We visited Nodi and Margareta at their flat a few days before I left Romania. Stefan had mentioned, at dinner in the restaurant, that they lived in a stately building, in one of the oldest and grandest residential parts of the city. Now assimilated to the soot-covered buildings in the central district, I was shocked by the new environs. The weather was warm again, the grass, a bright yellow-green fed by melting snow, and the trees on either side of the wide boulevard and in the broad median were just starting to bud, eliciting a recent memory of sunlight streaming through dense, lace curtains, and more distant memories of venetian glass beads, a frost-covered window, and a sunny French landscape with that particular quality of light that indicates an ocean behind waves of tall grass. The large, elegant homes, however, reminded me of villas in the lake region of Northern Italy. Large and rectangular, in a horizontal plane, with flat or very shallow roofs, and large bold, neoclassical facades in muted shades of ivory, fawn, pale yellow, terra cotta. I remember, in particular, a terra cotta painted house with a white colonnade topped with white arches, and tall curved windows on the second floor. The neighborhood was conspicuously clean and quiet, somehow both misplaced and complete unto itself.