or I in front of Dawn in the sleeping car, in the morning: I had lain awake all night in the next compartment, she sitting on the bed, the damp stain half-concealed on the sheet, and I ask, “What about your friend?” “Oh, he left. He got off the train somewhere last night.” Our last—no, next-to-last—meeting. She talking in the phone booth, I, outside, hear what she’s saying: “But I love you—you can’t leave me . . .” These are male experiences: they lead to measurings.)

Each man seeks his defeat in the other: that’s the simple solution to the riddle of brotherhood. (Are you really blushing now? What’s it like when a soul blushes? Like when the light in the air shaft outside the window filled up with the redness of dawn?)

However, I am speaking the truth:

Everyone seeks his murderer in the other; that is what makes human beings brothers. It’s as simple as a pulp romance novel, (“and so marvelously symbolic,” as Fräulein Ute Seelsorge would say). I was always sympathetic to your attraction to Nagel: it is fascinating to watch him fall into despair for sheer courage; but did you really ever take him seriously when it happened? And you don’t even know everything about Nagel. What you admired, why you envied him, was relatively easy to endure: his cast-iron character; his boy-scout single-mindedness; the raging ardor with which he wrote book after book; his poignant wrestling with the angel of literature (Hemingway as Gabriel); his touching and unswerving faith in the writer’s mission . . . What if you found out that he has given up all those things—in favor of political action?

He is a man of honor, our good Nagel . . . like you . . . isn’t that so? May I ask what you died of? Surely not the combination of alcohol, uppers, and downers? I suspect you died because you took it too seriously that you failed to take yourself as seriously as Nagel.

And now I’d like to know what so fascinated you about me, friend Schwab. The evil? . . . That’s a fabulous notion. Evil. Admit it. Be honest for once (it can’t matter to you anymore): What was the measuring between us? What did my irony challenge in you? Or rather: As what did it challenge you? as evil? That should have occurred to me for my last draft of the book—what a lummox I am! I have the stuff of seven best sellers in me and stand in front of literature as if it were a barn door—

of course: EVIL was the basis of measurement between Schwab and me. EVIL tempted us in each other . . . If that’s not a find! . . . I’m going to turn it into a movie: The Tempter (get the title registered right away!).

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BELOVED TEMPTER

An Intercosmic Film

Script: Aristides Subicz. Lead actress: Nadine Carrier (this time playing a man)

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If this doesn’t put some spring into the curly tails of my piglets! Done very discreetly, you understand, very delicately: a man, by means of sheer irony—okay?—gets another man—his bosom buddy, of course—to—what?—well, obviously: TO COMMIT A MURDER . . .