“But something else occurred after my being pilloried as a ridiculous bearer of culture and a somber member of the elect: I began wandering around the city. I sought the city. I played hooky, and rambled. I went on exploratory journeys through the streets of Vienna for days on end. I would come home in the evening, then, next morning, start where I had left off the previous day. My more than measly allowance went for trolley tickets. My scholastic performance declined accordingly. There were torturous scenes with Uncle Helmuth, and also with Aunt Selma, who could not bear having “her” child compare so shamefully with Hertha’s child. For Cousin Wolfgang was a marvel of scholastic triumph. He was soon wearing thicker and thicker glasses, in which you saw either a gigantically magnified pupil or yourself dwarfed and topsy-turvy. The fuzz of manliness erupted prematurely on his upper lip, pimply chin, and calves. His cowhide schoolbag, with its bleak barracks aroma of cheese sandwiches and wet bathing suits, a smell that announced his return when he came up the stairs, weighed a ton from all the books he carried—pure, sheer intellect in old, thick, musty tomes. But I was roaming about Vienna. With drawn flanks and Aunt Selma’s bewitched gaze. I was seeking the city in the city. With the drawn flanks of a stray cat and Aunt Selma’s spell in my eyes, I sought, in Vienna, the city of humanity: ANTHROPOLIS—

“and I knew I wouldn’t find it, because I was isolated from the others and I hated them. Always and everywhere, I found only the past, life already lived, striking me as livelier than present-day life. Cultural refuse. Testifying to a history that had become fiction. I sought Paradise and found that I had lost it. Eventually, I gave up running through the city and I went only to museums. Hence the bit of culture that I can display.”

•

Chatting thus with my dead friend, I had soon covered the distance to Kehl and driven across the Rhine—once again Germany’s border, not its river, as a couple of disagreeable nightwatch policemen and customs inspectors, of the “We’re not really like this, we’re just doing our jobs” sort, so vividly forced me to realize. I left Strasbourg and its cathedral tower rammed like a thorn in the flesh of the night as it veered to my right in the blackness behind the blue-tinged halos of arc lamps; then I once again slit open the wind-blasted nightland with the beams of my headlights.

By the time I neared Reims, the gaze of the Munich girl had bored so deep into me that I sprang a leak. I yearned for human contact.

I had driven into a rainstorm. The windshield wipers cut two tiny shiny segments out of the night, now interwoven with silver threads of rain that shot through the headlights and scattered on the hood. Watery veils enshrouded me. Beyond the roadside trees, whose branches rattled against the darkness, the landscape tossed and turned in a nightmare. Every clod of earth here was fertilized with the bone meal of two nations.