Unfortunately, something interfered with my plans.

However, bullheaded as a human being is (behind the times not only in the flight of years but also the flight of days), I was still not ready to admit final defeat. I became aware of my failure only when you asked me to tell you my story in three sentences.

36

And since things deep within me were touched by your Mephistophelian demand, I had a vision. I saw with what appetite you ate your thrush pâté. I scrutinized your mouth. I was fascinated by the dumb show it was performing with no spiritual effort on your part. You were relishing the taste with such gusto; one could see that your entire essence was sublimated into the fine-tasting food mush. After each morsel, your lips closed solidly, like rubber cushions lying snugly on top of each other, and while your jaws were crushing, your lips kneaded along, stretching and twisting as they assumed an expression now of bitterness and indignation, now of insult, hatred, baseness, and finally of almost majestic scorn. Scornfully, with sneeringly pulled-down corners, your lips suffered a swallowing hop of your Adam’s apple; they waited for the rather choky slide of the delicacy down your gullet; then they opened, contorting into a gorgon’s grimace in order to give a pale-violet tongue tip a chance to cleanse any pâté remnants from suspiciously perfect jacket crowns.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not a neurotic aesthete. Business breakfasts in gourmet restaurants with producer-piglets are part of my professional routine. I know the expression of involuntary disgust that one sees in people eating sumptuously. Their autonomously working mouths. Incidentally, as you know, I once wed such a mouth. It was in Nuremberg, at the canteen for German attorneys and witnesses in the gigantic Fürth courthouse. You got the same food as in the Allied cafeteria, but here it was poured out for you like swill. It looked half-fermented and maggoty. Still, it had nutritional value, vitamins. Germans were not picky in 1946. That mouth too was detached from the human being it belonged to. It too remained closed while the human being chewed. It too worked valiantly, albeit with the most peculiar clowneries for itself, just like yours. And the chewing, swallowing human being to whom it belonged and about whom it was completely unconcerned, and who was likewise unconcerned about it, was entirely sublimated into the taking in of nutrients. It was a young girl, corn-blond, with lovely posture, like someone who knows how to ride well. Over the capering mouth hovered a pair of aquamarine-clear fairy-tale eyes, seeing nothing. They were switched off, so to speak, or were listening (so far as eyes can listen), likewise into themselves, to the intake of vitamins from the disgusting canteen grub.

A burning pity overcame me at this sight, a pity not for the girl but for the condition humaine in general: for the human creature and the tragicomedy of its existence. Outside, the city of Nuremberg lay in rubble, as did the rest of Europe. The mass graves from the Don to the Pyramids, from Andalsnes to Salonika, were barely covered. The land was still full of iron men, and children ate from their garbage cans as from troughs. Here in Nuremberg, judgment was to be pronounced on WWII: the crime of war, war crimes; crimes against humanity, the crimes of conspiracy for all these things—twenty million victims. The self-assured zeal with which the gallows were constructed for several of the accused did not permit the hope that the twenty million victims would be the last. And amidst these atrocities sat a foolish, lovely young girl, eating with ardor and physical devotion, as though she were eating the flesh of the LORD. Ate with utter creaturely devotion. Sated herself, provided her body with nutrients. Had turned all her senses to this act of providing nutrients . . . this too a kind of gratitude: indeed, that of the flesh. I began to love her.