That was the bizarre thing about that light: it was not only beyond matter but also beyond time. An everlasting Sunday had commenced and was shining over the world. Had my friend Scherping been present, he would have said, “Now that’s a sky! You could fry an egg on it.” (He would have been wrong: the sky was more likely to freeze those who were sickened by the times and wanted to survive past the next few centuries, in order to thaw out again when medicine could guarantee eternal life: the SS would subsequently perform the most interesting experiments in this connection at Dachau.) And Vienna was lovelier and more Sunday-like than ever before. It looked as neat as a pin, fresh, with a new coat of paint, as if straight from a toy chest. And empty.

•

An especially effective vignette in my story was the one about the flower woman. She appears on the first of the three days. All through the night, the soul of the people had boiled. Describing something like this is a choice morsel for a novelist, and I didn’t miss my chance. For instance, the encounter with my cousin Wolfgang in a battery of marching columns (they had massed as unexpectedly as the hosts of iron men that King Laurin stamped out of the soil, and they had marched through the streets to the Rathausplatz, crowding more and more ominously), an encounter that was not without the macabre humor that properly highlights something horrible. (For the postwar German cinema, to which I offered the story on many occasions, the mass spectacle was too costly, although they probably could have found a lot of useful newsreel material; at any rate, my manuscript requires only a bit of tightening and revising to be considered masterful; if I remember correctly, it is filed in the folder marked Prehistory: Vienna IV, with the description of Wolfgang’s funeral.)

The coagulated flood of iron men smashed the groves on the Rathausplatz and soiled the monument to Ritter von Sonnenthal, presumably because King Laurin’s warriors smelled a Jew in the name. They did not sing, however (as they usually did on such occasions). The columns mutely set out again, threading their way in murky order toward the Ringstrasse. At their head, in accordance with tradition, marched a division of uniformed employees of the Municipal Streetcar Company (the trolley conductor of my childhood was not among them). They pulled the monstrous thing along behind them: a worm as black as nightshade, crawling along on thousands of legs, aglint with the will-o’-the-wisps of thousands of eyes in which the pale fire of an hour of decision was glowing.

It now crept out of the trampled-flowerbed earth and grew longer and longer and had no end in sight . . . crept past Parliament and past the Opera and past the City Park and, at Aspern Bridge, into the curve toward the Danube Canal and up the canal to Schottentor and then into its own tail. It thus placed a ring around the inner city.