Of course, there are differences. It isn’t all equally distributed—but if you’re tired, go ahead to bed. It’s only—what time is it anyway? Three thirty?—So if you need to get to bed, go right ahead . . .”

Note:

Nothing can be learned about Uncle Ferdinand’s whereabouts. All that’s definite is that in 1940, when Bessarabia had to be ceded to Russia as part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact—Aristides was a Romanian soldier at the time and had retreated across the Dniester with his regiment—the prince refused to leave his house and estate. It’s assumed that the Russians transported him to a camp as far away as possible, probably in Siberia. Not even John managed to find out anything definite about his fate. For his part, once back in Bucharest and provisionally demobilized, Aristides takes advantage of the lack of clarity about his background and, with the help of Stella and John’s connections, remains there for a while until they succeed in shunting him off to Berlin to keep him out of combat. (Stella’s role in Bucharest: a Romanian Jew but married to the English diplomat John; once Romania enters the war on Germany’s side, she has to leave Bucharest. Soon thereafter, her crazy attempt to meet A. in Berlin.)

• • •

Trivia:

A.’s attitude toward money: After the bitter penury of his school years in Vienna in the care of his relatives, Stella teaches him to spend money without a thought; docilely he falls back into the frivolous extravagance of his childhood milieu, cares as little about the relative value of money as about where it comes from. He loses it too, casually, just like his mother misplaced or lost pieces of jewelry. (A childhood memory: John tosses a string of pearls into the lap of the beautiful Maud. “Here’s something for you to lose.”) Perhaps in closing, a reflection on money as the deity of today, the only true religion of the West. It determines contemporary life to the same extent as, for example, religious faith did in the fourteenth century. Every offense against money is a sacrilege and gets punished more severely than anything else.

Sylvio Gesell’s “shrinking money”: could that have been a topic of conversation in Nagel’s garden house?

• • •

Handwritten:

. . . what exasperates Scherping is a common misunderstanding caused by my unfortunately large and ungainly appearance. (Is it so completely separate from what’s “essential,” however? And what would the latter be?) Carlotta calls me “the starosta,” but that doesn’t fit; I lack the necessary charisma. My “aunt” sees it more accurately, if all too poetically: I’m like the surface of a bog pond that doesn’t disclose how deep or shallow it is. Indeed, I know what I owe to that fact: without lifting a finger I’m able to dramatize myself. And after all, I’ve got anguish to spare. All I have to do is open the sluice gates and it surges over me. To more or less save my skin, I need to mobilize the beast in me, the “wolfish nature” I ascribe to A.: the sheer bestial will to survive. In the end, it drags me out of seething despair and saves me—all too reliably, however. And so I practice a deception to fool myself: a cold, pacified despair that gets staged to give the hysteric in me a playing field where he won’t be in immediate danger of collapsing into himself. (A.’s ironic smile and shrug as wishful thinking that may not be so unattainable.) At any rate, my insight into this ploy is irritating enough to drive me to the nearest bar. (Most drastic experience at the front: a bottle of cognac while under fire from Stalin’s organ pipes.) Paradoxically, I can only get free of myself when I—as here—project myself onto a piece of paper.