But all this is nonsense, of course. Sheer fantasy. A fancy of my overstimulated imagination. If it were true, then you would have to be over ninety years old today, in 1968. And besides—why? There is no reason to assume it. Not the slightest thing to go by. At best, some sort of manipulation by my subconscious. The foggy day outside, from which I came, was edged with a light that reminded me of autumn days in Romania. Autumn and also spring days. (I myself begin to fear for my mind. Abbia pazienza!)

And you greeted me so dashingly, with such forcefulness. Without having ever seen me before. As if you had known me for years. I found this heartwarmingly pleasant. It led me to joke on the spot. I could not guess that you expected more ceremony from me. After all, you are a mighty man on the literary scene and I am nothing but a writer.

But no matter. Right after our first exchange went awry, everything else went awry. But you should not therefore believe, Jaykob Gee, that I didn’t like you. On the contrary. I liked you very much: the way you sat there, enjoying a thrush pâté on small pieces of white bread. From the mashing masticatory movements of no doubt perfectly filled molars, your cherubic voice asked what I was writing. Could I tell you the plot in three sentences?

Try putting yourself in my place. I had come from the fog outside, as I have said. From a white-surging ocean. A bright, splendid blue-gold autumn day could be divined at the bottom. The fog was lined with gold. The dove-blue and lemon-yellow city of Paris was completely dissolved. It had turned into gray-whitish steam suffused with gold.

I had walked all the way from my hotel near the place des Ternes to the boulevard Saint-Germain. Or rather: I had swum. Along streets that had turned into white-surging riverbeds. Across squares like vast bays. Through the great flood areas of the Tuileries, where tree stumps, planted in the steam, loomed into the air. Across the Pont Neuf, which had turned into a cloud bridge over a steam-filled chasm. As I walked, I was overcome, of course, by all sorts of memories. Thanks to my drifting through the fog, they too were detached from any context. As if moving through fitful half sleep, full of exchangeable and exchanged meanings. They came floating from every place that hovered between Bessarabia and Paris in the torrent of time. They were not in me—I was in them. Dissolved and disoriented. The thing bearing my name was not a person. I was a surging flood of memories.

I should have explained this to you, Mr. Brodny. I should have told you that the contrast was too abrupt, too enormous, when I entered Calvet’s. There you sat, so unbelievably concrete, so utterly self-assured and American, so—how shall I put it?—so formed, so solidly immured . . . Yes indeed, in my disheveled mental state, I involuntarily thought of Schiller. I said with boyish zeal: