Even if the building remained, that didn’t mean I still lived there. After all, I’d been away for twenty-five years. Sooner or later even the most patient and understanding of landlords would tire of waiting for the rent. God knows who would be living in the apartment that used to be mine. God knows what had become of my books, my correspondence, of everything I owned.

And what about Minna?

I stopped dead in my tracks. I hadn’t thought of Minna in – well, in twenty-five years, of course, but, more to the point, in the couple of hours since I’d returned to consciousness. And now, having thought of her, I could think of nothing else.

Minna had been six years old when I first encountered her in the basement of a house in Vilna, the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. She was at the time the idolized captive of two dotty old ladies, who believed her to be the sole living descendant of Mindaugas, who had been in his turn the sole king of an independent Lithuania for a little while back in the thirteenth century. Minna’s captors saw her as a monarch in training, the logical choice as queen when Lithuania achieved her independence. Meanwhile, they kept her hidden away so no harm could come to her.

I got her the hell out of there and installed her temporarily in my place on 107th Street, fully intending to find a home for her, but Minna made it very clear that 107th Street was home and she didn’t want to leave it. I took her to Canada one time and almost lost her forever in the Cuban pavilion at the Montreal Expo, but aside from that she’s been happily ensconced in my apartment ever since, picking up languages from the building’s polyglot tenants, tricking my occasional female companions into taking her to the Central Park Zoo, and picking up a fair education without ever crossing the threshold of an actual school.

She was not quite eleven when I let Harald Engstrom pour me that glass of brandy, so that made her what? Thirty-five, thirty-six in November.