I had always captivated her with finely polished chivalry. (“We’re not used to such nice manners anymore, you know.”) And so this time too I did not hold back. I got out, walked around the vehicle, and held open the door, handing her out of the car. A ludicrous gesture of farewell, I admit (a movie script would have said here, on the left, “Musical leitmotif comes in softly”). She took two or three steps toward the hotel entrance, then wheeled around, came over to me, pressed her breasts, body, and thighs snugly against me, and whispered in a passionate, husky tone, “Darling, do you think you could spare another thousand francs? I need it to pay the bill here and some other things.”

Her mouth laughed again when she put away the money and left. The white roses were scattered from the car seat across the sidewalk all the way over to the hotel entrance, like a strip of moonlight on a dark lake, with a black swan swimming away. . .

. . . and because of that, Schwab expects my heart to have burst in my chest!? . . . I peer into the round, gaping eyes behind his inch-thick bookworm’s glasses. (Aunt Hertha rattling on the door to the shitter, behind which Cousin Wolfgang has locked himself in to read undisturbed: “You’ll go blind someday!”)

Well, what world-shaking event had occurred? I had lost Dawn. This time for good. Irrevocably. No, this time she wouldn’t come back. To be sure, she wasn’t just an extraordinarily beautiful but also an extraordinarily interesting girl, mad as a hatter, no doubt, but only sometimes, periodically. In between, she could be as smart, as merry, as full of wild joie de vivre as any thoughtless young thing . . .

A completely intimidated person, indeed, creature of a civilization of sheer collective madness, product of a civilization of money, dazzled by the myth of success, seduced by the rhetoric, the iconography of the commercialized love of life—a child still, barely twenty years old, I should really have borne a paternal responsibility, but the role doesn’t seem to suit me; I failed shamefully even with my own son (probably by trying too hard, she would have said). And of course, the age gap was rather large for the glorious lover, I assume, even though there had been moments of incredible intimacy—we had plunged into one another with exuberant tenderness, a sudden profound union of souls and senses, of the kind that has been rather infrequent since the fashionable obsolescence of Rilke and D’Annunzio’s emotional world. Ah! Her gigantic gray feline eyes close to mine (without the black glasses, of course), her mouth laughing happily (not scornfully), her beloved beautiful happy mouth . . .

and I had lost her. And the man reeling under the impact of this blow is not I: he is my friend Johannes Schwab. As though I had not personally experienced this whole foolish love story, which any sensible person would only shake his head at; as though I had experienced it vicariously for him, Schwab—what am I saying? For our entire generation, allegedly incapable of achieving much of a solid inner state, as though it were suffering from a kind of emotional scurvy. It was an act of salvation, in a word. From now on, people could point at me if anyone started in about the death of emotional life and the shift of feeling to collective experiences like soccer matches and politics. I was still different from the others; my emotional life was of prewar quality.