and how we laughed at this, my accomplice, the whore Gisela, and I! How amused we were when she first described Scherping to me, with his quaint bonhomie and transparent slyness, his yokelish cunning when he got her to impose and inflict punishments on him, as if he himself had not invented the reason for them, had not begged to be punished (for Gisela now specialized in discipline, and word of that sort of thing gets around quickly in the appropriate circles) . . . our bliss when she told me about his blubbering (“If only just once I could be beaten, whipped, tormented for something I really had done”—for Nagel’s best sellers, for instance) . . .

and Schwab, Scherping’s emissary, striding through the red-light district “like a blind seer,” head thrown back, fish-blue eyes looking neither to the right nor to the left, pride in his high thinker’s brow, humility about the mouth twisted in disgust, slippery desire in the soft, moist flesh of his twitching lips. Later he would become my friend and fellow sufferer in literary limbo, Johannes Schwab, whose mighty appearance I did not tire of describing. (Oh, but during those last months of the Ice Age, he was as Reichsmark-lean as anyone else: truly, it was a slender nation of Germans in the year 1947!) Schwab, I say, with his large, clumsy frame and ungainly Martin Luther head, with the wind of culture blowing in his luxuriant (still flaxen) hair, his Coke-bottle eyeglasses and ill-fitting baggy-seated tweed suit. He was such a model of the world’s idea of a German intellectual that when he first appeared in Whores’ Alley, the cry “Herr Professor!” leaped from window to window along the entire street, from one thickly reddened whore’s mouth to the next . . .

and one of the girls, lovely Heli, still young and warmhearted as freshly baked bread, trustingly dedicated to the foolish faith that the world contains a God-willed, occasionally disturbed, but always gloriously restored order, in which a small, well-to-do portion of mankind, better instructed in the spoken, written, and printed word, is, in moral terms, superior to the larger, poorer, less educated portion and determines which among the lower born it will raise to its level—lovely Heli fell hopelessly in love with Schwab: the “educated man,” happily able to read and write . . .

(what a blessing: to be loved by a whore, who submits to anyone, whom anyone uses unhesitatingly, and to be loved by her because of your superior dealings with language, which is similarly a whore, whom everyone (aside from a chosen few) uses unhesitatingly; to be loved by her unreservedly, giving herself with all the power and powerlessness of feeling, beyond the never wholly dissolved remnant of hatred and disgust that lurks in every love, beyond the struggle between the sexes, a battle never waged to the point of purification . . . how greatly I envied him, Johannes Schwab, the Scherping Publishers editor, sent to me with the evil angelic tidings of literary conception, and how often and how excitedly we spoke of it, Gisela and I . . .)