During the day, it was easy to get through on the telephone. I was then told: “Mademoiselle vient de sortir. Non, m’sieur, elle n’a pas laissé de message” (the hated snail-fed indifference in Madame’s voice). “Et vous-même? Vous allez bien? . . . Non, j’en sais rien, m’sieur. D’habitude, elle rentre assez tard” (d’habitude a syntactical formation of perfidious smugness). “Non, m’sieur, elle était à la maison hier . . . Oui, elle a passé toute la journée dans sa chambre” (and wouldn’t take my calls . . . and why this gloating note in Madame’s thick throaty voice? Is she, too, jealous of the handsome Pole? Her hatred of Dawn is obvious). “Certainement, m’sieur: le moment où elle rentrera . . . Oui, oui, j’ai votre numéro. Non, je n’y manquerai pas. À bientôt, m—”

I waited until midnight. Then I couldn’t stand it anymore. I grabbed the phone like an alcoholic grabbing a bottle. (Schwab: how greedily he interrogated me about my futile attempts to resist.

“You seriously mean”—a puff on the cigarette in his trembling fingers, smoked to a dark brown like an old meerschaum pipe—“you seriously mean that these are self-imposed drills? Compulsory soul-testing exercises, as it were—to test our powerlessness? Do we not know it precisely enough already?”)

I was practicing (so to speak anthracite-gray) magic:

By combining letters and numbers in a circle of mysterious correspondences, I summoned into the telephone receiver the voice of a servant of the spirits:

“Hello, this is long-distance operator four.”

Language of pure poetry: a code word for the universe—

I uttered a magic formula of words and numbers, and the locks to astral space burst open:

The rustle of the vast expanse of night

In its echo the world was dissolved. Like charring paper, the shadows crackled across the earth, melting in the smoke of sounds. Mystery flew in flitting signals from continent to continent: sounds flashed like quick silverfish swallowed by the leviathan of darkness. Twittering voices slipped like white mice into the enormous hole of the darkness. . .

Then, far, far away, the broken line of a repeated fluting came filtering through: flickering and fading like a will-o’-the-wisp, flickering and fading, it sewed the tiny stitches of its seam into the moor of the celestial expanses:

—ancient yearning prophecy of doom—tadpole of the Word:

in the embryonic liquid of the umlaut to the unborn consonants—In the great maternal belly of night, space-time was conceived

—tape measure of my patiently stretched impatience—

The voices of spirits were startled. They fluttered in chaos like pale birds (the powdering of gulls in the headlight beams when I drove through the night to my son in Holland):

One voice close by:

“Are you still speaking?”

Another, half-remote:

“You still don’t have a connection?”

One very far:

“Paris, hello, Paris?”

Far, far away, another coming toward me:

“Le numéro ne répond pas, m’sieur.”

Again, the half-remote one: