In a word: I still experienced myself in that portion—but simply as history.

Even later (years and decades after March 1938), I was forced to carry out such amputations of previous sections of my life; for instance, after my divorce from Christa, in a certain way after Schwab’s funeral, and certainly after Gaia’s death. So that ultimately my story became that of a man who experiences himself in the story of an adolescent who experiences himself in the story of a boy who experiences himself in the story of a child. Or if you prefer a visual metaphor: the surrealistic portrait of a man who carries within himself an aquarium in which he swims like a tench (a tench, it goes without saying, that carries within itself an aquarium, in which it swims like a tench) . . . And even though he keeps getting progressively smaller and younger and changing his suit so that ultimately, as a dear little golden-curled sailor, he carries nothing more within himself than the nostalgia for the amniotic fluid from which the stork unexpectedly brought him and placed him in a nursery somewhere full of toys and the first terrors of life, he was nevertheless—albeit hazily and mysteriously and tench-like—the very same man! All those cuts separated me from myself like a tapeworm head, from which the same tapeworm keeps growing back (because, in accordance with a biological command, it contains an established design of itself and hence its style, as it were). But none of those cuts supported its effectiveness by using the spectacular circumstances of a historic event. Only the cut in March 1938.

From which one may conclude that my personal history is connected only rather loosely and randomly with World History. It really does not concern me.

•

Hence, now, here in Paris, in 1968, it was not memory that stunned me but simply my small interest in it. My gaze up into the peepshow box of the air shaft, through which nothing was to be seen but a rectangular section of the ice-blue sky, sucked me out of time into a sort of removal from time—into a no-man’s-land between the here and now and today and the there and then and yesterday long since and frequently separated from me.

I belonged to neither one now. I saw both as equally remote and abstracted from me: each a wholly different story. I could tell either—but neither expressed me.

I peered simultaneously into my two aquariums, each of which contained the other and me in the amniotic fluid of a tale to be told—as a literary fetus, so to speak. One was a Paris hotel room reeking of bedbug killer and couscous spices; the other, the Vienna of the annexation by the Third and Greater German Reich.

In both, something swam in slow-motion weightlessness: I, my SELF—or at least a human being with an unbearable resemblance to me. In one, standing at the window and gazing up the narrow airshaft to the sky, a man of forty-nine, modeled trait for trait on my wanted poster, and with the same personal data, the same name, the same place and date of birth (and its disreputable circumstances), the same color of hair and eyes, the same nose shape, ear shape, fingerprints, and distribution of liver spots—hence, in terms of all criminological leads, quite unmistakably me. In the other, the same man, thirty years younger—a callow nineteen-year-old, in whom all these traits were just budding, so to speak, not yet settled in creases, leathern and weather-beaten and masculinely marked—yet nevertheless me. Indeed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, ME, my SELF—