“C’est ça, mon cher: ce que vous avez aimé!”

•

I sit here like a maggot in the heart of night.

The glow of the lamp on the dresser where I write (I’ve covered the mirror) peels a slanting hollow cone of yellow light from the darkness:

in it, I huddle over my papers (caught in my own web).

The light gathers around my feet in an elliptical puddle; in it, I suck in my shadow.

Here I dwell in the core of nocturnal stillness. The telephone at the switchboard (two floors below me) futilely bores into the stillness with its dull buzzing. It is doomed to be ignored. The handsome Pole is asleep, or reads, with world-remote ardor, one of his detective stories. (Or is he with some woman somewhere in one of these rooms stacked like boxes one atop the other? It doesn’t concern me anymore.) The silence is too thick for this buzzing thread to penetrate. The sound merely sews it thicker, a small-stitch quivering of desperate patience, pausing only to resume, like the stickily entangled murmur of a fly on sized paper:

(the buzzing fly is surrounded by the cringing black corpses of its fellow flies that have buzzed away their lives into the unrepentant nights of the Hôtel Épicure:

corpses of souls: when I was a child, I thought of flypaper whenever I saw the glow of candles in the old honey-gold of the effigies of saints: it had grown black with the souls that stuck to it—)

•

And I try to picture the nights when it was my patience that let the buzzing of the switchboard telephone bore across a thousand leagues into the night stillness of the sleepers here and vainly shrill away against the vicious despotism of their dreams.

•

Back then, I was assaulted by a different madness from my present one: love.

•

I loved Dawn.

I was far away from her: in Hamburg, in the apartment I had set up for us in a lover’s petit bourgeois world-embracing yearning for happiness—

at number 9 Heilwigstrasse:

—as if the address were an incantation conjuring up that self-effacing bourgeois happiness that both of us knew would never be granted us—could never be granted us, because of fate: not admitted by the story set down for us: because we would thus have lost what had driven us to each other: the other yearning inside us, unresponsive, without a model, making us susceptible to any insanity, a yearning beyond ourselves, steering our lives toward each other in a different way: like two parallel lines meeting at infinity, in the beyond of a story worth telling—