In my far-off fatherland they came once a year, on New Year’s Day, in the entourage of the children dressed as the Wise Men who came singing door-to-door, collecting charitable donations. First came the tenants in new white stockings; they left their shoes on the doorstep. They brought venison and poultry and lovely fish, jugs of wine and honey and stacks of golden winnowing baskets. Then they went to the overseer’s to pay their rent. In the afternoon the vendors came crunching down the frosty road from town in jingling horse-drawn sleighs. They presented the overseer with bills, which he went over carefully, and it lasted into the evening. Uncle Ferdinand stood by the window and watched in frowning contempt as they departed one by one or in groups after repeatedly bowing in thanks to the overseer. When the last one had left the yard, Uncle Ferdinand washed his hands—

I was never allowed outside with bare hands. They always made me put on chamois gloves. I was never allowed to touch money. I knew the old pennies with snipes on them in Uncle Ferdinand’s numismatic cabinet long before I could make change with the coins of the currency then in circulation—

and all that was less than a quarter century ago and maybe it’s not even real, maybe it never happened in flesh-and-blood reality. Maybe it was only invented by some dreamer who told it to me or about me, or maybe I invented it myself. Who’d be able to confirm it, or even want to? I lost my fatherland. It’s extremely odd and quite extraordinary. And I don’t even know who my father is. I carry my mother’s name (assuming it was her real name)—

“I’m not going to drink this stuff,” he said, pushing the Coke bottle away. “Take it back and bring me a schnapps.”

The bartender widened his pale blue eyes. “You want to exchange your drink?”

“No. How much is a double kümmel?”

“Two forty,” said the bartender, giving him a very suspicious look. “Here’s three marks. Keep the change, give me a double kümmel, and keep your mouth shut till I finish it and leave.”

From the handful of change in his pocket he sorted out three one-mark coins, shoved them one by one with his thumb over his crooked index finger, and with three sharp snaps placed them in a row on the zinc bar. The gesture gave him spiteful pleasure. The horse trader’s ostentatious display was surely a provocation for the bartender and the teenagers and also a sneer at the miracle of reconstruction, a miracle produced entirely by money, worthless paper become hard currency overnight, hastily hardening hearts and heads—

it was exactly how Mommy snapped down her solitaire cards on the green baize of the little card table—the contempt of the rich for small change . . .

He sees himself sitting with John and Uncle Ferdinand, watching his mother play solitaire: three lovers, and him at seven years old by far the most ardent. It must have been at Uncle Ferdinand’s estate in Bessarabia; the lighting is as it was in those days. Nowhere did I ever see such light again. In it, the world was infinitely wide. When the sun shone, it lit the wetlands along the Pruth River with all the bright distance from the Don to the Côte d’Azur: our hunting grounds: Balkan castles and casino palaces. Courtesan country. Mommy the high-class courtesan, the marionette of a paying gentleman on each of her slender fingers . . .