Thus time passed. Time passed over all of us, utterly sovereign. It didn’t give a whit about our conflicts, our different opinions and ways of life. Time did the only thing it is supposed to do: it passed, and made everything that lived in it pass as well. As usual, it did not do so in a steady series of developments but was seemingly inconsistent, leaping unexpectedly, tarrying whimsically now and then, sometimes even taking a step backward after two steps forward, as in a dancing procession, and eluded precise observation as it whizzed along.

In those postwar Ice Age years, time seemed to have made up its mind to tarry, and whether a man brooded dully on his hunger or drew from it the fanatical fire to blather on about the spiritual foundations for a festive day after tomorrow, the harsh time lost nothing of its grimness. Whether we lived through a morose daily round of petty, sullen, and tenacious efforts or in the Easter expectation of a new humanity, we all lived in an odd state of waiting. Even the most hopeless gray faces in the Quonset huts, for whom tracking down potatoes was a fairy tale and gleaning coals on railroad embankments a quixotic quest—even they were waiting for something, whatever it might be, good or bad. We all were waiting just outside reality, waiting as if we weren’t really living but were being lived by someone or something—or better yet: dreamed of by something or someone, nightmarishly dreamed of by some mysterious “it”: destiny or divine providence or whatever one might call it, or merely a collective spirit that shaped the era—in any case, something from somewhere outside of us and our realm of perception.

And all the while, time was dribbling away from us without our noticing it. We breathed out our existence, day in day out, and the days, objectively speaking, truly were gray and grim and cold and clammy, like the watery puddles in the bomb craters, whose dead surfaces shuddered and raised goose bumps under the raindrops during the so-called mild seasons and, during the biting icy winters of those legendary years, froze into blind eyes that gaped sightlessly into the stony sky over the city ruins.

And all the while I loved Christa. I loved her body, even though she let me have it only as if it weren’t worth the trouble to refuse me. She developed a new habit: no sooner did I slip into bed with her than she would raise her arms to her face, her right hand clutching her left shoulder and her left hand her right shoulder, so that her elbows stood before her mouth like two bastions in the wall of a fortress: she did not want to be kissed by me anymore. A kiss demands emotional connection or, conventionally, presumes it. This, as she would have put it, was “not in the cards anymore.” But I was allowed to luxuriate all I liked in her full breasts and further downward. It wasn’t even worth the trouble for her to deny her senses an involuntary participation in my passion, and she permitted herself an occasional thrill, sometimes even the churning up of an outright orgasm; thus my nightly masturbation with my spouse often achieved a perfection that almost amounted to a true act of love.