I don’t know what came over me. In any case, I felt myself veritably shuddering with lust for this mountain of chocolate-brown flesh in jingly jewelry and a Balenciaga tailleur and sporting the ridiculously arrogated name of a Romanian princess. Perhaps it was something utterly subliminal, the perverse notion that I was morally ravishing something abstruse, a sideshow curiosity like the Trunk Lady or Sheila the Elephant Girl. Whatever the case, I behaved quite uncontrolledly, moaning loudly and grinding my teeth. Finally, unable to hold back any longer, I bit her mahogany neck so that she too emitted a series of tiny, lustfully painful cries. Then, very confused, she fled into her mammoth bourgeois palace, and I drove Schwab to his hotel.

When we arrive, to my astonishment, he is sitting bolt upright in the back seat and his eyes are open. He doesn’t say anything. Nor do I. Finally, not without effort, he creeps out of the car, trudges around it, sticks his head in at my window, takes my hand in his two hands, squeezes it ardently, and says emotionally, “Thank you! Oh thank you!” Shaking my hand, he keeps repeating, “Thank you! Oh thank you!”

Then he vanishes into the hotel entrance. I drive through the dead streets to the George V. It’s four a.m. and the dawn is budding. At eleven, he rings me. He’s made up his mind to fly back to Hamburg.

I drive him to the airport. He shows no sign of remembering anything. I have to give him a blow-by-blow description of his accident, though he’s at least managed to understand that his car was wrecked and he did what was necessary to have it towed away.

We drink a farewell whiskey at the bar. When his flight is announced, his eyes fill with tears. He can barely speak. He holds my hand again and stammers, “Thank you! Thank you for everything!” Shortly before going through the gate, he turns back to me once more, reaches into his pockets, and hauls out fistfuls of bank notes, which he presses into my hand: “Adieu! And thank you! Farewell! Adieu!”

That’s how reality presents itself to me.

4

So that was my friend S.’s last visit to Paris—in fact the last time I ever saw him. He flew back to Hamburg, where by means of a devious combination of alcohol and every kind of upper and downer he sought to inveigle Mother Nature into sparing him the embarrassing circumstance of a suicide. Within a few months he had succeeded. By the end of December of that same year (1964) he was dead.

You, Mr. Brodny, will probably fail to grant him your respect. Please bear in mind what a delicate case he was. Even when I first met him in Hamburg in 1948, he couldn’t get over how unpredictable mankind was, and how confused the world. A Gottfried Benn fan, you see. A Benn reader believes in the power of the mind. Of course, he knew about the mind’s vulnerability. I wonder how he would have endured the present (and with it the ever more clearly looming future). How would my image have changed in his eyes? I am not speaking about the curious fact that the easygoing chocolate-brown giantess was to be Dawn’s successor in my heart and my ardent mistress for two years before she too passed away. By the way, her mother really was a Romanian princess and called Jahovary. But more about that later.