S., on the other hand, admires my stories, my endowment of poetic inspiration. (Is he perhaps a bit envious?)

“Show us something from your magic box,” he says and bores his Germanist’s eyes, half-blind from reading, through inch-thick lenses into Christa’s sapphire ones. They are always wide open, those round, bright blue eyes. When Christa blinks, her shining azure winks on and off like the blues on a police cruiser, but whenever her gaze plunges into another pair of eyes to seek and find agreement, no blinking eyelid extinguishes it for even a fraction of a second. It stays open and beaming, offering itself in crystal clarity, penetrating its object with superior knowledge of the truth. It’s not the gaze of an augur, no, it’s druid fire from the depths of the sea . . .

(And in its presence, me: a ragged Scheherazade, a fibbing Punch. How well I understand why S. has also fallen under her spell!)

The “magic box” is my only possession. The dowry I brought to the marriage with Christa; accepting it is the last thing she’d do. I’ve hung onto this box through all the perils of the last few decades: the prewar, wartime, and postwar years, through all my wanderings and escapes from inopportune surroundings and historic events drawing uncomfortably near . . . More by accident than on purpose, it’s stuck by me. Whatever else I may have lost, thrown away, or squandered in deserts and depravities, Ice Ages and Ages of Gold, it has survived. No wonder Aunt Selma watched over it like a treasure; it was the travel case for the jewelry of her beloved sister Ilse who had gone (enviably) astray. The legendary “Maud.” The high-class courtesan. Loved and spoiled by the most frivolously wealthy and powerful men of her day. A source of shame for the Subicz family (and of daydreamy reliving for Aunt Selma).

Aunt Selma, the cart horse who knocks herself out to schlep the poverty-stricken Viennese household of Subicz descendants—herself, Aunt Hertha, Uncle Helmuth, Cousin Wolfgang, and me, the son of a whore—through our mundane existence. For an—alas!—all too brief interlude she has laid her hands in her lap. Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha are “at work,” he at some factory with gigantic machines, she in her moth-eaten music publishing company. (A university graduate despite being an underpaid employee, he has some claim to professional respect; she has double pretensions: by birth a Subicz and a von Jaentsch on her mother’s side. “I kiss your hand, dear lady!” The bankruptcy assets of the Imperial and Royal Habsburg Monarchy readily absorbed into the lower middle class.) Cousin Wolfgang, that model son, is at school like a good boy. I’m playing hooky (or have a cold, an upset stomach, or something else that releases me from the drudgery of that institution of public education). Between Aunt Selma’s hands on her lap, on the coarse linen of her apron, lies the magic box. Crocodile leather, even then fairly well worn. It no longer contains any jewelry. Gone are Mommy’s thick strands of pearls, her diamond necklaces, headbands, bracelets, jeweled clasps, her rings with solitaires—emeralds and rubies. Now the box is full of photos gradually going yellow. Aunt Selma and I have looked through them for the gazillionth time: the glory days of the deceased Ilse Subicz, my mother, who had given herself the showbiz name (nom de plumeau?) Maud. We spread the photos out before us as if they were solitaire cards: pictures of society events, gala dinners, balls, parties, and receptions, portraits of my mother, portraits of her beaus, snapshots from the daily lives of hedonistic idlers (beach scenes, tennis and polo matches, snowshoeing, casinos, masked balls). They are the visual catchwords of a legend that reads like a dime novel: A beautiful girl goes astray, lives life high on the hog, and dies young, leaving behind a bastard child destined for great things. As an artist he will come into her intellectual inheritance. Every artist had a whore for a mother. Aunt Selma weaves the backdrop for this saga. There’s always something else to fill in, explain, place in the right context.