Sometimes I was overcome with a hot wave of pity when I saw the despair in her eyes—in the radiant aquamarine of her childlike eyes!—because, of the four pounds of potatoes she had managed to scrounge somewhere, three pounds had been frozen and were half-rotten, or because the fuel for our alcohol burner was used up, or because the wall of the room we lived in at the bisected villa on the Elbchaussee was sporting a new crack, and dampness was seeping through. Granted, things like that can be awful, but looking closer they didn’t seem so bad; almost everything was ruined anyway; we could just as easily have laughed about it, especially since I knew that Christa would waste no time routing me out of a wonderful conversation with Nagel (precisely at the point when our spirits were “ardently bracing themselves for a festive tomorrow,” of course, a tomorrow that would be hers too, after all!) in order to get more potatoes or fuel, never mind where or how; or, ruthlessly stubborn, demand that I do something about the damp wall; remove the crate of ludicrously useless slipcovers and damask curtains from her family’s home in East Prussia—treasures that some fool of a fleeing relative had rescued from a fire and proudly dragged west—and replace it with my books and watch them molder.

“If you could at least make something pretty from these pieces—an evening gown, for instance . . .”

“An evening gown?”

“Well, okay—some clever housedress . . .”

“A housedress? To wear in this creaky dump? I’m already freezing to death in ski pants and a sailor’s sweater.”

“Then throw the junk away!”

“I wouldn’t dream of it! Somebody will take the slipcovers in exchange for beans, peas, turnips, cabbage . . .”

Ah, no, my pity never lasted long, even though it had been the origin of my love for her: the sudden yearning and understanding of human weakness and humility in a fellow creature and spontaneous identification with it, the physical commiseration of my tenderness when I had seen her chewing and swallowing the American Army chow in the canteen for German witnesses and defense attorneys at the court in Nuremberg—chewing and swallowing with a dedication that was so totally, so unconditionally, so definitively and finally only physical as to leave not a sliver of space for any lofty inner life, for the mind or soul, for the enjoyment of the “bread one doth not eat.”

In Nuremberg the sight had moved me to tears, as I’ve said. I felt I was watching the basic truth of the condition humaine. The dreadful existential plight and exposure, the heartrending destitution, of the zoological species Homo sapiens, everything this naked and exposed creature undertakes beyond coping with the immediate existential necessities of finding food and shelter, mating, raising offspring, all its grotesque spiritual leaping into the metaphysical realm together with the proliferating madness of its artistry and intellectuality—all these things seemed futile and therefore poignant.