“Here, this is a good portrait of my mother—beautiful, wasn’t she? Yes indeed, ravishingly beautiful, especially the shape of her eyes, so pleasantly un-Germanic, not at all aggressive and round as a bull’s-eye. The upper lid an arc soft as moonlight above the straight lashes below—as if the radiance shone anew each time she blinked. Max Factor turned out a whole generation of starry-eyed beauties in Hollywood with that trick. But in little Ilse Subicz, it was a natural gift, inherited from Bosnian mountain-farm women from the days when the Orient still ended at Europe’s threshold. Thence also the sly wit in her glance, her irony. . . Ah well . . . and the curly head in her lap is me, of course. I must not have been much older than a year when—cute baby, no?”

(Exchange of glances between S. and Christa: it could be any old baby; they all look the same at that age . . .)

“The farm woman holding me on her arm? Probably a Romanian nursemaid. It must have been at Uncle Ferdinand’s in Bessarabia in what’s now Russia—or rather, in what was then Romania . . . To tell you the truth, it gets boring to give your birthplace when you have to supply an entire outline of Eastern European geography and history along with it—at any rate, it was geographically somewhere between the Carpathians and the Kyrgyzstan steppes, temporally between two orgies of cataclysmic hate, World War I and World War II. Between different worlds and times, as they say. But as you can see, when I was a little boy, none of that left any traces on me. For the first seven years of my life I was very happy, well bred, and well fed, very spoiled, very cheerful, and unselfconscious . . .”

—my earliest memories? Light falling obliquely through a large window, slanting across a bright room, even brighter than the sunlight outside, all bundled together in the words “summer happiness”: it paints the four quadrants of the rectangular window onto the mirroring parquet, fragrant with floor wax, and sparkles in a hundred lights on the silver tea set—

On a console table, a big bouquet in a porcelain vase—

and outside, billows of lilac along the wall of the park—

the fragrance of freshly mown meadows—

and Mommy laughs and picks me up and kisses me—

the smell of Pears soap on me, dark as old beeswax; my skin is red from Miss Fern’s unforgiving scrub brush—

Excursion: the bobbing rumps of the coach horses, notched like a peach. The parabolas of their coarse tails lift and from the rosettes of their anuses, opening iris-like, emerge apple-round yellow tubers that plop between their sweat-flecked haunches while the mallow-colored rosettes close up again with beautiful efficiency—

—my mother doubled over with laughter and imitating Uncle Ferdinand. He gives a lordly wave to the tenants stepping back respectfully into the ditch as we drive past. “Bonjour, popor!” (popor means people . . .)