all these things were in my mind, as well as Bessarabia and Uncle Ferdinand. And then I heard you speak (without, of course, noticing your angelic voice). Aside from the free and easy “Hi,” which, I must confess, got on my nerves, you very soon said, “I’ve heard about you, young man.” (Why so young? At worst, you’re only five or six years older than I.) “You’re writing a book.” (Indeed.) “Tell me the story in three sentences!” This was said by your hardworking mouth, which lent such original expression to feelings, sentiments, moods that you did not even have, while you consumed pieces of white bread, mashed in Margaux and sputum, with pâté de grives. And quite to my surprise, I heard familiar sounds in your diction. Neither your bellowed r in “story” nor the thick l of the recent immigrant conceals the slightly nasal Viennese Kaffeehaus yiddle of your speech pattern, Jaykopp Gee.

And with that the lid was off my memories. There was no stopping now, and I was not solidly immur’d in earth, I was floating away from myself, floating through the catastrophe-land of Europe, back to the lost half of my life. There was too much of my past in your tender yiddling cadence, from Ostbahnhof to Hofmannsthal, I couldn’t pull myself away.

And yet there you sat and were everything that Europe no longer was, everything that it had meanwhile become, to my sorrow: the same Hilton Hotel from Madrid to Oslo, the same service-station diner, the same airport, the same jukebox from Bückeburg to Calabria, the same supermarket, the same T-shirt on girlish tits, the same hard neon light on evenings when the sky turns to stone over the phallic cities.