and neither concerned me directly. Each was I, my SELF—but simply as history: as my abstraction.

Still, a secret rapport existed between the two of them (the realization they were ME), in which I was not included. They existed through me and beyond me, in a higher form of existence that I had not yet attained. They looked as if they were winking and waving—indeed, even calling to one another, shouting something I could not (or was not supposed to) make out. It sounded like something I knew, indeed knew very well. It sounded like my own echo, but I had forgotten the words of the original call, and the echo had died away no sooner than I thought I had caught it.

They knew the words and had decided to keep them from me. And thus, they (these stories of mine, twice times two times two times two times two stories) aroused my curiosity, forcing me to deal with them and cope with them incessantly, to tell them to myself over and over again, unceasingly—yet without ever managing to become fully a part of their equation, all their numerators and common denominators, their common multiples as well as, ultimately, the solution to their algebra.

My gaze through the tetragonal funnel of the light shaft yanked me up and out into the cold void, in which I floated away from myself like a balloon cut loose. And, like the hazy strips of soft, perforated cloud covers, the rags of other memories, other histories of my many detached and abstracted SELVES, soared past me:

a pond in a now entirely mythical land (known as Bessarabia, a name that is speckled like a guinea hen): a small pond in a park, where a delicately old-fashioned boat was decaying

a bridge arching over the Danube Canal in Vienna, under whose slanting shadow, cast transparently into the mealy lit fog, I, my SELF, a boy of eleven, was placing a toy boat in the black water: in it a candle that was to drift to my dead mother

a classroom at the realschule in Vienna’s Thirteenth District, in whose mountain sorrel a wheat field of youth was rotting on the stalk, year by year

the nixie eyes of my foster mother, bewitched and strangely hungry for salvation, her gaze with drawn-in flanks, as it were, arousing the same hunger in me

Stella or liberation, sinful lovemaking in the veil the frogs wove with their croaking one moonlit night over Baneasa, furious mating behind a boundary ridge on the highway where the car stands with its motor running, predatory pouncing on each other in hotel rooms rented for hours at a time

and John, whom we—still glowing and breathless and with hands trembling—sit facing, with his perfectly immobile face.

The war:

Cousin Wolfgang, appearing before me in military gray; Berlin in flames, and the gray human faces which the soot of conflagrations has seared so deeply that they shine; the canteen with German attorneys and witnesses at the Fürth law court and the purely physiological gratitude in the otherwise perfectly expressionless face of a young girl who is eating, taking in food with all the senses, all the organs, all the cells of her body