“Even as a child she was something special . . .” Massively spoiled by their father, my grandfather Colonel Subicz (he too was a legend, fallen in the very first days of the First World War), also spoiled by their mother, born a von Jaentsch (“I kiss your hand, Frau Baronin!”). An army brat whose reputation as a pleasure-loving beauty preceded her in every garrison to which the patiently starving Subicz was posted between Przemyśl and Ljubljana, rising through the ranks from cavalry captain to major, from major to lieutenant-colonel, and finally, decades later, from lieutenant-colonel to colonel while his three daughters grew more and more beautiful and the youngest most beautiful of all. “. . . and our father told her repeatedly, you’re something special, not made to be submissive. You’ll always dominate, give orders, have your way. . .”

And then plunged into penury: their father’s heroic death, the hardship of the war years, defeat, destruction of the world of the Subiczes and von Jaentsches, years of hunger, inflation, and inexorably miserable existence. “She couldn’t stand it, so she escaped . . .” (So goes the legend. In fact, the wicked girl gave in to her urge for freedom even earlier. I was born in 1919 so she must have already run off in 1918. John was serving in an international commission at the time. In any case, she ran off . . .)

Ran off into the “great life.” Not, however, as a grande dame. Maud, the high-class courtesan, was presumably snubbed by the grandes dames of the epoch. But not humiliated. (Aunt Selma says that when Ilse-Maud was still a girl her mother, born a von Jaentsch and always careful to maintain social rank by speaking French to her daughters, had told her, “Si tu continueras comme ça, tu finiras dans un bordel.” To which Ilse-Maud replied, “Peut-être. Mais cela sera toujours un bordel de premier ordre.” (Notation in the margin: Caution! Cf. Abel.)

We weave the myth of the beautiful Ilse-Maud just as later, in the winter of 1940, Uncle Ferdinand would weave the myth of the “Middle Kingdom”. . .

. . . and so I too am resurrected from the pictures in the magic box, the princely son of a whore, soon to be the orphan boy in the misery of the Viennese starched-collar bourgeoisie, Stella’s gigolo, and finally a castaway in the land of the lotus-eaters, who never had a real fatherland but was a prince in a childhood realm, a gift from god, cuddled and kissed by everyone—and one day forgotten, abandoned to the world of the lowly and disinherited

S. points to a Kodak photograph. “Who’s this?”

“My mother on the Côte d’Azur.”

“And the huge old coxcomb next to her?”

“Uncle Ferdinand. A Romanian prince.” (Possibly my father. I don’t say it, Christa does, with a steely blue gaze into Schwab’s thick lenses.)

Undaunted, for decades I’ve been documenting myself with this box! It’s a well-known fact that the camera lens doesn’t lie. People expect me to perform my myth—and they get what they ask for: