“For the first time, I stood before him face to face. ‘Did you draw this?’ he asked, holding the drawing out to me amid the tense silence of the upperclassmen. Czerwenka morosely nodded toward me, his eyes downcast. So I said, ‘Yes.’ The drawing teacher pushed a piece of chalk into my hand, pointed first at the plaster model of a flayed muscleman bending an imaginary bow in an unrealistic lunge, then at the chalkboard, and said, ‘Copy that!’

“I began at the nape of the skinned bow-bender and with one stroke drew the S of the back line down to the corded nodules of his buttock musculature and along the thigh, the back of the knee, the calf, to the heel—I got no farther. For the drawing teacher ripped the chalk out of my hand, peered at me wildly under the tangled shock of hair on his forehead, sized me up and down, and said, ‘You bastard!’ Stomping back to his desk and tossing the chalk into the dusty cardboard box at the blackboard, he muttered, as though to himself (but so loudly that everyone could hear), ‘And someone like this is vegetating in this idiotic school!’ Before reaching his desk, he turned back to me and shouted, ‘Tell your parents they’re morons—morons and criminals! Tell them that I said so. My name is Weidenreich—Leopold Weidenreich. Go on—get the hell back to your class!’

“An artistic temperament. Imagine the difficulties I would have caused him had I actually delivered his message to my foster parents. He seemed, incidentally, to have realized as much himself. Thereafter he never even deigned to glance at me, the striking Herr Weidenreich, and I remained untroubled by any effort on his part to cultivate my gift, the efflorescence of which promised so much that he could go off the deep end at the mere thought of its remaining undeveloped.

“The incident might have had no aftermath if I—yes, you see—if I had not been surrounded henceforth by an enigmatic aura—how shall I put it?—as though stamped with a mark of Cain that separated me from my classmates far more than my obscure background, my (now rather rusty) knowledge of languages, my hysterical clowning, and my bellicose quarrelsomeness. This aura rather annoyed them and turned them against me, and yet it had definite authority. A short time later, Czerwenka (six foot three and three years my senior, but now only one class away from me) advanced toward me to deliver the punches he had planned for me. I checked him with a single glance that blended grandeur and malice; in hunter’s parlance, the mere glance of my eyes drew an opaque veil over his. He took off with his tail between his legs.

“Incidentally, it would be appropriate to point out here that this aura of malicious grandeur was certainly not restricted to the milieu of my school in Hietzing. For example, I can recall with clarity the time when Cousin Wolfgang (who knew nothing about this incident with the art teacher) hissed at me in venom-bloated despair, ‘You and your arrogant ways—UNTO EVERY ONE THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN, AND HE SHALL HAVE ABUNDANCE!!!’ This could have been a proud moment in my young existence—just like that other moment, when you imparted the same words to me, your mouth aglow with loving envy. . . It could have been one of my great moments, except that (here, as with you, and also as with Weidenreich) the mere glance from the eyes of my anima (which eyes I had meanwhile removed from Miss Fern’s fading Florentine charge and inserted in various other heads attached to riper bodies) pulled an opaque veil over mine.