Salzburg, November 1938. Sheets of rain.

We have come to town from our cuckoo-clock cottage on the Mondsee. Stella is preparing to return to Romania. John, entrusted with mysterious diplomatic missions, has left us to our own devices all summer. We have weathered the Sudeten crisis and the spectacular Munich Agreement with complete tranquillity. We learned of them from illustrated gazettes in which the grocer wrapped the cheese and from the mailman’s political comments. (“You see? When they saw they couldn’t put one over on our Führer, they dropped the Czechs, those bastards, those lousy sonsabitches . . .”)

World events reach us here in late echoes, thinned by the mountain air and soothed by the indolent ringing of cowbells and the humming of flies in the summer heat above the lakeside meadows. World history hangs over us as remote as the thunderstorms that arise daily between the glacier peaks, rumble a bit, and then are dissolved by a dazzling sun back into the sheer washed-out blue of the Alpine sky. But were that history to take place over us, with us, we would pay as little heed. We do not exist in the world of others but only for each other. We have no eyes for what is happening around us, we see only each other. We have no wants, no wishes except for each other . . .

Nevertheless, Stella is wise enough to tell herself (and me) that our refuge from a reality that is gradually becoming ominous is due to John, and that it is advisable to follow John’s directions.

These directions are very precise. In a letter from Warsaw (where he was transferred from Prague), John writes that it would be advantageous if Stella came to Bucharest. There it could be proved through my elective and nominal uncle Ferdinand (who had vanished from my life for twelve years) that I am a Romanian citizen. John feels it would not be advisable to come to Bucharest myself and take the matter in hand, for I would most likely be drafted on the spot. It would be better if I dealt in some other way with this irksome business—which can most likely be deferred but is unavoidable in the long run. I should approach it in such a manner as to leave myself elbow room later on. Uncle Ferdinand (who, incidentally, is delighted to hear from me), says John, will know how to settle this satisfactorily through his connections. In any case, given the circumstances, I would not be safer anywhere than as a friendly foreigner in Hitler’s Greater Germany, so I am to stay where I am: on an Austrian lake that now is part of Greater Germany. However, says John, Stella’s presence in Bucharest is imperative.

This means separating from Stella for a certain time, probably an unendurable period for both of us. But for me it means definitively cutting the umbilical cord to my Viennese relatives. (Uncle Helmuth—in high dudgeon because of my relationship with a Jewess and, through her, naturally, with all sorts of foreign plutocrats—has already cited his rights and duties as a guardian several times.) Meanwhile, we have packed our bags.