I AM

and am content in ME:

I SELF-brimming

The warm mother hen of laziness broods me and makes beautiful thoughts slip from beautiful images.

FOR UNTO EVERY ONE THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN, AND HE SHALL HAVE ABUNDANCE, BUT FROM HIM THAT HATH NOT SHALL BE TAKEN EVEN THAT WHICH HE HATH . . .

All my power (and all my fear) is rooted in this verse, and no one is left around me to measure its truth by. . .

Truly, Brother Schwab: your death was a severe stroke of fate for me. You were to the best years of my adulthood what Cousin Wolfgang was to my adolescence: the lovely echo, the magic mirror on the wall. I know every last feature of your face and his. The nervous pride of the brow. The twitching vulnerability of the mouth. The bright lurking and the despair in the half-blind eyes, which could look so sharply from behind the glasses’ lenses. —

Your eyes and his were almost ludicrously the same. Never will I forget his gaze when in August 1939—shortly before I went to Romania to be a soldier myself—he came to me in plain military gray: wordless, with the force of an expressionist stage entrance. His globular eyes peered through glasses as thick as bottle bottoms (just like yours: all in all, he could have been your twin), and these eyes expressed, in an ineffably stupid stare, “Well, what do you have to say now? . . .” And they almost burst with fear of finding out what I might say.

Wasn’t this often your fear too, friend Schwab? Otherwise, in order to have a brother, I could have made do with Nagel. He was never afraid of what I might say. He did not seek his defeats in me. He evaded me like a man (for that’s basically what it’s all about, isn’t it? Measuring yourself against someone else?) . . . Let me reveal one of the secrets that made you blush when you were alive, a medium-size depth-psychological secret (but don’t tell Hertzog): I was never afraid of being beaten up by you. If by anyone, then Nagel (although that’s absurd: the poor man has only one arm, after all). Nagel doesn’t want to measure himself against me. You always wanted to measure yourself against me. I for my part am sorry: I want to measure myself against the handsome Pole. Remember his arms? Fantastic, man! . . . I sometimes daydream about smashing him in the kisser—and then . . . just ask Sherping what happens when a man imagines he could be helplessly abandoned to his defeat.

(Schwab’s confession: the blush in his face when he told me about how he would come home and run into his wife Carlotta’s lovers on the stairs; how he confronted her, and she told him straight to his face, “Yes, somebody comes every day when you’re not here.”

And John’s stony expression when I returned with Stella, both of us still glowing . . .