All in all, it was a wonderful time.

•

It was the time when Christa had every reason to be jealous of Nagel. I truly loved him. His makeshift home was a garden house that a couple of nearby bombs had torn askew (our home was the remnants of the adjoining villa on the Elbchaussee: Christa was counted among the relatives of the victims of the Twentieth of July, to whom the assholes at the housing office gave preference). And here, I made up for the boy-scout romanticism I had avoided in wise timidity during my formative years in Vienna (albeit not without secretly envying my cousin Wolfgang, who joined everything). We distilled turnip liquor in an apparatus cobbled together out of two old watering cans. We lay in wait on the Elbe ice to catch starving coots. Once, we even bagged one, and in order to roast it festively, Nagel burned his cello (he couldn’t play it now anyway, not with one hand). In the evenings, when we snuggled under an old horse blanket like orphaned brothers, field-flower bouquets of delightful stories blossomed from the fiery mouth of the little iron stove (to which we had fed Christa’s portable gramophone—I wanted to contribute my fair share, after all). Christa, meanwhile, lay in bed in the ruined villa and pouted.

No one could tell such marvelous stories as Nagel. He had lived through a lot and was a keen observer. After all, he had made up his mind to write at a very early age—a reader of Jack London and Joseph Conrad, later an enthusiastic adept of Knut Hamsun, and then, of course, Hemingway. He had had all the experiences that I had not had: the hard, deliciously variegated, adventurous reality of life. Everything I still have not managed to experience. When scarcely an adolescent, he had run off with a circus. For one and a half months—still and all. When they caught up with him, his parents put him in the doghouse, but six weeks later, he was off again: signed up as cabin boy on a tiny freighter that plowed the Baltic Sea. Only one round trip, to be sure, but the wind hit Force Nine three times. His father was a beer-brewery engineer in Harburg. At sixteen, Nagel could drink like a fish and was kicked out of the Hitler Youth for insubordination. A resistance fighter, obviously. Shortly before he was supposed to graduate from high school, he punched his teacher, was expelled, and entered the Labor Service. He dug ditches in the hills of the Rhön and learned how to fly a glider; he fell from an altitude of thirteen feet and broke his leg. Wearing a cast, he took a makeup exam; and no sooner could he walk again than he strapped on a rucksack, according to the good old German tradition, and, with the laudable humanistic goal of hiking along the entire route of Goethe’s first voyage to Italy, set off. But because he was nearing conscription age, the assholes at the passport office refused to give him a passport; embittered, he went to the coal district of Upper Silesia, where he worked underground for eight weeks with a safety lamp on his forehead (I was familiar with the white-toothed smile in his blackened face from his dealings with the iron stove). Then he had an idea. He went to Munich and, by way of old comrades from the Labor Service, contacted a certain Party agency, which, after a brief training period (he already knew about explosives from the mine), sent him across the Alpine border to infiltrate Austria as a provocateur.