During this period, the thrifty bitterness began to appear in Christa’s mouth, ultimately transforming the artless cupid’s bow of her lips into the clasp of a mostly closed purse. I then might have guessed what she was thinking. (“Nagel is at least doing something sensible with your endless talk.”) Even Hertzog, whom she had regarded as a slick crook (“He’s only using all of you as guinea pigs; he’s just observing you and then doing something completely different with it”), she began to see in a new light (“There has to be something to it if it gets Nagel to do some proper work”).

Naturally, she didn’t put these feelings into words, either. (In general, she was visibly less communicative; even the memories of childhood and adolescence, memories of large cakes on the coffee table under the copper beeches, and buggy rides to neighboring estates, faltered and oozed out into chilly, ladylike silence. Only later, when our little boy could listen, did those memories surge up again, and, much to my sorrow, he absorbed them more ardently than the myths I had to hand down to him.)

But I could tell by other signs that Christa did not view the evening get-togethers in Nagel’s garden house merely as an intellectually camouflaged collective waste of time by a handful of bums, alkies, and moochers. She now barely protested when the remnants of the pool table from the half-buried den, then the cue rack and the window frames vanished into Nagel’s stove, followed by all the stationery with the engraved patrician address from the table where he wrote (with his left hand). Furthermore, her transient relatives and acquaintances now evinced a certain interest in my doings. (“I understand you’ve founded a cenacle with friends, for discussion evenings and so on. One of them even writes, I hear? I’d love to meet the man. Who publishes this kind of stuff? I mean: if ever I were to think of writing about my experiences during the escape . . .”)

In short, we were becoming respectable.

This was then gloriously confirmed one evening by the appearance of a gentleman whom I stubbornly called Major General Baron von Neunteuffel, which was not his real name—I forget what it was—but in any case, he had been a lieutenant general or something like that, and the victorious powers had soon set him free because of his various brilliant qualities. Neunteuffel happened not to be one of Christa’s relatives, or one of the many acquaintances who had been closely allied with the family for generations. But before entering the garden house, he naturally did not fail to pay his respects to her, as a man who had almost joined the resistance movement and was an admirer of her unfortunate father—“he’s laying a wreath,” I said, reaping Hertzog’s explanation that according to Freudian teaching my cynical proclivities were a symptom of a prematurely repressed infantile sexuality with subsequent masochistic tendencies.

It was Hertzog who had invited Neunteuffel. But the major general did not come alone. He brought along (presumably as a political alibi) a distinguished-looking character, whom he introduced as a “victim of Fascism.” This man was a Baltic German, his name was von Rönnekamp, and as an incorrigible homosexual he had spent the length of the war in a concentration camp. Incidentally, he was later to surprise me and everyone else present by saying he had discerned in me a “truly religious man in the Dostoevskian sense.” Major General Baron von Neunteuffel proved to be a versatile, proficient, and—as it turned out—clear-sighted man. With his dependable, alert, and sociable character, he succeeded in loosening the awkward restraint shown toward him by several participants in the group.