The cards bloom in neat beds on the dark green baize. Mommy took them out of a little tortoiseshell case, tiny cards with pink and powder-blue backs on which a pair of doves bill and coo in a black frame of filigree rose tendrils. On the case is an enamel showing the aces fanned out: the ace of hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs, held in place with a brilliant. Everything Mommy owns is tasteful and luxurious, earned on her back with nonchalant grace. And I, her darling, was also earned on her back: Uncle Ferdinand could just as well be my father as John or one of our other benefactors from the Côte d’Azur, Bully Olivera or Sir Agop Garabetian. They will all repudiate me when Mommy dies—

Unwillingly, he sees himself in Vienna, an orphan, living with relatives made shabby by inflation. Not now, not here, where hatred of these philistines is already choking him. What he needs now is propping up: he’s on the verge of losing himself here in Hamburg, in this patched-up world of rubble, busy rebuilding everything that only yesterday led to its utter ruin—

I don’t want to think about the way I was when I wasn’t allowed to be myself. I’m not allowed to here and I wasn’t allowed to back in Vienna. I need my myth: the pipe dream of my true self: me, not the stranger, the odd one, the cause of offense, but as I was back then: snugly nestled in everyone’s goodwill, the Little Prince, luxurious little son of a whore. I worship Mommy but I don’t like the way she snaps down the cards. It doesn’t go with her elegance. It’s vulgar. It’s nothing but . . .

she cheats: instead of drawing three cards from the pack each time, she draws them one by one. The rings on her fingers glitter, her polished nails are hard and pointy. When she casts a strategic eye over the colorful field to see where she can play a card, or if it will be discarded, she purses her red lips as if to whistle a silent song. Kissy-mouth. I read rapture in Uncle Ferdinand’s eyes. John’s face is cool. Both know Mommy’s passion for cards. She has cost them both a fortune . . .

now Mommy has spotted a place where she can play her card. Her lips part in an incipient smile that would be cruelly triumphant if she allowed it to ripen. Her eyes flash. She presses the card onto the green baize with such enthusiasm that it bends double. Then with her thumb she snaps the lower edge over the last joint of her index finger. I can’t help thinking it’s like when someone squashes a flea with their thumbnail, a nasty sound. Where did I learn to think so? Was it when one of Uncle Ferdinand’s foresters was de-fleaing his dog? A mundane idea. Better: in his dressing room Uncle Ferdinand has a Sèvres porcelain, “Le puce.” A shepherd kneels behind a lady who looks invitingly at him over her shoulder. She’s pulled up half her crinolines to expose her naked bum, plump and rosy, on which sits a flea. A pastoral: just a game, like Mommy’s solitaire, a game that can turn dangerous at the chemin-de-fer tables in the casino, where fortunes are lost. A man can be squashed under her thumbnail. (Pulp fiction!) MONEY IS HARD. Gisela told me that, and Christa says the same thing every day—