KARLSBAD-HAMBURG-- THE POSTCARD: July, 1914 1. A woman of middle age with a round, even puffy, face wears a dress down to her heels and stands against a background of overly-picturesque cliff (a carefully painted backdrop in a photographer's studio). Little is known about this woman. Even her name, Rachel, was preserved only on a little page of autobiography written by her eldest daughter to get a job in some sort of Soviet office at the beginning of the thirties. "My mother, Rachel, an office worker, died in July, 1919. . ." that is--five years after this bit of news was posted to her son (a medical student at the time) in Hamburg. On the back of the card are just a few phrases, lacking even the usual inquisition about his health or a wish for his fulfillment. There is just the one reminder: it is time to order a new suit. Apparently the youth's health was not then in doubt. Fulfillment (unthinkable outside marriage) was thought for now to be premature. 2. It remains unclear whether Robert succeeded or not in having a new suit ordered and made before August, when he, as an enemy alien, was deported as a consequence of the onset of events which, throughout the whole world, are still unresolved. For some reason, grandmother Raya (that is Rachel, who had changed her name) told me that her mother-in-law (that is Rachel, who hadn't change her name), just before dying, bequeathed her all her jewels. There was just enough to survive the four famine winters that came in the next decade. It is known too, that Rachel could not abide modern trends in art. She forbade her son to display two prints rendered in pointillist style. Rachel called these pictures, composed of dots, "spotted fever"-- the disease that took her life. * * * * * This is what Robert said, in December, 1952, when the prospect of arrest loomed with sufficient clarity: "The twentieth century began with a fourteen-year delay. I don't know when this century will end." The first part seems to be a quotation; as for the second part, for Robert, the twentieth century ended in 1954. © 1996 Boris Khersonsky. All rights reserved. Translation by Ruth Kreuzer and Dale Hobson