But the nights, the nights . . . they were dark and gloomy and weighed on my chest. I had trouble breathing all night long. It didn’t help that I crept from the wall of boards that separated our miserably furnished rooms and the collapsed part of Witte’s villa on the Elbchaussee out across the bomb crater to the nettles among the crumbled bricks where no one would look for me—not Christa in any case, and Nagel couldn’t see me from his garden house either—and sat down there and stared up at the sky as if expecting deliverance. I couldn’t see any stars. Thick clouds pressed on my eyes. The nights were in league with my nightmare and left me no way out of my torment. Wherever I fled, the old woman was with me, even there in my hideout among the ruins of the Hanseatic past. The old woman herself came from the ruins of the past, even if not the Hanseatic past, but who could say for sure? She evaded all my questions. I never could discover what corner she arose from. I’ve been a night owl all my life, in the cynicism of my badly disguised Romanticism. Too often kept awake by daytime adventures, by too many people and events, by waiting for Mommy, who I knew was with one of her beaus (my “uncles”), by Cousin Wolfgang’s panting curiosity, and soon too by the scream of air raid sirens. The nights were never my enemies. I was never afraid of them then, as I was of these now. The nights of the pre–Ice Age were transparent all the way to the stars. I loved their stillness, feeling solitary in their immensity, alone in the world. I added my ambition to their vastness. We cobbled together what was my secret treasure: freedom from guilt and the pride of being—despite everything that might confront me—indisputably well born. I was never closer to my true self than at night in Uncle Bully Olivera’s villa on the Cap d’Ail. I slept with the windows wide open to the sea, and of course I didn’t sleep. Miss Fern was gone. I lay with my eyes open, looking down onto the restless, splintering silver on the black velvet of the lazy waves that rocked the fishing boats and caused their naked masts to scribble confused hieroglyphics in the violet sky. And I knew I wasn’t like my occasional playmates and wouldn’t become like the adults around me and had been granted a special path I would tread, head held high, to the amazement of all the others. And I still knew it when I returned to Bessarabia and, half-numb from exhaustion after Uncle Ferdinand’s tales of his crumbling Middle Kingdom, threw myself onto the bed, knowing that beyond the sparkle of frost flowers on the windowpanes was my friend, the lofty night, keeper of my secrets—the night that generously left it to the moon to spill its milky light over the humps of snow-covered willows in the Dniester meadows while it filled the vastness above with cosmic frost and the rustling light of its showers of stars.