Nor does Uncle Ferdinand ask to hear where and how I have spent the almost one and one half decades since my short pants and long, buttoned gaiters and little Norfolk jacket with the tremendous navy-blue-and-white polka-dotted bow under the Eton collar, and Miss Fern’s admonishing English dove-cooing in my ear. And even if he became absentminded and let the question slip out, he would not wait for my answer. For if he doesn’t know the answer, then the events must have taken place outside his world, and anything happening beyond Uncle Ferdinand’s world has but remote significance for him. There is no room in the Middle Kingdom for the people, things, circumstances, incidents I could tell him about—except, at best, Uncle Helmuth’s spiritist séances. And Uncle Ferdinand would know about them from Countess Kannwitz without Uncle Helmuth’s making an appearance.

But perhaps Uncle Ferdinand himself does not even wish to hear anything about his Middle Kingdom. If he wants to keep informed and up to date, it is probably only for the sake of inventory. Like the task of the ornithologists and shell collectors among his princely cousins, his true chore is to sift, count, arrange, and name, not to analyze and observe. The world is as God the Almighty has created it: è così perchè è così. Uncle Ferdinand has already told me basically everything worth knowing about his Middle Kingdom—its structure, its mechanics, its functioning. Only seldom do I hear something more, lessons about habits and conduct—say, that the toughest hunts are ridden not in England in red nor in France in green but in Ireland in glen check and brown boots. I am told of Count Dankelmann’s famous five driven partridges in Upper Silesia: two shots at the approaching covey, change guns, shoot only one barrel, change guns again lightning quick and take the last two shots at the flushed fowl . . . Anecdotes likewise recede into the background. (For instance: “She was terrified of having a baby, but she didn’t want to do anything to protect herself because she was afraid that some birth-control device might injure her and then she couldn’t have the child that she wanted someday from a man she really loved. And that was why—” I understand. Expressed in the floweriness of folk poetry:

And there you see the reason why

it’s only through the asshole by

which narrow passage for the fart

he finds the entrance to her heart.

Although Uncle Ferdinand is so prudish that he freezes at the slightest obscenity, he now has a good laugh. If an off-color joke is heartily ribald, he appreciates it as he would a hearty peasant dish that occasionally interrupts the monotony of his daily haute cuisine. He has me repeat it twice: “How did that go again? ‘And there you see the way—’ Oh yes, of course, ‘the reason why’—otherwise it won’t rhyme. It’s only through the asshole by—well, well, very funny indeed—she lets him find his way to her heart. Very funny, really very funny!”)