Here, however, true life can still be found, although ultimately no one gives a shit. I shoot my hand out from my sleeve, look at my now visible (to her as well as me) Cartier watch, then turn to her with no transition, as though continuing an only just interrupted conversation, and say, “I hope you’ve brought along enough time.” And she very willingly replies, “Oh, this is nothing new for me.” She speaks (as expected) a penetrating Hamburg German, in the direction of Harburg. I ask her disingenuously, “You’re not German?” She is German, but her husband is Lithuanian, only they’re divorced (there you are), but her citizenship still isn’t cleared up, “all this endless bureaucracy,” and last year she wanted to go to Italy. One thing leads to another, and three hours later I’m lying in her bed, a Murphy on the wall of a ten-by-twelve-foot room; she lives in a studio flat with a bathroom and kitchenette in a high-rise development somewhere in the wasteland behind the Hagenbeck Zoo, but she does have “a bit of a yard” (dropping her r’s the way people do in Hamburg), fourteen feet wide, thirty-five feet long, the flanks shielded by two strips of canvas against neighborly in-sight (at least from next door); between these strips, the eye rolls as though down a bowling alley (with a leap over the pathetic asters at the far end) into the yawning void of the planned central green space. The housing development is still young, no lawn has been started as yet, but chamomiles, a resistant weed, are stinting out of the mortar-laced soil, a slum-summer breeze that endures year-round seems to have settled in, there is apparently no other season, in any case the playground is as good as finished, it will open next year (the year after at the latest), red and yellow and green and violet paint, the iron pipework of the swings, monkey bars, and slide are already looming from the cement-framed gravel (a Paul Klee execution site: gallows and torture wheel for little stick figures with zeros for heads). Farther along, at a dramatic standstill, the concrete squadron of the high-rises in triad echelons comes thundering toward the playground: instead of gun turrets, the box balconies emerge from the hatches. At sunrise and at sundown, the shadows of the nine (or twelve) giant phalluses (three are always in reserve) shoot east to west, then west to east, across the bare surface whose border is the skyline, there’s nothing beyond it, the world ends there in Ptolemaic fashion, we live right on its edge. Here in the foreground, on the wide (first) step of the three composition-stone steps, under a green sunshade with stitched-on toadstools, there are two chaise longues and a small wheeled table with a bottle holder, ringed by six flower pots with hyacinth bulbs, two with brownishly proliferating asparagus, three geraniums, and one mimosa (donated by myself and now without blossoms). Here, I make myself at home when visiting her.