I am finished with writing. The words that once raced across these pages have stopped in their contented tracks. I have attained some kind of rest because of them. I no longer fear waking to blood and snow and storks on chimney tops. I eat my burnt toast at breakfast, as I have eaten it since the morning of the twenty-fourth of February 1937, with a renewed sense of Uncle Rudolf’s protective love for me. And mine, for him.

Let the bleak dreams come again, if they must, for I can cope with them now, unless I go gaga, as lonely people in their seventies do.

But I’m not lonely, as I have discovered. I have the warmth of the dead in which to bask.