I took this gaze with me into the smoky turquoise into which the blue of the Bavarian sky had faded on this October day, gilded with autumn foliage. And now the turquoise also filled the roads with magic spaciousness. It hinted at a night frost; pale, wan, and hazy, it shimmered around the dividing and hardening contours of the neo-Gothic gables and neoclassical moldings and the baroque-capped twin church towers. My curved windshield sucked in pallid strings of light and scattered them. To the left, the massif of the railroad station, star-studded red and green, accompanied me for a while. White-waving columns of steam with capitals edged in a dawn-red blaze tumbled up into the blue, rolling with a fiery glow—technology’s romantic early period, when it still had a volcanic character. On the right, tooth gaps in the line of buildings recalled the bad wartime and worse postwar time; architectural horrors of the Wilhelmine and Reconstruction eras glided past, then, while the rail strings frazzled out under black Egyptian tau symbols with emerald and ruby eyes, flattened out into suburban beer halls. A square, with a trolley shelter painted Josephine-yellow and decorated with peeling geraniums, evoked a children’s-book illustration of garrison bandstand concerts. One breath farther and the Spiegelfuge of a church façade, carved of plaster, sprang back into the lilac-blue of shadows. On the left again, a landscape-shaping dimension of depth yawned open for an instant: a perspective bordered in black-silver-black by two canals between tree-lined avenues, shooting out straight as an arrow toward the façade of Nymphenburg Castle at its focal point, as if carried off at the wrong end of a telescope. Next, housing-development row houses and crumbling suburban villas hid behind front-yard thickets—a couple of big Technicolor gas stations . . . I turned onto the Auto-bahn—and the gaze of the girl whom I would never again meet hung over me like the Star of Bethlehem. But I hurried away from it.

I did it without melancholy. I was even exhilarated: faithless by blood. I love to leave cities in gathering twilight. Then I don’t have to say farewell to them. I just wait for the moment when the broken light disintegrates their density, pulling them apart as though with a magical molecular expansion and thus canceling their gravity. I drive for a while into the darkening countryside. The evening is a sigh of relief. The earth is liberated of the bad dream of another wildly marauding human day. The city falls back. Gradually, the mange that it spreads along its outskirts is healed. Once I’m beyond it, the city’s magnetism lets go of me; I too can breathe more freely again. Behind me, the descending night swallows up the city. It no longer exists; it was never real, only a dream: the echo of an existence I attempt to escape.

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