no wonder she retreated and preferred seeing the winter through in her bed.

But when I crept to her, there was closeness again, other skin, flesh warmth, intimacy. We still had things to tell about ourselves; we exchanged the tinsel-wrapped life treasures of childhood memories. Christa sometimes chatted very sweetly about her childhood in East Prussia: very clear weather again, a very blue sky, a very anacreontic nature, a huge estate household, golden fields of grain and darkly wooded lakes, at night the mighty copper beeches soughing over the gentle fireworks of the glowworms in the park. A rather eccentric mother, who had broken her neck in 1939 while jumping over a ditch (on horseback, of course); an elegant patriarchal portrait of a father, who had been strung up in 1944 as a hero of the resistance; both parents very much alive in her memory. A flock of brothers and sisters with quaint character traits; neighbors and relatives had saved them from being arrested for guilt by kinship and thrown in a concentration camp: nocturnal cross-country escape on horseback (the roads were watched), two months hidden in the hay of a barn (not without its humorous episodes), soon the all-out chaos began anyway, the refugee trek to Mecklenburg, finally an underground existence in Hamburg, waiting for the end.

A children’s book. I soon knew it by heart. Nagel’s stories were a lot meatier, more anecdotal, blossomed in tropical brilliance from the à propos of conversation. They didn’t tiptoe forward step by step on girlish feet; these stories leaped about daringly and surprisingly, sovereignly disconnected, held together purely by a keen eye, toppling over into more and more configurations, like the prismatically reflected picture elements in a kaleidoscope.

What Christa told me was the beginning of a novel, with the glassy brittleness of Fontane’s idylls, over which a tempest of Tolstoyan drama suddenly breaks. Very attractive, no doubt, very gripping, but fragmentary, the opus got bogged down in the far too broad beginning, the main character never got beyond the initial stage of development, events rumbled behind the scenes like stage thunder, many things went up in flames, and stormy sheet lightning flashed over graves and execution sites, but the heroine lay in bed and pouted because there were no more county horse shows and no more aristocratic society balls.

Nagel on the other hand—yes! Nagel picked up the splinters and assembled for me a colorful mosaic of a reality whose farthest reaches were charged with the mood of a thunderstorm. No thread was needed to string together the tangle of characters, settings, themes; the drama behind them set forth the situations, put them in order, arranged them. Any humor only made it more sinister. Any sublimity quickly revealed the dreadful bathos of banality—

but from the barbarism, poetry proliferated like bindweed. It’s not a civilized plant (whatever one may say); it blooms and thrives best in rubble fields and steppes . . .

•

For Nagel was writing now. He had always planned to write and was bursting with accumulated material: the things he had seen, gone through, made up. He was working on several projects at once: various short stories, a play, and even the draft of a novel. There wasn’t any further cooling of our friendship, which had suffered because of Hertzog and the exuberant growth of the manger-shepherd circle into a discussion group, but we saw less and less of each other. He worked fiercely day and night, wrote tirelessly, using his left hand with childlike awkwardness. We weren’t allowed a glimpse at his literary output. During the discussion evenings with Hertzog he was struck by an aspect of me that seemed to him more suspect than it had before. “You’re too Austrian for me, man.” I was orphaned.