She muses for a while, her elbow propped up, her hand, holding a cigarette, on her temple. “I want to stay here until I’ve saved up a nice tidy sum. I’m in no danger of going to ruin here. I’m not interested in alcohol or drugs or other girls. I want to be a first-class whore—one who gets top money. To do that, I have to specialize in something. S and M is a pretty sure gimmick. You wouldn’t believe it, but most of these guys come here for some crazy thing like that. They can fuck all they like anywhere else without paying. We make our money off guys with fantasies in their heads and their crotches. And homeless guys like you.”

I toast her. The stuff she’s told me so far is small talk, so to speak. But the last sentence establishes a personal relationship. I desire her intensely. I suggest going to the sofa again. Any time, she says, without batting an eye; naturally, I have to pay for the second time just as for the first. “Even after the bottle of cognac?” I protest. Even after the bottle of cognac, she replies, unruffled. “But you’ll have most of it left.” Not even jokes can soften her heart. I shell out the bills on the table, and she instantly rises, pulling her sweater up over her head and the velvet hotpants down.

During the year we were friendly (until the birth of Christa’s and my son, when a fit of philistine morality persuaded me to break off these friendly, intimate relations with a brothel whore: after all, our son was a born Hamburger; his respectability was paramount)—during that full year granted to us by our cheerfully carefree, often exuberantly fun, always stimulating, high-spirited friendship, I never once succeeded in sleeping with her without first paying the set fee. No matter what I did to try to change her mind—cunning, tenderness, violence, surprise—she was adamant, as if she would be violating an oath by giving herself just once without payment, and as if it would bring the entire structure of her goals and plans crashing about her ears. . .

and I insisted on it stubbornly, obsessively, as if my fate hinged on a victory over her, over her implacable refusal—my entire fate, the realization or failure not only of my personality but of all my goals and plans . . .

for it was then, during the early weeks of my tempestuously erupting friendship with Gisela the whore (the Ice Age was clamping down one last time, and the teeth of the winter of 1947 cracked and splintered: I can recall sudden puffs of soft spring wind wafting unexpectedly through the days)—it was then that it happened, that I left something behind in her room, the copy of my treatment for a big movie project at Astra Art Films, commissioned by my primordial piglets Stoffel and Associates; and one of her clients, the then rather small-scale but later big-time publisher Scherping, found the manuscript and read it and excitedly passed it on to his editor J. S., ordering him to track down its author immediately, so that this genius, evidently as yet undiscovered for belles lettres and hence lying fallow, might instantly write a book (to wit, about wartime experiences, which I did not have, to be sure, but which were dealt with in the film treatment) and thus give mankind the masterpiece of the era, the great novel of the waning century. . .