I thought to myself, She’s a nixie. Some terrible curse forces her to dream that she is a household cart horse, and only when she’s completely oblivious of herself, and is no longer trapped in the nightmare of herself as a draft horse, only then can she emerge from her well shaft, can her nixie eyes look upon the alien world of human beings, can she see the faces and visions of her dream and brood about what they might signify. I said this to myself thus, poetically, because I saw how profoundly her Dalmatian-hill-girl head, in this moment of objectless dreaming over some banal object, had been transformed into something that struck me as the epitome of the German. And already in winter 1940, in the tub of my bathroom in faraway Bessarabia, I knew that a further precious element from the lost half of my life was thereby irretrievably lost in an icy, sinking Europe.

27

I hope it does not irritate you too much, esteemed Mr. Jay Gee Brodny, if I do not unravel the thread of my narrative chronologically but instead, in order to proffer you an insight into the various paleonto-logical layers of my existence, draw it back and forth, pulling out a piece now here, now there, in order to revive some significant moment or other, some informative situation or episode, and thus perhaps to display something that strikes me as worth narrating for a very specific reason. What I envisage is a self that keeps emerging out of itself in constant regeneration, like horse willow, yet becomes more and more self-alien, more and more self-inscrutable in this phased growth, so that ultimately the time experienced and the world experienced seem to it like a theatrical stage during the continual set changes and scene changes in a play whose author has in no way adhered to the classical rules of unity of time and place—whereby, of course, the protagonist of this tragicomedy is always a different person, although spectrally the same, as it were. This can hardly be depicted except as a literary equivalent of looking at raw footage for a film, but I admit that this unsteadiness in storytelling is, no doubt, due to many years of watching movie editors at work and witnessing their laudable persistence, the way they scour through the provisionally stitched together takes, the way they comb through the wealth of filmed events, forming a new series that is often the opposite of the original outline, until the intended meaning of the whole becomes acutely evident. For, as Nagel has his leading character, the narrator, say in his latest (rather plainly autobiographical) best seller, “What we imagine we are expressing is not always what we are actually urged to express. That is why the writer’s labor commences beyond language, where one confronts oneself eye to eye . . .”

And here lies the reason I am telling you so much, so meticulously, about myself, sir. In fact, it’s the reason that I, unfortunately, cannot tell you my story in three sentences. After all, that was what you asked me to do, wasn’t it?