I laughed from sheer joy, laughed aloud. I could stay, and it was my host who apologised! Tears came to my eyes: comfort? He did not realise what royal comfort he offered me. A corner where I would withdraw out of sight, a nook whence I should not be driven, a seat which is not drenched with rain and on which I might rest. His wife came in too, a kindly little woman, aged before her time. She invited me into the room and wiped a chair with her apron, then began splitting wood in the kitchen. When the fire had burnt up she opened the door so as to let in the warmth. Warmth! As it slowly thawed me it also thawed my heart. At first my mind remained inactive, I was just happy. Then I began slowly to take notice of the things around me. Under the low roof, above the piled-up bed, a text was hanging in a gaudy frame. I read it over and over again during my long wait, and yet I cannot remember it. Oleographs and family portraits hung on the walls, the women sitting in stiff poses, the men with long, waxed moustaches. A fretwork basket stood on the chest of drawers. Everything shone in a reddish, warm light. A red piece of cloth served as a curtain over the window. And as I sat on my hard chair the guard’s hut seemed slowly to become strangely familiar to me, as did the room with its cheap ornaments, as if I had been there before. But then the house stood in another landscape, far away, on the Carso, amidst bleak rock, on a wild mountain. Then I was young, and writing my first novel: _Stonecrop_. That other house, to which I had given the youth of my creative power, stood between two tunnels. And it dawned upon me that perhaps there was no such thing as hazard, that even little guards’ houses return to you the love you have once bestowed upon them. Something caught my eye, I had not noticed it before—a calendar hung on the whitewashed wall and I read in the dim, reddish light: April 16, 1919. That recalled me to reality. Carriages passed on the road coming from the direction of Aszód—stolen carriages, and in them sat suspicious-looking people, Jews in fur coats, and they all drove into the courtyard of the castle. I watched them from behind the red curtains. They entered the house noisily: was it not all theirs? And the windows of the castle stared in rigid astonishment out into the garden, as if they wondered what was happening behind them.