“Only once did I reveal on what side I really stood. I have to beg for your kindly patience in this trial too, or my early experience will not enjoy the counterpoint that life manages to arrange so well. I’ll keep it brief: A few years later, Cousin Wolfgang’s educational path had already separated from mine. Uncle Helmuth’s explanation of the principle of the steam engine had not found the same swift grasp in him as in me; he was considered backward in many respects, anyhow, and so they decided to give him a humanistic education and me a more scientific one. I was thus well on my way towards the intellectual uniformity of Keyserling’s Chauffeurmensch and my only cultural accomplishments were occasional cartoons (drawn clandestinely under my desk, unnoticed by the teachers). They were accurate, mordant caricatures, and so successful that the fame of my genius reached the upperclassmen.

“A pupil named Czerwenka (isn’t it odd what trivial details stick in the mind?) was having certain difficulties in keeping up with his class and lacked even halfway decent marks in just about every subject. He turned to me with a request initiated with a poke in the ribs: Could I prepare a drawing on the theme of “summer,” a homework assignment, which he could hand in as his own?

“Why not? I even enjoyed the idea. Asking a few questions off the point, I took Czerwenka’s intellectual measurements and gazed at his thick face and ink-stained (incidentally, conspicuously small, effeminate) hands in order to fathom his psychology. In the very next class (descriptive geometry), I drew a picture of Summer such as might presumably be reflected in Czerwenka’s innermost being: a canal shore with the exposed innards of a gas plant in the background—everything shaped roller-like, a kind of cyclopean cylinderism—and in the foreground, a group of sphere-headed bathers, sinking elephant legs and barrel torsos into the sluggish water. Thick, sure contours—you would have recognized a talented imitation of Léger.

“Czerwenka was most satisfied. This was precisely what he wanted and would have put on paper, but, alas, he had no knack for expressing himself with a pencil. The drawing teacher seemed to know this too. He told Czerwenka point-blank that the drawing could not be his. Who had done it for him? Czerwenka, cornered, gave him my name. ‘I don’t believe you!’ said the drawing teacher and sent for me. The drawing teacher was a gangly, jittery, rather young man who, it was rumored, had an artistic private life: he was counted among the talents of the Viennese Secession, was honorably represented with dynamic pen-and-ink drawings in its annual exhibits, and taught at our school only out of sheer artistic destitution. His indifference to our achievements seemed to confirm this gossip about him. As for me, I had always used his classes to do my homework for the next few classes, where, in turn, I pursued my drawing activities. He had noticed this and had shrugged, with that scornful disgust that is the final weapon of an impotent teacher against the ringleader of class perfidy.