I left my mother and the forest with its shy animals to follow my father to war. Soon the war laid waste the land. People told me my father was a bad man and they had hanged him. So I became a bad man like him. I burned down many houses. I watched many roofs collapse into the honeyed light of the flames that fell from the rafters like a woman’s loosened hair. Once I came to a house where there was a beautiful daughter. I took her with me and loved her. She bore me a son, I don’t know where. There is no more forest. They felled it in the war. I want my son to seek me. I want to find him and grab his dark locks to lift him up for a better look at him.

• • •

Preface (Draft)

The best part of this book are the drafts I told to someone or other and immediately forgot; they are the chapters of happy invention I neglected to write, the important themes I pursued for a while and then lost the sense of, ideas and accidents I was too lazy and neglectful to note down—in short, everything not to be found in these pages.

The man who left us these notes (without a doubt, they are for the most part autobiographical) was born in Bessarabia, which had just become part of Romania, in 1919, shortly after the First World War. Although it would perhaps be wise to take this symbolically, he spent a princely childhood in extremely feudal environments on country estates there and in the villas of his various “uncles”—a.k.a. the lovers of his happy-go-lucky mother—on the Côte d’Azur. After the untimely death of that beautiful woman, orphaned and forgotten by his mother’s benefactors (his father can only be conjectured as one of their number), he ended up with relatives in Vienna and “wilted,” as he put it with bitter sarcasm, through a dozen nightmarish years, studying in the sweltering stupor of various third-rate schools in the outlying suburbs and living in the narrow (in every sense of the word) confines of a “starched-collar bourgeoisie” degraded by war, inflation, and what might be called a smoldering Socialism, until in 1937, only a few months before the Anschluss, the Jewish wife (the “Stella” of his manuscripts) of one of the legendary patrons of his childhood, the shadowy British diplomat John, discovered him and, by taking a more than maternal interest in him brought his “existence back into bloom,” a good deed for which she would later pay with her life.

What he calls the “blossoming of his existence” will suggest to anyone more or less familiar with the psyche of writers what his destiny would be. The passages of his manuscript that refer to it sound like a catalogue of the wishful thinking of those who, according to Flaubert, “sont faits pour le dire, et non pour l’avoir.”

The times did not favor the fulfillment of those wishes. When German troops invade on March 12, 1938, and Adolf Hitler makes an appearance in Austria, it “mows down the naive conscience of those happy beings who were able to take part in the beauty of the world.” Although the author of the story spends that summer on a lake in the Salzkammergut with his beloved, “confidently wrapped in a cocoon of togetherness that recognizes nothing but itself,” the winter of 1938–39 separates the pair. Stella manages to arrange her protégé’s return to Romania and his reunion with another patron of his childhood, “Uncle” Ferdinand. By the winter of 1940, he is a Romanian soldier stationed in Bessarabia. The “world of iron men” has begun and with it the “Ice Age” that will last until 1948.