Only once did I get my hands on something. After the bar closed and I paid a tourist-trap bill, after shouting in the street and an unpleasant scene with a policeman (“I insist on having your badge number! I’m a foreigner and I will not be spoken to in this way!”), after a bone-quaking cab ride and then a wild Weisswurst gorging in the din of Donisl and another taxi trip, she turned out to be a kind of biting albino rat. We wound up in a room in Harlaching that looked as if a tornado had whirled through it. She was equipped with the clitoris of a hyena, which, however, hysterically yelling, she wouldn’t let anyone approach—and certainly not me. Despite a numbing quantity of whiskey from a bottle acquired at a brothel price, and despite a tumultuous rolling around in bed—which woke up the next-door neighbors and made them bang their protests against the door and the walls—any peace-bringing discharge of my neuromuscular tensions was out of the question, not to mention any appeasement of that erotic urge that wants to absorb the feminine and make it an integral component of one’s own being, like the wonderful Schistosoma haematobium, which, a velvet-lined casket, carries its beloved all its life within itself and releases it only temporarily, to lay eggs.

The matter ended badly, of course, with a couple of resounding slaps, which did not produce any meliorating effect. On the contrary: now the neighbors were properly mobilized, and they did not take my side at all . . . It took me several days to repress the incident.

•

On the evening of the tormentingly long day that the piglets required for what they term “executing the contract”—drawing up and finally signing a document that reduces by half the agreed-upon honorarium and stipulates all kinds of loophole contingencies for further reductions—I left Munich. My car had been waiting since noon with freshly changed oil, a grease job, a full tank of gas, and the tire pressure carefully checked. Packed with my suitcases, briefcases, portfolios, and the cartons of papers for my book (I dragged them everywhere, as Nadine did her deluxe tray), the car stood ready in front of the hotel. It was a flat, low monster, like a predatory bug, and a small pack of more or less expert observers was always gathered around it. In the grouplet of scraggly-dressed young Germans (even in Gypsy garb, they manage to have something stiffly awkward about them), I was struck by the gaze of a girl: dark, beautiful, relaxed, open wide in the eternal, primal question: “Is that you?”