A mood-moment, in any case. This sort of thing should not be underestimated. The weather yesterday was still affecting me. In the weather I recognize myself in my paleontological strata.

Let’s keep in mind: for me, weather has always been more of a psychological than a meteorological phenomenon. The days of my childhood, for example (which I count as having lasted until my mother’s death), were never marred by even the smallest cloudlet. Sparkling blue sky everywhere (particularly dense, of course, above the Côte d’Azur). The stolidity of my formative years in Vienna was something I allowed to pass over me with my head drawn in: I no longer remember when it rained or when the sun shone. Unusually clear weather (clear as glass and almost painfully cold) prevailed in Vienna in March 1938, at the so-called Anschluss, the annexation (or upheaval), and it remained sunny throughout my summer with Stella in the Salzkammergut. Distinct changes in the seasons (childlike delight at the ardor of the snowmelt, for example, at the black crumbly earth thawing free underneath, the starry-eyed primroses sprouting in last year’s wet yellow grass, the first bright, tender green on the birch branches and so on, the leaden sky under which the white balls of cherry blossoms explode, weeks of summer heat thick with flowers when the horizons flicker like fire lanes, apocalyptic downpours whipping the silvery, surging cornfields, lightning flashes and thunderclaps, then abrupt silence, a steaming sigh of relief in Nature—the end of the world was only playacted, everything is sparkling again, the red poppy glows again in the yellow of the wheat next to the truehearted blue of the cornflowers, a blinking dripping from the leafy roof of treetops with the clouds rolling apart overhead, the day mistily brooding to a close, a magical mosquito dance as the shadowy webs of evening weave thicker and thicker, then the moon rises big, round, and clarifying, yes, indeed; finally, the blue-and-gold self-immolation of autumn)—these pleasures, long since anachronistic, I could experience after my childhood only upon returning home to Bessarabia. But then, it was almost winter.

And oddly enough, this winter has already skipped across a few years of military events (I spent them under arbitrarily changing climatic conditions, like a mouse zigzagging around inside a cage of predators where the beasts pounce on one another: one had little opportunity to consider the weather). It was the Ice Age anyhow. But true winter—a crisp snowland, in which the kneeling world turns its back on you in the sweeping storm of ice crystals, the angels are frozen to the earth, they cannot raise their eyelids, frozen stiff over their blind eyes—true winter, I say, resumed for me only when the weapons fell silent.

•

As we know, it wasn’t only the weapons that fell silent back then. The cities fell silent too—that is, what was left of them. They were nothing but chains of streets leading through rubble fields, acres of brick debris, mortar, cement fragments under bonnets of snow: white, hilly districts where the frost softened and leveled the harsher contours with its pitiless grasp. Here and there a cracked lighting pole showed its dangling wires, here and there a section of wall loomed, with its back to the horizontal sweep of the ice wind. Basement caves that weren’t filled in were tenanted by people. They too were silent (understandably).