A conversation with Schwab about snails and the houses they produce out of themselves as the expression of their species: always quite typical and yet individually distinct in pattern, coloring, and ultimate form . . . Plus a quotation from Valéry, which Schwab, of course, promptly had at hand, and which I will never find again without my notes and books . . .

And with that, I was at last fully awake and greeting the dear day.

•

It was yesterday. I did not get up or open my eyes. I lay motionless and tried to guess what time of day it was: was it early morning? late afternoon? Somewhere within, I was seized with the desire to get up quickly and go to the Madeleine, where the girl I had left last night might still be hanging around. But there was time for that tomorrow. I kept lying there. What absorbed me was the lost note.

It was, of course, nonsense to imagine it could contain any tidings of salvation, a magic word that would be the key to my book. Yet all my thoughts were fixed on it. It seemed to me I should have thought of it when, with the first note about Schwab to come into my hand, the terror of my dream and the recognition of my murder pounced on me. And this, I felt, signified that the two were mysteriously connected: the dream about my murder and the lost contents of the note. I ought to recognize this connection so that it might become clear: the it that was about to express itself through me.

As far as I could recall (and it was now enormously important for me to recall), I had slipped the note on the conversation back then (when?) into the folder marked Hamburg—Miscellaneous: presumably as the model for one of the fireside chats in Rönnekamp’s salon: the cultural chitchat—so cultivated as to be stageworthy—of old pederasts in front of disdainfully bored young homosexuals (boys with breathlessly husky voices and skulls clearly marked in their smooth doll heads, exotically beautiful, like Siamese cats) and ordinary seamen dragged over from the docks (stupidly blue-eyed, sweat-fermented, with laborer’s fists like hammers, sexual apparatuses bulging out of snug flies, rosebud-like carbuncles where their Sunday shirt collars sawed into freckled necks . . . all these things in Folder C).

In those days (happy days of innocence!), I took a schoolboy-like pleasure in describing such causeries, and enriching the ghostly self-exposures—the regular Saturday-night stripteases down to the bone of Wilhelmine, Hanseatic humanism, which Carlotta watched with her lazy eyes and sensually puffed cheeks—with small fragments from my occasional exchanges of ideas with Schwab . . . A malicious act against S., of course, a despicably cheap betrayal and, for that, twice as painful to his virginal mind, a treason against our intimate intellectual rapport . . . He would surely have understood immediately what I was driving at when he found his remarks (chastely costumed as questions: “Don’t you really think that it might possibly be different, namely. . . ?”) placed apodictically into Rönnekamp’s tart auntie-mouth—