boasted my Great-uncle Vili when the two of us finally sat down late that summer afternoon in a garden overlooking his sprawling estate in Surrey. “Just look at this,” he pointed to a vast expanse of green. “Isn’t it splendid?” he asked, as if he had invented the very notion of an afternoon stroll in the English countryside. “Just before sundown and minutes after tea, it always comes: a sense of plenitude, of bliss almost. You know—everything I wanted, I got. Not bad for a man in his eighties.” Arrogant self-satisfaction beamed on his features. I tried to speak to him of Alexandria, of time lost and lost worlds, of the end when the end came, of Monsieur Costa and Montefeltro and Aldo Kohn, of Lotte and Aunt Flora and lives so faraway now. He cut me short and made a disparaging motion with his hand, as if to dismiss a bad odor. “That was rubbish. I live in the present,” he said almost vexed by my nostalgia. “Siamo o non siamo?” he asked, standing up to stretch his muscles, then pointing to the first owl of the evening.
