He spotted me and couldn’t believe his eyes at how sharp-featured and run-down his wife’s youthful lover had become, but it couldn’t have moved him a bit. John was anything but softhearted. So why did he unceremoniously pluck me off the street with the same cold-bloodedness with which Uncle Ferdinand had welcomed me back to Bessarabia in 1940 after fourteen years (“Ah, te voilà, finalement, il était grand temps qu’on te voie . . .”). It’d been seven years since John last saw me in Bucharest. Back then I too was in uniform, but with much less brass on my lapels than his friends in front of the Hotel Atlantic had. Then as now, he was wearing one of his Saville Row suits that now fit me like a glove. I’m again part of the civilized world of the victors, but in front of the Atlantic in the condition of a raggedy refugee driven from his homeland, it required the exorbitant self-confidence of a John to introduce me to his entourage of brigadiers and wing-commanders as if it was only yesterday that the two of us were together for a weekend at the Duke of Westminster’s. Why did he do it? What moved him to quarter me forthwith in the Atlantic, feed and clothe me, once again provide me with dubious papers which, however, commanded respect from dutiful officials (a travel document from the military government for an “individual of doubtful nationality”), and finally to order me to Nuremberg? Was it the memory of my mother, the high-class courtesan he had had a stormy relationship with—so stormy that he almost couldn’t grin and bear her cruel game before she found eternal rest in a pond in Bessarabia? . . . Stella had been much more passionate about memorializing her. She took a literary interest in the career of Ilse Subicz, who gave herself the stage name Maud (the bed as stage?). Stella found her exceptionally audacious. An officer’s daughter from the world of Austro-Hungarian garrisons that stretched from Udine to Kecskemét to Zhytomyr and a beacon of emancipation, she turned the heads of the richest, most pampered and hard-nosed men of the era until they jigged before her like organ-grinders’ monkeys. Stella collected everything that could document that career. Some things—photos, clippings—I still have, preserved in my magic box—that was all that I could call my own except my rags, a comb, a toothbrush, and a fingernail brush when I washed up in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe, of all places! It all served to confirm my mother’s legend, the legend of the beautiful Maud; and so it also served to confirm the legend of me, her love child. But what’s all that to John? It’s a million miles removed from even the remotest likelihood that John could regard the earthly existence of his onetime mistress, my mother, with the same literary interest as Stella, to say nothing of being so fascinated by the legend’s factual aspect, congealed into the concrete existence of a bastard child, that he would feel compelled to take this living evidence—me—under his wing . . . so what did he want from me?