Aunt Selma darns stockings, bowed over a darning egg. (It was incredible to see her achievements: there were holes that had ripped into the darned areas and been redarned again and again, so that archaeological strata of darning work covered our toes and heels.) She sits and holds her head at a slight angle, and I know: she is now listening to herself. She hears herself like a faraway melody. I think, Now that strange, almost Gioconda smile is budding in her. But she senses that I have caught her unawares, and she turns her head to me. And no matter how quickly I look away, she catches me lurking. (I once heard her saying to Aunt Hertha in the kitchen, “The boy has something shifty about him; he’s not open and straightforward, like yours. Sometimes I find him downright sinister.”) The others live in the empty rooms of their terribly lonesome indifference. Even Cousin Wolfgang. My brother Wolfgang. The open, honest, dear boy, already reading his classics at twelve and thirteen (while I was struggling to understand what logarithms were, and, because I didn’t believe I would ever succeed, perusing penny dreadfuls under my school desk, fleeing into a world of wholesome archetypes, instead of consulting Mocznik-Zahradniczek’s Mathematical Textbook for Realschule); Cousin Wolfgang, who at sixteen began his enterprise of absorbing all the great thoughts recorded during six thousand years of history (which barely allowed him to have a single thought of his own but which did not prevent him from exhausting the prime of his mental energy in the dissolute fantasies of masturbation); my brother Wolfgang, with whom I had grown up in the hellish intimacy of a room shared day and night for twelve years, in the brotherliness of mutually smelled farts and mutually knocked-out teeth, in the shared torment inflicted by adults and parents and guardians, in the agony of our impotent and useless hatred of them . . . even he never lost his gaze into nothingness.

Sure, he daydreamed sometimes too, he said when I asked him. About what? Oh, you know. You imagine you’re going to do something important (a gymnast’s dreams, so to speak): contribute to the welfare of mankind (the gigantic swing on the horizontal bar), become famous, respected, loved . . . Rich, too? Sure, if possible, rich too. But that’s not the most important thing (leaping from the horizontal bar, elegant knee bend with arms stretched level, straightening up elastically; the palms slap against the thighs; body frozen at rigid attention: Bravo! Mens sana in corpore sano!). What do I dream about? he returns the question. What do I mean—nothing? You can’t dream about nothing. A mood—eh? Okay, then, not a mood, but what? A sensation with no object, a listening out into the stillness, a peering into nothingness, that’s not a dream . . . Fine, I’ll spare you the quotations, but even the contemplation of the mystics . . .