Yes indeed. That’s what he was like. My friend Nagel. A gruff old bastard, but he had balls. I still remember his white-toothed smile in his sooty face (darkened with smoke from the stove) when he told me how he had lost his arm. Somewhere in Russia, he and a group of similar daredevils—wild fellows from a penal column who knew they were done for anyway—were meant to blast through an encircled area. In the middle of the night, they had put on snow coats and crawled all the way to a particularly vicious nest of heavy machine guns and anti-tank guns. Nagel led the way as platoon leader. Now, the morning was coming up (he described its rosebuds on the ice with an ardor that did credit to his later full-bosomed spiritual kinship with the painter Philipp Otto Runge). The moment for attack had come. Nagel raised his arm to signal to his buddies: “Storm the nest! Get going!” But nothing happened. No one got up to storm. Only the Russians began shooting wildly, lashing the terrain with sheaves of machine-gun fire. Nagel looked around furiously for the assholes, who were lying with their mugs in the snow. Why the hell hadn’t they started running at his signal? After all, he had raised his arm—

at this point, he glanced at his arm and didn’t see it. The arm was gone. There was no arm to give a visible signal. It had been shot clean off when he had raised it.

And so all his buddies were likewise cleanly picked off where they lay, one after another, their faces in the snow. They hadn’t seen the arm that was supposed to signal the attack.

At the time, Nagel, grimly laughing, called it “a really stupid story.” But I’m not sure. Today, when it comes to mind, it strikes me as dismally symbolic.

•

How far back, how remote this lay in time, and how present it was in my memory! . . . I could reel it off like Nagel himself:

All I have to do is apply the pen and it races across the paper. Sheer delight. I write even more fluently than when I concoct delicacies for my piglets. Wohlfahrt & Associates, their snouts zealously snuffling, badger me for something they can smack their lips over: some gaudy, juicily snot-oozing subject to lure yet again some distributor threatened with bankruptcy.