The secret I want to talk about is the geography of my first bedroom.

My first bedroom coincided with the Herrenzimmer, the "gentlemen's room" as the family living room used to be called in prewar Vienna. Here, come nighttime, my mother opened my little bed and she and my father retired through the door located at the foot of the bed into the dining room behind the right wall. I could hear the mumble of the conversation grownups have, after the children are got out of the way, about things grown-up people know.

In May 1938 the Nazis requisitioned our Vienna apartment. The most interesting thing, sometimes, about a memory is the stubborn impossibility of filling in the holes in it: I can see the alien uniforms standing around our Herrenzimmer. I know there were more then one but not how many, nor do I see myself, or where I stood, though I sense my father like the unseen dream presence behind a dreamer's back. I do see my mother. She is standing to my left. I was ten years old. The time had come for me to learn that what the grownups didn't know was how to save me, that they didn’t know how to save themselves.

My parents and I took the train to the village of Fischamend and went to live with my grandparents. In August, the Nazis requisitioned my grandparents' Fischamend house, and my grandparents, my parents, and I got back on the train to Vienna. We lived with aunts, cousins, and friends--whoever had room--until we were able to leave Vienna on our thirteen year migration via England and the Dominican Republic to New York. I put it all down in a novel I called Other People's Houses. I wonder if the Ancient Mariner in his latter days got really tired of rehearsing his old trauma. Every story I tell starts, willy nilly, with this ur-story.

I returned in 1968 with my American husband. The stairs of a Viennese prewar apartment building spiral round the central elevator in its wrought-iron cage. On the second floor I said, "There: Number 9. That's our door. Number 10 was Xaverl. At least my mother called him Xaverl. He had sinus trouble and my mother said you could set your clock bv Xaverl's early morning coughing, honking, and spitting."

"What are you going to do?" asked my husband uncomfortably.

I rang the bell of Number 9: The sound of a Vienna door bell.

"What are you going to say?" asked my husband.

"Boring!" I remember thinking of Alain Robbe-Grillet's new wave novel because instead of using metaphors and similes to describe a habitation in colors, shapes, smells, and histories, he related the front porch in measurements, width by length, and the plantation of trees visible from the porch in terms of metric distances and compass directions.

I've come to think Robbe-Grillet was onto something. What do we bring away from our nostalgic--our so curiously, so helplessly urgent pilgrimages to a past long since refurnished with the colors, shapes, and smells of the histories of the new people living in our old childhoods? We confirm the blueprint plus elevation of our first geographies. And what if they've removed the walls? In an essay called "The Mural" I've described how my husband and I rented a car to Fischamend and crossed the village square toward the oversized father/mother/child painted on the building that housed the new police station which replaces my grandparents' house. "What puzzles the imagination," I wrote, "is the inability to reconstruct the spaces in which we had moved: I can't position the window that overlooked the square in the wall at the right distance from the angle of the door there used to be on the left." They had removed the floor I stood on.

With my ear inches from the door of our Vienna apartment, I was intensely excited to discover I knew that when the door opened I would see, directly across the foyer, the door to the little toilet I refused to go into, nights, when it was infested with ordinary robbers. To the left, I told my husband, is the kitchen and beyond the kitchen the miserably narrow maid's room my mother had regretted in her refugee days when she was maid and cook in an English household. Listen: The slippers slurping across the parquet floor toward us from the night are coming out of my parents' bedroom, past the bathroom door and along the wall where the little wardrobe with my clothes used to stand. They're turning the L of the foyer past the door with the glass inset that leads into the Herrenzimmer. I mapped the Herrenzimmer in the air. Here's the window. Here are the three leather armchairs round the round table, here's the glass-fronted bookcase, the tile stove, door into the foyer, door into the dining room. My bed stood right here. The chain on the inside stopped the door from opening. In my mind's hindsight it is Hansel and Gretel's crooked, beak-nosed witch peering through the crack. She asked me what I wanted and asked for my father. She said there was nobody by that name living there. I knew that. My father had died a quarter of a century ago during the week that ended the European war. The elderly witch who is living in my Vienna apartment suggested I go and talk to the concierge and then she shut the door.

I have polled my friends: Put yourself back into your first bedroom. Lie down on the bed: You know which way your feet point and the position of the window in relation to the door in relation to the chest of drawers, and the direction of the room in which your parents are asleep. Did you know that you have this map in your head? My friends are surprised, but not overly interested. Boring. We're not excited by the elemental fact that we carry our heads north of our feet, yet this is our basic orientation: It determines what we call up and down, what we experience as right and left. It's not something, when we're talking together, that we mention to ourselves or to each other. We take it, or would take it, if it so much as occurred to us, that this is what we have in common. But neither do we account to ourselves or to each other for the place in which we stand--the standpoint--from which we do our talking.

The kids have a bit of slang that gets near to what I mean. "I know where you're coming from," they say. Or "You see where I'm coming from?"

No, I don't know. I don’t see, and neither do you, and that's why the things we tell each other seldom achieve direct hits. What we mean is likely to land, if it lands at all, to the night or left or aslant of what we intended. Ask someone to quote back to you what you just said. Do you recognize yourself? Proust put it best. He said when A and B talk there are four conversations--what A says and what B hears and what B says and what A hears.

It's the secret of our ur-geographies that poets and people of that sort never stop trying to give away; it's into each other's earliest space that lovers, in their first weeks, believe they are going to be able to enter.