Soon, I had uncoupled myself from the evening suburban homecomers on the Autobahn, dived beneath overpasses that hissed away above me, and plunged into the denser and denser texture of evening, which, after a few precarious minutes of sharply dividing sky and land, caught them both in its veil and let them blur into each other. The huge deep-sea eyes of my diving bell were switched on. In its interior, the lights on the instrument panel were already glowing. The speedometer needle had quickly scaled past the apex of the dial and scurried down its right half now; reeling slightly, it hung over the final marks. The tachometer needle hovered calmly beyond the border span that a red segment ordered it not to cross. To my right, in the scattered, powdery glow of my lights, fields and meadows flickered like the blue-gray checkered backs of cards fanned out in the hand of a nimble-fingered player, then were swiftly raked in by the edge of my side window. To my left, like bristles under a sharp stroke, the trunks of a forest bent toward me . . . All this broke off, changed, jumped back and forth and up to hilly terrain in cringing, hunchbacked leaps, and then out into uncertainty; came soaring down, leveled off again, smoothed out. The sagging darkness trussed up the scattered beams of my headlights, squeezed them into two intersecting cones in the hose of the road, ripped out a hollow space, at the end of which they were swallowed by the pent-up blackness. I was hurled into the dark space and toward that place of uncertain encounters dashing ahead of me. Its harbingers were the pale tracer bullets of the dividing line, sometimes the red-glowing rectal eyes of a truck, which I signaled to before the shadowy monster loomed and towered to my right and whooshed past me . . . I was warned. I was holding my destiny in my hand. I was sovereign.

But I was not alone. I had invited a friend in: Schwab, who was dead now. And I chatted with him, in the manner that had always irritated him the most: in the parodying patter of cultural chitchat, into which I could insert the barbs of my malice, which had to lodge in the matters he took seriously—“—for instance, European heritage. Can you tell me why you take it so seriously? It’s a sackful of fictions, that’s all. With some mental hygiene, one should be able to shake it off. Sentimental values at bargain prices. Nowadays, any self-respecting person has a Biedermeier dresser in his assembly-line bungalow. Even in America. There, it’s Colonial Style, of course. Very popular lately. Those fellows used to be way ahead of us, lacking a past as they did. But now they’re spending their advantage on dubious antique furniture. They too are discovering their history. Not as a lived myth, you understand, as a Western, but dragging the past into presence as a sentimental recapitulation. The Western is timeless. The eternal song of civilizing man facing off against nature. The Biedermeier dresser in a vacation bungalow is barbaric booty: a souvenir plucked out of Civilization’s refuse.