“in a word: luxury articles. I do not wish to irritate Christa with them, her aquamarine gaze is already deeply sunk in the trout-blue of your gaze in order to find out whether you share her thought: namely, that I mythologize my background as a whore’s child . . . What I meant to say was simply this: I had been able to witness the ambassadors of the great cities lay their patterned splendors before my mother. (There was usually something for me too: a dearly loved stuffed dog named Bonzo, for instance—but let us forget these details, our chat is already overladen with them—yet on the other hand shouldn’t a good novel also be a cultural-historical catalogue?) In any case, for me it had been only a matter of a time before I would visit these cities and probably even live in them. Soon, I would drive through teeming streets in Uncle Bully’s Delage, be led by Miss Fern through vast parks to fountains spraying their water up to the clouds—so close that a puff of air, bewitchingly redolent of autumn leaves, fresh garden soil, gasoline, and roasted chestnuts, would carry a fine shower of the rainbow-flickering spray over me—and soon, one night, I would be in one of the luxury hotels of these cities, and could listen to the roaring surf of the streets while, with a beating heart, I tried to envision the images that would be unfurled tomorrow. . .

“Previously, I had, so to speak, viewed only the covers of their paperback editions, and very casually at that: with a glance, say, through a sleeping cabin window into the sooty pigeon-blue of a railroad station where, under the title (Bucharest, Budapest, Belgrade, Trieste, and so forth: édition spéciale, bonne pour les Balkans), red-capped (incidentally, extremely ragged) porters dragged baggage around, and the little wagon of oranges, chocolate bars, and lemonade bottles was always too far away for someone to call it over . . .

“and sometimes, as under a thumb cropping over the edge of a book, a brief glimpse of an open page: seen through a dueling network of struts and stays (while the train lumbered dully across a bridge), a street filled with bug-like vehicles and teeming ant-like people . . . and even this image had been alive with anxious promise . . .

“Now I was actually in one of the truly big representatives of those big cities. I had not yet penetrated to where its heart, beating red and blue, seemed to glow in a melting pot—but it was really just a matter of days. I had only to step out the door (I eventually did just that, but that’s another story) . . . in any case, I hope you understand that for the time being, I had no time to take precise stock of my losses. The world that I’d lost was still lying about me (if no longer quite intact, it could at least be found with relatively little effort) . . .