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wooden stairs, the night reverts to its transparent silence; and so sharp, so bitter, is the taste of solitude in my mouth that I find myself wishing for the comforting warmth of my receding childhood, for my parents’ habitual presence. Only after a time do I realize that being alone here and now, on this dizzying edge of the unknown, is to me a happiness deeper, a happiness more pure, than any companionship could ever be. I clear out the saucers, rub the fingerprints off the smudged cup, then, telescope in hand, return to the balcony. The night embraces me, cool and endless, and above me the stars are tiny holes in the darkness through which the light of eternity is pouring out. I can almost sense primordial stardust flowing through my veins. People are forever telling me that stars make them feel small, and I always nod noncommittally and wonder at the stuffy confinement of their minds.
    Stars make me feel vast.
    I think of the day at the dacha, three summers ago, when my father gave me the telescope. “We’ll try it right after nightfall,” he told me, “though the best time to look at the stars is at three in the morning.”
    “So let’s do it at three in the morning,” I said.
    “But how will you wake up?” he asked, smiling. “We have no alarm here.”
    “If I wake up, do you promise not to send me back to bed? Will you teach me the constellations?”
    “All right,” he said with a shrug; for of course he did not foresee the need to ever keep his promise.
    That night, when I opened my eyes, my room lay quiet and gray, shifting with odd predawn shadows, creaking with mysterious half-sounds. Sitting up in bed, I groped for the light switch. The clock above the armchair read a few minutes to three. As I crept downstairs, pressing the gleaming new telescope to my pajama-clad chest, I felt thrilled by the unfamiliar sense of being awake while all the world slept. The front door was unlocked. My father was out on the veranda, staring into the garden, waiting for me—or so I thought until he turned, and I saw the look of surprise on his face.
    “Ha!” he exclaimed, squinting at his watch. “ L’exactitude est la politesse des rois. I must say, I’m impressed. Well, come here, come here!”
    For the next hour we stood side by side, gazing upward until our necks ached. When the night grew chilly, he draped his old woolen cardigan over my shoulders. He spoke of ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and Andromeda chained to a cliff, and Babylonian stargazers. He quoted early Mayakovsky:
Listen!
If they light up the stars,
Does it mean someone must need it?
Does it mean someone wants them to exist,
Does it mean someone calls these little bits of spit “pearls” . . .
    He taught me dozens of sonorous foreign names, which I repeated after him, enchanted. “Do you know, Shakespeare writes somewhere of the futility of astronomical knowledge,” he said at one point. “How does it go, let me see . . .” He riffled brieflythrough the index cards of his prodigious memory; he knew entire volumes of poetry by heart. “Ah, yes!
“These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights,
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are . . .”
    His English was strongly accented but clear. “Magnificent, no? ‘ Their shining nights  . . .’” He paused to let the aural afterimage of the words linger in the air. It was so quiet that I imagined I heard a slumbering wagtail ruffling feathers in my favorite apple tree and some nocturnal creature splashing through the forest pond beyond our fence—and involuntarily I strained to catch the sound of the stars circling above in their slow, majestic, infinite river, though I did not know what they should sound like. A remote tinkling of melodious crystals? An unearthly choir of angels? A maddeningly beautiful, maddeningly indistinct poem mumbled into his beard by the unknown, unknowable