Kauffmann, too, seems unsure of this elusive identity, just as he is unsure what to think about his former girlfriend. She has read one of his books and signs her letter "with love", but gives no address, thereby indicating that she has no wish to see him again. He even wonders if he met her on his travels in Courland, but that after so many years neither of them recognised the other. Now, he reflects, "Mara is like a scar for which there never was a wound."

There is something haunting about this story within the story of Kauffmann's journey, which is embellished by random encounters with more or less colourful and eccentric Courlanders, none of whom however has the charm of Mara. She belongs to Courland's amnesiac present, yet evokes its exotic past — from the Order of Livonian Knights to 19th-century Jewish emigrants, fleeing Russian pogroms from the principal port of Liepaja; Baron Munchhausen concocting his fabulous adventures; the exiled Louis XVIII, last of the Bourbon monarchs; and Eduard von Keyserling, whose novels immortalised the doomed Baltic barons: Courland's Chekhov. Kauffmann's homage to his lost beloved leaves us all in his debt.