“Possessed by my foolish love for a will-o’-the-wisp, an apparition of a human being—if we’re being honest, right?—in any event, a sheer fiction of a woman, a fata morgana of a love object, I no doubt carried out something exemplary—I mean, something beautifully consistent with the zeitgeist. But why and to what extent? That it has something to do with repetition, that much is clear—Papa Kierkegaard would be thrilled. Once again rummaging for the lost half of my life, I was doing something in its style. In the style of the twenties and thirties, which quite commonly these days have come to trigger in just about everyone an ever more self-conscious nostalgia. Thus, not only did I repeat something, individually, but something repeated itself through me: the it, the id in me, part of the collective of my race, my civilization, my culture, and my time. It had me do what is due to be done in this time. Even in my extravagance, I was once again merely a leaf in the wind of the zeitgeist—isn’t that a breathtaking thought? Everything that occurred, exactly as it occurred, is typical of the time—and that means: that from it we can draw conclusions about the quality and character of our time. For instance, the abstractness, the echo-like quality of the relationship between Dawn and myself, the experience detached from ourselves and all surrounding reality, not to mention the high symbolism of her farewell gesture, first eating the white rose and then making the sluttish request for money—simply glorious!! But you must understand that I now yearn for a less anemic reality. After so much abstraction, so much fiction, such a toying as-if, I would like to fortify myself with raw flesh and warm blood . . .”

I do so every evening at a cheap cabaret on the place Blanche, where a troupe of delicious negresses are making a guest appearance. They too perform in the Folies Bergères style of the Mistinguette and Josephine Baker era (ergo, they too drag the past into presence), with pistachio, violet, and flamingo-colored ostrich feathers foaming on their heads and from their tailbones, with sequined corsets, and stilettoes tall as their insteps and thin as a pencil under their sinewy feet. They hurl their wonderfully limber legs at the rotating colored lamps under the ceiling, as if they were trying to yank them out of their hip joints. They bend their pelvises forward and backward and around with such sharp, grotesque contortions that one involuntarily bends with them, vibrates with them as if in the back and forth of an erotic shadowboxing. Their solid, fine-tipped breasts jiggle like rubber, and the lianas of their arms intertwine and unravel to the intertwining and unraveling saxophone voices of the Dixieland band accompanying them. In short, they are worthy of admiration. I tell S., “Worthy of ad-miration. You have to come and see them, ab-solutely!”

He doesn’t need to be asked, he clings to me anyway, never leaves me unguarded for even an instant. This suits me fine: I’ve already left a small fortune with the black beauties anyway; I’ve borrowed the money from the clerk at the George V. God’s and the movie piglets’ providence will see to it that he gets the money back. In any case, for now, Schwab has the honor of paying the bills.