•

Thus I lay there and was soon reconstituted from chatter with myself into that which I really am.

•

Besides, now the day arrived in earnest. I had to go to Paris. I got out of bed and went over to the washstand to look at my face in the mirror above it. The more thoroughly I nailed down my stare, the more vacant my face became. I was able to confirm that my eyes are an intense blue (I have been told so repeatedly, and I ought to resign myself to sharing my outstanding physiognomic feature with popular depictions of the Mater Dolorosa and the Hitler Youth). But despite utmost concentration, nothing else about myself came to mind. The scouting trip through clefts and fissures left by life in my epidermis proved as abstract and fruitless as a theoretical promenade along the footpaths shown on a landscape relief map in a spa pavilion. If absolutely necessary, this man could be expected to kill, to murder, but the likelihood was neither revealed by a special sign nor excluded. I soon gave up on myself and began to shave.

The day was as bright as it had promised to be. The sidewalk glistened metallically with rainwater that had not yet evaporated, and oval drops glittered on the roofs and hoods of parked cars. The cathedral looked like an art-historical disabled veteran that Professor Sauerbruch had patched together from several disabled veterans. I went to my car and unlocked it—

and above me floated a great angel, smiling a Mona Lisa smile into the autumnal sky blue.

During the drive to Paris, I examined my dream systematically. Earlier, whenever that nightmare had ambushed me, such efforts had proved fruitless, and this was the case again. The images could be summoned, but not the terror. I know the sequence by heart. I can run it forward and backward like a film at the editing table and linger on any detail: It is always the same giant office building, with empty corridors leading to empty hive cells, and elevators whose empty cages float up and down like bubbles in slowly boiling test tubes. Somewhere high up under the roof and deep in the basement, they change their minds and directions, rattling and rumbling through cyclopean cogwheel innards. The risen ones now sink downward, the sunken ones rise up again, and so on for all eternity: even in my dreams, I’m a shabby symbolist. It is night. I have let myself be locked in, unnoticed by the building guards, and I am lying in wait for the cleaning woman. She is gray and worn out with slaving, an old woman. I can picture her body: worm-eaten flesh hanging in four skin pouches from the leather-covered skeleton; two of the pouches dangle in front, on the monkey bars of her rib cage, two in back under the primeval pelvic bone-butterfly—a beggar costume of a body, as in medieval danses macabres. She covers it with slovenly oldcrone clothing: coarse, urine-stained underwear beneath strata of sweat-yellowed smocks and aprons whose color has been leached out by laundry water and caustic detergents. All this fills me with violent disgust. Nausea chokes me. But I wait for her, smiling. It is a murderer’s smile, sharpened like a pencil . . . And while I try to lure her to the basement under some flimsy pretext, I realize that she sees through me. She knows what I am planning to do to her. Knows that I want to silence her. Knows that I know that she was the witness to an unspeakable baseness, and that I am going to murder her for that reason.