In Search Of Melancholy Baby [antikvár]

Ü"Don't teli me you really mean to live in America!" said Klaus-Gabriel von Diederhofen, _ whose real name doesn't sound so impressive. "And why not?" I asked. He shrugged his shoulders. "Klaus doesn't like America," said Sergio Bugaretti (an-other champagne name) with a wink. "You know why?" Just then the director clapped his hands and told us to get ready for the camera, and each panelist assumed his own version of dignity: the Germán perching a pair of wire-rimmed glasses on his short nose to look more proletarian; the Italian tossing his gray locks back from his forehead to establish closer contact with the audience; the Russian émigré—which is to say a forty-eight-year-old writer recently booted out of Moscow or, to be even more precise, yours truly—affecting serenity, sociability, and a worldly sheen, none of which was wholly in keeping with his situation at the moment. We were sitting in directors* chairs at the peak of an ideally round, ideally green mountain. Beneath us, in the folds of the foothills, the brightly painted houses of a town whose name had the ring of a flute—Cortina d'Ampezzo; above us, all combs, towers, and fangs, the glacierlike slopes of the Dolomites. In that summer of 1980 I was a celebrity in Italy. Several months before I left the Soviet Union, my növel The Burn had come out in Italian. Just after I left, somé Italian jour-nalists traced me to Paris, and the municipality of Cortina