and the endless fun of wandering through Hamburg in quest of adventure. It was summer (it seemed like the first summer in decades), and the miracle of the currency cut had taken place, the shops were beginning to fill up; production was not yet going full blast, spewing out junk, like today, so there was still prewar merchandise from secret warehouses, handmade things, “one-hundred-percent” genuine; and she went shopping with me. She had astonishing amounts of money and she spent it judiciously on top-drawer, durable goods chosen to last: leather coats, fine furs, handmade shoes, silk stockings (not by the dozen but by the gross), cosmetics by the carload, jewelry (completely flawless one-carat diamonds); she paid cash for everything and was treated like a princess—

and the shock, the terror, the stupid confusion in the eyes of a salesman or store manager who recognized her, who might have been her customer the day before; the inner struggle in the decent, law-abiding citizen, for whom business interests won out to the exclusion of all else . . .

We rented a car, and I taught her how to drive. We motored deep into the Holstein countryside and the Lüneburg Heath, fetched up at rustic inns, lay under firs in the sandy grass (yes, indeed; even when I was overcome by libidinous stirrings there, I had to pay in advance), hiked barefoot through the silt of Baltic beaches, danced at farmers’ festivals and on the casino terrace in Timmendorf—

and the incessant awareness in our conversations, in our laughter, in our delightful mutual silence, in our thoughts of one another when we were apart—the heart-lifting awareness of an extraordinarily sovereign, utterly unassailable situation

(“What can happen to me now?” she used to say. “Disease, death—fine, that’s nature. But otherwise? So what if the Russians come. I’ll receive them like anyone else. With champagne, if they want it—and pay me for it.”)

the ether-clear awareness of living at the extreme boundary of existence, on the razor’s edge, in perfect freedom—this intoxicated us like a drug.

I was giving her a driving lesson along a country road, and we stopped at the entrance to the highway, where I was to take the wheel. It was late afternoon, and she had to return “to work.” We had had fun and were in a good mood. We liked the open car; she wanted to buy one just like it—if she ever needed a car. Before changing seats, we smoked a cigarette. With her head tilted back, so that her full hair dropped over the back of the seat, she blew the smoke into the air. “You once told me that if ever I got fed up and didn’t want to work in a whorehouse anymore, I ought to tell you, and you would try to get me an editing job in the movies. I’ve done a lot of thinking about what I would really like to do; I’ve thought about what would be fun and what would be sensible. You know what it is? I’d like to have my own brothel.”