What else do I remember about my aunt Aurora, you ask? Well, many things… But the first thing that comes to mind is her deceased husband, Nikolai Chudnovsky—whose patronymic I have unfortunately forgotten, and whose father was a Russian Orthodox priest who ended up in Yugoslavia after the October Revolution, for obvious reasons. He was a hunter and a drunkard, beloved by the inhabitants of Banatski Karlovac, where my aunt still lives and watches television. Uncle Nikolai was especially close to the representatives of the weaker sex, as the expression goes—erroneously, of course. My aunt once told me that he used to disappear for days at a time, presumably on hunting expeditions, and that her understanding neighbors used to ask her more often than she cared to remember: “Dear Mrs. Chudnovsky, how can a woman as beautiful as yourself stand such a rascal?” And then she added, while staring absentmindedly into her own past and sighing: “But he had such a good heart, your uncle Nikolai.” Although she eventually kicked him out, because she could not tolerate his habit of letting his hunting hound, Rolka, sleep with him in the same bed, she never remarried—not even when she became a widow, a couple of years after the War. My aunt Aurora simply did not like dogs, and that was all there was to it. “It was either me or Rolka,” she concluded with righteous indignation.