—in my memory, the bearskin caps of the boyars in the portraits of Uncle Ferdinand’s ancestors: I have declared them mine as well; I come from a princely house—

Miss Fern’s hateful index finger snapping the hat brim I’ve turned down at a jaunty angle back into the circular brim of a child’s hat—

—the viscous, dark blue sea beyond our garden gate on the Côte d’Azur, continued in the purple waves of the lavender beds; higher up, the clear contour of the coast, the hillsides crosshatched sepia and silvery olive-green, the cloud-blue mountains—

the swaying masts of the boats rocking gently along the pier, crossing one another in a symbolic fencing match: Japanese theater. Sky, sea, and coast all brutal spots of color: land of the Impressionists—

the coastal breeze rattles the palm fronds along the esplanade—

—white parasols, Panama hats, and blazers with gold buttons. We’re on the deck of Uncle Agop’s yacht. Uncle Agop lets me look through his telescope at a distant fishing cutter. I can see the red pompom on the fisherman’s cap . . .

“But look at those trees in the background—no, not those. Those are cypresses and they don’t grow in northern Bessarabia. There was a dense forest of them in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where we spent the winter with Uncle Agop the oil tycoon, we being my mother, Uncle Ferdinand, my nanny Miss Fern, and me. At home in Bessarabia we were very near the Russian border. Only the Dniester separated us from the evil Bolsheviks. At night shots often rang out from across the river. We didn’t think much of it. But we spent the winter on the Côte, and what I wanted to show you weren’t the trees there, but the ones in our park at home, as I called Uncle Ferdinand’s estate in Bessarabia. Here, take a look at these gigantic beeches—not those, those are plane trees. There were some of them in Saint-Jean too—or rather, in Antibes, in the garden of Uncle Bully Olivera’s villa; Bully made his fortune in Bolivian tin and was another of my mother’s devotees. She would easily confuse them, especially if you could see lions at the garden gates, because there were lions both here and there—I mean, in Antibes and also in Saint-Jean and at home in Bessarabia . . . I’m sorry I’m showing you all this in such disorder, but that’s also how memory functions—if it functions at all. The selection of images out of the thousands of impressions we’ve experienced is as random—or inexplicable—as whatever it is that guides my hand to take a particular photo out of the box. All of a sudden, one of the countless snapshots our five senses have stored up, called forth God only knows how and by what, assumes profound significance—for example, the lions at the gates of all the houses my mother and I lived in. Mommy had a real passion for those slightly bourgeois doorkeepers. Uncle Ferdinand called it one of her “quirks.” She had copies of Uncle Ferdinand’s park lions made and gave them to Uncle Agop and Uncle Bully for their villas on the Corniche, marvelous examples of kitschy outdoor accessories if I do say so, although not the banal kind with plaster ringlets you see at the garden gates of small-town mansions. No, these were medieval and fierce, dreamed up by a local stonecutter who’d never seen a real lion. They were a cross between a dog and a giant tomcat in a powdered wig and fetchingly curled up mustachios above snarling mouths. It’s a shame I don’t have a photo of them, but we were so used to their being wherever we stayed that no one ever thought they were anything special except Mommy, who named and constantly renamed them after her lovers. If you could see through these trees here, you would see where they stood: in Bessarabia on top of the pillars of the wrought-iron gate beyond the bridge over the deep, transparent, darkly flowing stream, sparkling gold in sunlight and shaded by wondrously large coltsfoot leaves, water whose constant, strong current combed the yellowed swamp grass in its depths. It was as if they too were lined with gold, the bedroom of the beautiful Melusine. I would often watch the riverbank crabs crawling over it. In their armor they seemed like heraldic relatives of the lions, somehow connected to their passionate anger, the petrified fury with which those big cats sank their griffin claws into the blank shields they held before their wasp-waisted bodies . . . Yes, and then the stream emptied into the pond where my mother—but that’s another story. Here’s a picture of Uncle Agop’s yacht off Monte Carlo—”