Bessarabia, how you weary me! Your rose-petals steeped or candied, your precious little cakes, the interminable Turkic murmur of your samovars. Gypsies, Slavs, Roumanians, Greeks, who can call this a country? Rye grows all over by its own logic; it ergotizes, sours. Bábushki gather dry brush for bake-fires. Butterflies on petals and on pins. Hellenized boyars, The Φιλική Έταιρεία in Chişinău, Tsarist/Soviet annexation. River-borders. Disinheritance.