And here, the unexpected occurred; here came Nagel’s crowning glory. Twitching his arm stump in the empty sleeve as though trying to pound on the table with his missing fist, he suddenly blustered and shouted that he had had enough of this shit; if things developed as Herr Neunteuffel prophesied, then he hoped that he, Karl Nagel, would have found a way of emigrating to a place where it wasn’t worth the trouble to use nuclear weapons, Korea or Siam or God knows where, and if he hadn’t succeeded, then he would prefer plundering hordes of radium-contaminated Rheinlanders or Lower Bavarians defending their forest homeland with clubs to any powerful German force for maintaining order. He was fed up to here with all the stupid talk; he had more important things to do than waste his time with this chitchat, goddammit; after all, this garden house was not the bookstore at the Cologne railroad station, it was a private home, damn makeshift to be sure, but all the same—So get out, all of you! The whole goddamn bunch of you, get out!

It was fabulous. Hertzog was the only one who made an attempt, at the threshold, to remain. All he got for his trouble was the knob of the slammed door in his back. Hurrying to catch up with Major General Baron von Neunteuffel, who was hurrying toward his car, which had just been approved for him by the occupation authorities, he tried to explain that poor Nagel was in the throes of a subliminal religious crisis that made him extremely irritable and also, because of an unresolved father-son attachment, tended towards an unequilibriated functioning of the gall bladder.

The rest of us stood in the starry, frost-smoky night. Herr von Rönnekamp, who seemed uncommonly worked up by the incident, ecstatically shook hands with every last one of us, holding our hands awhile in order properly to relish each friendly gaze. Despite everything, he said, he hoped to see us again soon, talk to us, get to know us better (the hope was to come true in my case). Then, with a bulbously Baltic “One second! I’m coming!” (which spouted from his mouth as a small gray cloudlet in the frosty night), he likewise went to the car. Fräulein Ute Seelsorge quickly joined him to see whether there wasn’t room for her too. Some of us laughed. Some felt that Nagel had been quite right. One man said, “Okay, but that won’t do all the same!” One girl was weeping silently to herself, and all of us agreed that it was freezing cold. The little group dissolved and trickled apart.

And I was proud! My shirt buttons almost popped off, I was so proud. Nagel, my friend Karl Nagel, had shown what a grand fellow he was. He had driven the money changers out of the temple. He had spurned the tempter. In the teeth of temptation, he had remained steadfast. He had finally, with his own hands (or rather one hand), set sail to steer his life’s dream through the winter night.