Cousin Wolfgang now lies in Vienna’s Central Graveyard. I think of him often and with sincere affection. In those last few years, when it tortured him to see me reading Nietzsche as a matter of course while he wrestled with the same text like Jacob with the angel (“For you, it’s a cowboys-and-Indians story!” he said angrily. “And for you?” I asked. “But this shakes your whole being! This bowls you over! It forces your inmost nature to make an ultimate decision . . .” And then his voice trailed off before my ironic look. Oh Schwab!)

in the last few years, I say, when he was standing up more and more resolutely for the worldview of the National Socialist German Workers Party, which was outlawed in Austria but was celebrating triumphs in the “Old Reich,” he would speak starry-eyed about the Volk. We used to talk a lot in those days, just before and just after John and Stella entered my life (until his way of seeing the world no longer permitted him to watch unprotesting while I lived as the kept lover of a Jewess). This was the era when we had drawn so close through our fistfights as to recognize our brotherhood despite our incompatibility—good Lord in heaven! Fourteen years together in one room, at one table, in front of the same emaciated faces, in the same dripping, steaming bathroom . . . Too bad he departed from us so prematurely, my dear cousin Wolfgang! He has been lying in the ground for six months now (it’s 1940)—a martyr to his “reality within reality,” which he regarded as the only reality: as if its standards, its weights and laws, were valid for everyone . . . I should have done more to convince him of God’s approval of better bathrooms . . .

21

Anyhow, there in Bessarabia I pleasurably prolong my bath. I feel it’s important to mull these things over while I cover my chest and arms with the sumptuous, spicy foam. Despite the four-course lunch and the opulent afternoon tea, I feel hungry, which adds a degree of poignant warmth to my affection for Uncle Ferdinand, for I know how carefully he will have arranged the dinner and the accompanying wines. I am tense and overtired, but quite thoroughly happy. I feel as if once more I have escaped into another, new, unexpected state, a new, abstract reality. My frame of mind must be similar to that of the souls who, at the Last Judgment, have managed just barely to slip under the angel’s dividing hand to the right side of God—only to realize that they are floating in space because they have lost the ground under their feet.

I would have liked to chat with Cousin Wolfgang now. I enjoy picturing him seated here on the edge of the bathtub as he so often did on Sundays in the bathroom of the apartment in the Twelfth District, when Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha and Aunt Selma had gone off to the woodlands of the Rax, and he and I, claiming we had to study, enjoyed a quiet day of ample loafing and undisturbed bathing joys. Our brotherhood was unclouded at such times.