It’s already quite cool out, there is supposed to be snow in the Alpine foothills, but I’m a fresh-air fiend, I get claustrophobic in the little apartment, she understands. Our relationship has become quite close in a rather loose way. The incredible has happened: In a city where (as my experiences during my married years with Christa taught me) each and every one of the two and a half million inhabitants (not counting the perioecians) knows everybody else, knows everything about him, has all sorts of connections with him, can check every step he takes (and usually does), she has no idea who I am, our circles never cross, my present Middle Kingdom (like all earlier ones) is on a different planet from hers. She seems to take me for a businessman occasionally passing through (with a touch of the exotic, though: an Austrian? an Argentine German?), she doesn’t ask me for details or particulars, not even where I live when I don’t spend the night with her (which I seldom do), or if and when I’m coming again. I call her up when I feel like it (at my age, anyway, such needs are irresistible at most three times a week), and simply say, “Are you going to be home this afternoon?” It sounds (and is meant to sound) as prosaic as asking, when you enter a train compartment, “Is this seat taken?” And she’s never answered anything but “What time are you coming?” She always speaks in the same monotonous, slightly nasal tone; suburban bleakness then settles into the earpiece, the emptiness of drab, lonesome Sunday afternoons; already spiritually groggy, I show up at her place at the announced time—and then I have to pull off a one-hundred-eighty-degree readjustment act. Adapting to the reality of the 1960s is not easy for me: when, for instance, I reach the building door (I always need at least a panicky half hour to find the right one: one of thirty-six perfectly similar building doors in twelve perfectly identical concrete blocks), I press the button under a certain (her?) name in the aluminum plate (one of sixty-six Bakelite buttons in punched holes under sixty-six perfectly similar cellophane-covered plastic name platelets in twenty-two triple rows like an accordion keyboard—and just what is her name?). At such times, I feel I’m being sucked into a vacuum. I realize these are merely behavioral problems. With a little more practice (perhaps consultation with a psychologist: Professor Hertzog would doubtless make himself available), I could soon easily get the better of them, above all, rid myself of the neurotic associations that still occur. With the venomous buzzing of a wasp squashed under a shoe, the door lock springs open behind my left renal area. The buzzing has something definitive, irrevocable about it: that’s how the automatic lock snaps open and shut on the solitary-confinement cell of a prisoner serving a life sentence. Yet I am entering an apartment house in which the community should be burgeoning; why then are these buildings so empty?