back then, at any rate, her girlish fragrance, her soft, round flesh, and the warmth of her blond skin made up the capital in my emotional household, and I used the interest to make up for my disappointment with Nagel.

Perhaps I should have told her this at some point; she probably didn’t know, though she could, of course, have noticed it. Especially when she was expecting a child, I was simply entranced with her, placed my head on her belly, which had already taken on the milky bloated quality of motherhood, asked her to hold her breath, and I listened to see if I couldn’t hear my son’s heartbeat—the little boy who would trustingly grow up holding my hand and then stride, laughing, towards life, to which I would release him—a sunny life that we upright survivors of the wintertide would have set up for him, perhaps in the city of mankind, ANTHROPOLIS . . .

Naturally, there was nothing to hear but the growling of her empty stomach, but I loved her all the same, and even though all she had to say to my early paternal ardor was that I had unpleasantly cold ears (she had received the news of her pregnancy not, like me, in a worshipful crèche mood but rather with an annoyed, despairing “That’s all I needed!”)—she’s simply a rather dry person, that Christa, and her poetry too lies ultimately only in her sensitivity.

Incidentally, she didn’t spend the entire period in bed, of course, merely the bulk of it, including daytime. The time, namely, that I spent with Nagel & Associates. And just what else could she have done in those days, when even the angels were frozen to the earth and the nearest basement movie theatre was a twenty-minute hike away? . . . There wasn’t much housekeeping to do. I cooked when there was something to cook, cleaned up the two rooms we lived in, pretty much the only livable ones in the villa on the Elbchaussee. It was bitterly cold, after all, and wood and coal were scarce; Christa saved them for the visits by her countless friends and relatives, the scattered blossoms of East Elbe Junker flora that the polar wind blew our way.

During such visits, Christa had every opportunity to demonstrate how proficient she was in bearing her sorrow in a simple, ladylike fashion. If I was introduced to the droppers-in, they communicated with her by means of a glance. Stateless, eh? What was the father? Unknown. I see . . . They forwent the shrug taking me as a phenomenon of the times. The conversation then continued in a brittle, piss-elegantly booted and spurred class jargon, as though it had not been interrupted; my offer of a sip of our turnip schnapps was declined with thanks. I took the hint and soon left the like-minded alone. For Christa, however, these were pretty much the only events in her sad life. She had probably had different expectations in her heart when marrying me. She had viewed me as John’s protégé, the foreigner and almost ally, the PX rations–recipient and travel-order passenger—