So I simply go out to the yard; it is not that I am expected, but rather that it is utterly inconceivable that I could stay away. The wheeled table already offers what she calls “a little something to munch on”: a small basket of black bread (“Just try it, it’s whole-grain bread”) rye bread caraway-seed bread graham bread aniseed bread crispbread salt sticks cheese sticks, a little board with ham on it (“Just dive right in, that’s homemade cottage-cured ham”), her familiarity is quite neutral, impersonal, noncommittal, the act of taking possession occurs by way of the exceptionally rich offering of first-class consumer goods: smoked goose breast (“It’s a home recipe, from refugees from Pomerania”), fat liverwurst (“You’ll never get that in a normal store, it comes from Holstein, straight from the farm”), a small crock of butter (“genyuwine country butter”), a stone jug of Steinhäger beer (“Drink some right away, it’s nicely chilled”), a bottle of Bommerlunder, half a bottle of kümmel, a remnant of cognac, reams of paper napkins, a small dish of salted almonds, another of sweets, a cup containing cigarettes (Copenhagen brand: gull motif), an ashtray (Rosenthal porcelain decorated by Bele Bachem’s artistic hand with a cat-faced debauchee in a corset and laced boots plus a Montgolfier floating high in the air), the weekly magazine pile (“Knowledge Is Power”)—all she’d have to do is have my slippers ready (“Why don’t you take off your tie, it’s a lot comfier”). I promptly stretch out in the chaise longue, hack off thick slices of whole-grain and rye bread, goose breast and home-cured ham, heartily heap up liverwurst on playing-card crispbread, poke the salt sticks in the butter, the cheese sticks in the mayonnaise. I need something to hold on to, something solid in this boneless situation, in this strangely abstract world; the life-giving food has to produce the reality of life I lose when I walk into the hallway here and certainly under the sunshade with stitched-on toadstools in this sunless wasteland. I try to find the reality of life in the illustrated magazines, I peruse Der Spiegel, Stern, Good Housekeeping, Better Living, Modern Woman, Radio and TV Guide; while doing so I slip more and more deeply, more and more hopelessly into abstractness, also losing my (already diluted) identity.