“Incidentally, I must say to their credit that my Viennese relatives made an honest effort to ease my adjustment. Uncle Helmuth very plausibly explained to me the principle of the steam engine and (I suppose because he was taken in by my precocious powers of apprehension) recommended that I read Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. Unfortunately, the text was beyond me; aside from a few descriptions of occult phenomena that terrified me to the marrow of my bones, it left no trace in my mind. Aunt Selma, ranging hungrily about, seized hold of my need for affection. Despite Aunt Hertha’s nagging, her sour philistine lectures (prompted by a certain insecurity towards me), the liberation from Miss Fern’s discipline was at first agreeable, even though I vaguely missed the support, however unjustly, like someone accustomed to a tight corset and now released from it. And Cousin Wolfgang was simply a gift from heaven: my first buddy and accomplice—also my first audience, breathlessly listening, in the dense blackness of the room we now shared; as we whispered from bed to bed, I would tell him of the glittering tumult of the carnival in Nice: the staggering, shaking, hopping, reeling, whirling dance of the giant puppets through flurries of confetti, explosions of paper streamers, and crazily screaming, teeming, frolicking masses around the slowly moving caterpillar procession of floats. Or else about the very gently swaying maze of sailboat masts in the harbor at Monte Carlo. Or the automobiles gliding along like state carriages, heavy and majestic, their wheels rolling over the Promenade des Anglais with the sound of a bandage being slowly pulled off your skin. The purple bougainvillea cascading over white terrace balustrades. The green, white, and red of the tennis court in Cap d’Antibes, feathered in palms and embedded deep in the intense blue of sky and sea, behind the magnolia boulevards and laurel hedges. And naturally also our park, in the distant land of Bessarabia (whose name sounded dappled, like a guinea hen) and the pond in the park . . .

“whereby I was already, if you please, animating my accounts with experiences that were not necessarily always mine (Typical! Christa would think). Besides, please do not forget: the dark bedroom that we shared for twelve years, Cousin Wolfgang and I, may have been uniformly murky at first, but on closer view, once the eyes had adjusted to the finer light values in the darkness, something shimmered through the narrow cracks between the blades of the window blinds, shimmered regularly, now brighter, now darker, now more reddish, now more bluish, casting a dim reflection on the linoleum-covered floor. This shimmer was Vienna, one of the legendary big cities (ineffably more adventurous, more variegated in its population, more confusingly tumultuous than a Mardi Gras with its frivolous fireworks), whose name had echoed in the conversations of my divers uncles whenever they brought my beautiful young mother all manner of splendors (returning conquistadors, laying gifts at the feet of their empress): dresses crustily embroidered in castle-garden-bed patterns and glittering with diamond clasps, gigantic circular boxes containing hats adorned with feathers (I believe they were called aigrettes) from ospreys and birds of paradise, diadems from Cartier, red-white-and-green eardrops (baked out of rubies, diamonds, and emeralds) from Buccellati, furs from Revillon, deliciously soft, tenderly flattering the cheeks, still dimly redolent of a sweet little animal through the hint of lily of the valley, greasily polished heavy leather bolsters from Brigg, filled with clattering, from whose throats (opened by a sensationally modern zipper) the steel-and-ivory heads of golf clubs stretched like starving nestlings, umbrellas from Hermès (their slender handles: a small forest of miniature totem poles with dog and parrot heads); simply all manner of cunning barbarities: crocodile-leather vanity case from Hies, for instance: marvelously space-efficient, filled with a multitude of objects (doubled by the mirror inside the open lid) fitting precisely into the furrows of the chamois lining and crowned with monogrammed ivory tops: perfume vials, powder boxes, cold-cream jars, soap dishes, ivory combs and brush handles, and the inevitable, never utilized manicure set, which could not lack the tiny obstetrical hook of a shoe-buttoner;