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I stood naked at the window and peered up through the air shaft to the sky. Cold bit into my skin and shriveled my scrotum. I thought of the day when I had looked out of the same window at an angle, down to the opposite window (whose shutters were now closed), and Schwab and I had surprised Madame in her nakedness. I thought of her big, maternal breasts, whose fullness had charged into my gonads. In those days, I was not exactly overfed by the tender virginality of Dawn’s breasts (which, moreover, I had not yet relished). At Dawn’s age, Madame’s tremendous appendages must have been magnificently bursting, with pale, bud-like nipples.

Rarely does one set eyes on such perfection (much less set hands or kisses or bites). I did once, however, when I was frozen stiff in the collapsed air shaft of a bombed-out house in Hamburg, shortly after my arrival from Nuremberg. She was a victim of the widely feared “rubble killer,” a deliciously beautiful woman: stark naked and silkily glittering in her frozen matte nymph skin gently strewn with feathery snow crystals; only her face was bluish violet, like an eggplant. You see, the rubble killer strangled his victims with a wire noose on a wooden throttle valve. All he had to do was twist it behind the victim’s neck to tighten the wire with a horrible lever effect. The eyes of the corpse very sharply revealed the power of this tightening twist: one eye had rolled up at a leftward slant under the caved-in lid, the other gaped dully at a rightward slant toward the stiff nipple. And her tongue had burst out of the cracked lips as though she wanted to lick it (they say of hanged men that their last moment passes with an ejaculation—what is it like with women?)—

Anyway, it was when I was engaged to Christa that they discovered that woman, yet another victim of the rubble killer, and I believe Christa had a good night after that. I was at my peak, as now.

I stood at the open window and wished to be seen in my morning glory. By Madame, preferably, or even one of the fat-assed Algerian women. Or, for all I cared, by one of the traveling salesmen, or the chambermaid who was probably cleaning a room across the way. Or the handsome Pole, who must have been sleeping with Madame one floor below, after finishing his night shift . . . I wished for a scandal. A voice furiously shouting “Tu te fous du monde, salaud?” A window being slammed shut. The telephone: “Vous n’avez pas honte, monsieur?” Someone banging at my door: “Dites donc: ça vous amuse?”

I wished for MYSELF AS AN EVENT.