The silence this morning was exactly the opposite. True, it also contained the city, but not that aura. You could hear Paris in it, but it was an abstract, panoramic, tourist-picture-book Paris. It contained no people experiencing it. Streets, squares, monuments, gardens, gables, and ledges had a Sunday glow to them—and were accordingly empty. Each house was freshly painted, so to speak, with sparkling windowpanes. Each street corner was meticulously swept. Each leaf on the trees in the boulevards was varnished. It was a toy Paris: beautiful, perfect—and, as I have said, abstract. The silence emanating from it was sterilized. It lay there, scoured clean, like a lovely shell on the beach.

Curiosity seized me, and I got out of bed and went to the window, pushed open the shutters, and stuck my head into the air shaft.

It was filled with bright nothingness.

This bright nothingness almost made the air shaft burst. The walls seemed able to stand the tension no longer. They had narrowed, losing their gravity and density. The bright nothingness scattered their molecules.

I looked up. Very high above the rectangular cutout of the peep-show box to which the air shaft had shrunk, the sky was stretching in a deep polar blue. I looked down. Below, on the dirt-encrusted glass roof of the first floor, frost lay along the iron beams. Razor-sharp coldness cut into my skin. I looked up again—and was yanked aloft like a balloon cut free.

For what happened next, the experienced novelist has a few idiot-proof, well-cemented phrases at his disposal, but he cannot use them unless he wishes to be regarded as tasteless:

his heart contracted when he realized—

with a stroke that roiled his innermost being he perceived—

an insight struck him like a fist—

as though an inner turmoil had shaken the scales from my eyes—

thus, I recognized the light and the silence.

They were the silence and the light of the days when the German troops marched into Vienna (in March 1938: it was known then as “Hitler weather”: an icy cold blue sky and a Sunday glow over the empty, silent world).

•

Those days were still sharp in my memory (and kept fresh by repeated and highly detailed reports to Schwab). There was no reason why their recollection (even, so to speak, from an ambush: on the morning after an honestly bought night of lovemaking and looking ahead to a joyfully productive day here in Paris) should rattle me. (After all, it was not unusual to have frost in October. The political situation—according to hearsay; I don’t read the newspaper—was as precarious as ever, but not immediately alarming; and sudden clear weather was no excuse for drawing the parallel to historic dates marked by extraordinary climatic conditions.)

March 1938 was altogether different—I mean more unusual, more surprising. I knew it by heart, like certain notes for my book. Dozens of times—if not more often—I had told all kinds of people (not just Schwab) about those days, finding attentive and then soon reflective listeners, whose moved state had lifted my description to artistic heights. During the quarter of a century that had passed since these memorable days, I had turned them into a showpiece whenever the conversation turned to politics and recent history (for I understand nothing of the former and I live past the latter; in order to join in, I tell about the peculiar weather back then):