However, bullheaded as a human being is (behind the times not only in the flight of years but also the flight of days), I was still not ready to admit final defeat. I became aware of my failure only when you asked me to tell you my story in three sentences.

36

And since things deep within me were touched by your Mephistophelian demand, I had a vision. I saw with what appetite you ate your thrush pâté. I scrutinized your mouth. I was fascinated by the dumb show it was performing with no spiritual effort on your part. You were relishing the taste with such gusto; one could see that your entire essence was sublimated into the fine-tasting food mush. After each morsel, your lips closed solidly, like rubber cushions lying snugly on top of each other, and while your jaws were crushing, your lips kneaded along, stretching and twisting as they assumed an expression now of bitterness and indignation, now of insult, hatred, baseness, and finally of almost majestic scorn. Scornfully, with sneeringly pulled-down corners, your lips suffered a swallowing hop of your Adam’s apple; they waited for the rather choky slide of the delicacy down your gullet; then they opened, contorting into a gorgon’s grimace in order to give a pale-violet tongue tip a chance to cleanse any pâté remnants from suspiciously perfect jacket crowns.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not a neurotic aesthete. Business breakfasts in gourmet restaurants with producer-piglets are part of my professional routine. I know the expression of involuntary disgust that one sees in people eating sumptuously. Their autonomously working mouths. Incidentally, as you know, I once wed such a mouth. It was in Nuremberg, at the canteen for German attorneys and witnesses in the gigantic Fürth courthouse. You got the same food as in the Allied cafeteria, but here it was poured out for you like swill. It looked half-fermented and maggoty. Still, it had nutritional value, vitamins. Germans were not picky in 1946. That mouth too was detached from the human being it belonged to. It too remained closed while the human being chewed. It too worked valiantly, albeit with the most peculiar clowneries for itself, just like yours. And the chewing, swallowing human being to whom it belonged and about whom it was completely unconcerned, and who was likewise unconcerned about it, was entirely sublimated into the taking in of nutrients. It was a young girl, corn-blond, with lovely posture, like someone who knows how to ride well. Over the capering mouth hovered a pair of aquamarine-clear fairy-tale eyes, seeing nothing. They were switched off, so to speak, or were listening (so far as eyes can listen), likewise into themselves, to the intake of vitamins from the disgusting canteen grub.