstruction of the postwar West German film industry. I undauntedly survived the marriage to Christa and an affair (which rocked the worldwide public) with the fading movie star Nadine Carrier (including several relapses); and I survived my son’s scorn. (A young man a father could be proud of, by the way: un ragazzino molto fine, elegante, intelligente, perbenino. The Dalmatians have Mendeled out. Christa’s clear, corn-blond brightness. Her better-bred hands. Her small mouth. Her eyes, brighter, larger, more sincere than mine. No cunning in them. Her hair, smooth under the brush stroke.)

No use imagining that if Uncle Ferdinand were still alive, he might be interested in meeting my son, grandson of beautiful Maud. Except for the data in the Almanach de Gotha, the only genealogies that interested Uncle Ferdinand were those of horses and dogs. And even they did not interest him anymore during that faraway February 1940 when I saw him for the last time. The only thing that interested him then was the act of handing down.

I still sense the unerring gaze with which he watches over my table manners. In them, he does not read my aptitude for someday entering the ranks of the Middle Kingdom but only my polite willingness to listen to him. My powerful appetite evidently pleases him; I won’t tire easily. His fatherly concern, his elegant, seemingly unconditional familiarity and comradely intimacy, should not deceive me. I would make an embarrassing mistake if I presumed to derive any privileges from them. “I like to treat everyone as my equal,” says Uncle Ferdinand. “But that doesn’t mean that he may treat me as his equal.”

The elegant as-if of our equality is quite naturally due to his not asking me anything. He does not wish to know why I am not seen in the right places at the right time through the annual course of the “seasons.” Why I do not play polo near the Pyramids in January, zoom down the Cresta run on my knees, belly, and elbows in Saint Moritz in February, play in tennis tournaments on the Riviera in March, sail near Ragusa in April, dine with Lady Diana Duff-Cooper in London in May, attend the night races at Auteuil in June, waltz with Geraldine Apponyi on Budapest’s Margaret Island in July—and so on through the moons until the graceful cycle concludes and recommences. It is tacitly assumed that only private reasons are holding me back. In case of doubt, at my age, a romance that must be discreetly handled (and then indiscreetly gossiped about). Otherwise I would quite obviously be doing all those things, though to be sure WWII is, to some extent, a hindrance.