People were quite different when my father was a boy. For example, he told me once that there was a beautiful maiden of marriageable age at Krk, the largest island in the Adriatic, where my father was born in 1912, and from where his family had to flee in 1918, immediately after the Italian occupation, because his father, a land-surveying engineer and the head of the cadastral office for the island, had played an important albeit unclear role in the pro-Yugoslav provisional government there, formed in the brief interregnum that followed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and, returning to the maiden, when the time came for her family to marry her off, she proudly refused all their choices, always finding something or other not to her liking in the young men presented to her. This soon became common knowledge in the small community. One day, a very poor young man came to propose to her without the benefit of her family’s approval, but she, quite predictably, refused him as well with the following words: “I do not want a man without bread in his hands.” This expression, parenthetically, is still used in many parts of Yugoslavia, and I imagine elsewhere in the world, to denote the ability of a man to support himself and his family, as “bread in hands” was in the past, apparently, all one really needed. Neither is bread what it used to be. Be this as it may, the young man left with a sinking heart, but returned in a short while with a loaf of bread in his hands, knocked on the door through which he was so recently almost thrown out, asked for the unfortunate maiden, who was indeed, according to my father, of astonishing beauty and poise, and, when she finally appeared, presented her with his loaf, turned around without a single word, and walked away. She just stood in the doorway, holding the accursed loaf, until she regained her composure and quietly closed the door. A couple of hours later, her family established that she had hanged herself in her spacious chambers. My father insisted that he remembered this renaissance doorway with such absolute clarity, that he could immediately draw every single detail exactly as it was when he last saw it. As he reached for a pencil and a scrap of paper I stopped him, for, to begin with, as an architect he could always produce such a drawing, and moreover, I had not seen the doorway myself, and thus could not judge the accuracy of his recollection. And I regret this small gesture, because his knowledge is perhaps irretrievable, and because that particular doorway is of enormous interest to me now.