and he steps back from the tea table. He has gotten hold of his watercress sandwich mushroom patty currant tart or cucumber sandwich, and struts once again as a giant rooster through my childhood day—

and in the silver on the tea table, as his shadow moves away, the springtime rises again, a hundred times in a hundred radiant stars. Spring, outside the window, wafts through the air, blue and full of distressing promise. It is the springtime light, the sweet core, of the lost half of my life. It has not even been snuffed out by the years of my Viennese upbringing with Uncle Helmuth Aunt Hertha Aunt Selma plus Cousin Wolfgang as a dowry of the spiritualized philistine world. The dismal gray of those fourteen years was still lined with that light—as was yesterday’s fog (the day before yesterday’s fog? or that of how many nights and days ago?), through which I walked from the place des Ternes to Calvet’s on the boulevard Saint-Germain in order to meet you, Mr. Brodny. Don’t think me certifiably mad if I repeat that this was the light of the old Europe—behind the fog even here, in Pearris, Freanss, in the year 1968. It froze on a solstice day thirty years ago, in March 1938, in Vienna, Austria. The first phase of the Ice Age then commenced. Now, the second age is already long since past. But the ice doesn’t seem to have thawed completely. The gray mist is still hiding that golden light. How long will it take the mists to dispel altogether? And will the light that finally breaks through be the old light again? What do you think?

34

How regrettable, dear Mr. Brodny, that our meeting yesterday (the day before yesterday? the day before that? I can’t remember which day it was; since then, I’ve been living behind closed shutters and without a timepiece; I write; now and again I sleep for a few hours and then continue writing, and I shall not stop until I have explained to you why what I have to say cannot be said in three sentences)—how frightful, I repeat, that our meeting was so inauspicious! I would very much have liked to talk with you. As a compatriot, so to speak—former compatriot, for now of course you’re an American through and through, while I, hopelessly behind the times, have remained a European. You see, I insist on imagining that you too originally came from Bessarabia. I insist that I saw you when I was a child there. You were one of the men who purchased Uncle Ferdinand’s harvest. We had gone on a carriage ride. It was still very warm; my mother held a white parasol over us. Uncle Ferdinand told the coachman to turn into a field. There you were, standing by a fiery-red thresher that puffed small white clouds of steam into the spotless sky. You were wearing a linen jacket and leather gaiters, and you greeted us—my beautiful mother, Uncle Ferdinand, Miss Fern, and me—with such forceful verve that Uncle Ferdinand automatically and irritatedly waved you off, telling the driver to keep going. Thus, our first meeting was unconsummated, Mr. Jacob G. Brodny. And, at the second meeting, it should not have surprised me to discover features in you that I had not reckoned with—for instance, the dismayingly clear singsong of your angelic voice. I was quite taken off guard by this cantorial tenor.