(the buzzing fly is surrounded by the cringing black corpses of its fellow flies that have buzzed away their lives into the unrepentant nights of the Hôtel Épicure:

corpses of souls: when I was a child, I thought of flypaper whenever I saw the glow of candles in the old honey-gold of the effigies of saints: it had grown black with the souls that stuck to it—)

•

And I try to picture the nights when it was my patience that let the buzzing of the switchboard telephone bore across a thousand leagues into the night stillness of the sleepers here and vainly shrill away against the vicious despotism of their dreams.

•

Back then, I was assaulted by a different madness from my present one: love.

•

I loved Dawn.

I was far away from her: in Hamburg, in the apartment I had set up for us in a lover’s petit bourgeois world-embracing yearning for happiness—

at number 9 Heilwigstrasse:

—as if the address were an incantation conjuring up that self-effacing bourgeois happiness that both of us knew would never be granted us—could never be granted us, because of fate: not admitted by the story set down for us: because we would thus have lost what had driven us to each other: the other yearning inside us, unresponsive, without a model, making us susceptible to any insanity, a yearning beyond ourselves, steering our lives toward each other in a different way: like two parallel lines meeting at infinity, in the beyond of a story worth telling—

I loved—and as if in this state not only did the primal motifs of nature have to keep sounding but also, along with the leitmotif of personal fate, its full theme, so in this love story there was a cool-jazz repetition of what had been a trumpeted marching song of my love for Christa (and was to be an atonal valse musette with Gaia): from building the nest to devouring the mate, from the blissful isolation à deux to the desperate effort to reattain someone who had become unattainable.

THE APARTMENT

(this time):

A model shell of insulated coupledom in the immediate nearness of the present, a spaceship for the icy spheres of absolute earthly happiness. We live in style, the ordinary style of the era: in splendid isolation, which screams to be published in all the relevant widely circulated magazines on the arts of living and interior decoration (Oeil, House and Garden, House Beautiful, Schöner Wohnen): the home of the successful screenwriter and his enchanting companion on this stretch-of-the-road-of-life (a star model from New England, to be seen repeatedly in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Grazia). Hence, the fragrance of the great big world even in the space-saving kitchenette: Chinese spices, hand-forged iron pots for Indonesian rice specialties, shashlik skewers, Swedish designer flatware, health foods (Bauhaus style of nutrition culture: purely functional wheat germ, soybean extract, sea salt, brown sugar). A yoga board for bathroom gymnastics. The house bar is a Hammond organ of luxury consumption: Drambuie and Izarra, Passover wine, tequila, raki. A record collection with early English church music, Vivaldi, Earl Garner, Strauss (Ariadne), Boulez. The furniture (two rooms plus sleeping alcove) showing cultural growth in fast motion: English walnut (Queen Anne) combined with Finnish pieces (mass-produced). The knickknacks: pre-Columbian, Gold Coast, Tang Dynasty, Dada. On the walls: samples of Arabic script, ancient Coptic woven fragments, and the works of masters in whose names Tarzan’s gurgling jungle shriek is abstracted into the flashing, smashing, crashing of the spaceship when it shatters against the satellite: BRAQUE! ARP! WOLS! . . .