But that was in my mind when I saw you eating, Mr. Brodny. The year 1962 was also in my mind, the year when I was at the peak of my fame as the writer of shitty movie stories and completely at a standstill with the work on my book, on which I pegged hopes of my salvation from screenplays. It was the year I finally got divorced from Christa and soon didn’t even have a place to live. I moved from hotel to boardinghouse and from boardinghouse to hotel, while people in the street pointed their fingers at me because I was the lover of a world-famous star, Nadine Carrier. The escape from Nadine to the crazy love for Dawn was also in my mind—Dawn and the abstract existence I entered into because of her: the growing unbelievability, unreality, of my existence (which so fascinated Schwab), while all around me lay a world of tormentingly immutable facticity: millions of people teeming over highways, hundreds of thousands eating at rest stops. Everyone, it appeared, knew what he was doing, how much he was earning by doing it, what he could afford with it, what things cost. The supply of purchasable goods was overwhelming, the choice soon imprisoned the entire individual. Everything was getting better, more perfect, more obligating; you had to have it, otherwise you didn’t count . . . And I sleepwalked through the sorrows of a lover whose beloved has been abducted to Hades like Eurydice (I still remember very precisely a conversation with Schwab on the Pont Neuf)—sleepwalked through Paris, the bright and beautiful underworld . . .

all these things were in my mind, as well as Bessarabia and Uncle Ferdinand. And then I heard you speak (without, of course, noticing your angelic voice). Aside from the free and easy “Hi,” which, I must confess, got on my nerves, you very soon said, “I’ve heard about you, young man.” (Why so young? At worst, you’re only five or six years older than I.) “You’re writing a book.” (Indeed.) “Tell me the story in three sentences!” This was said by your hardworking mouth, which lent such original expression to feelings, sentiments, moods that you did not even have, while you consumed pieces of white bread, mashed in Margaux and sputum, with pâté de grives. And quite to my surprise, I heard familiar sounds in your diction. Neither your bellowed r in “story” nor the thick l of the recent immigrant conceals the slightly nasal Viennese Kaffeehaus yiddle of your speech pattern, Jaykopp Gee.

And with that the lid was off my memories. There was no stopping now, and I was not solidly immur’d in earth, I was floating away from myself, floating through the catastrophe-land of Europe, back to the lost half of my life. There was too much of my past in your tender yiddling cadence, from Ostbahnhof to Hofmannsthal, I couldn’t pull myself away.

And yet there you sat and were everything that Europe no longer was, everything that it had meanwhile become, to my sorrow: the same Hilton Hotel from Madrid to Oslo, the same service-station diner, the same airport, the same jukebox from Bückeburg to Calabria, the same supermarket, the same T-shirt on girlish tits, the same hard neon light on evenings when the sky turns to stone over the phallic cities.