For all that, the first tape was a highly interesting acoustic document. I proposed that he get it back from Nagel and send it as an experiment in avant-garde music to the Donaueschingen Festival. But my suggestion did not have the liberating effect that one hopes for from humor. Schwab remained despondent, distraught. He was brooding about what was to come.

He moaned. It must have been at around the fifteenth or sixteenth bottle (the fortieth minute on tape) that he finally got down to the nitty-gritty—namely, the difficulty, nay, virtual impossibility, of writing today. Writing in general and novels in particular. The insane presumptuousness of writing novels after Joyce. And certainly niting wrovels, hmm, excuse me, of, clink clink clink, blubblubblubblub clink swallow-swallow-swallow, heavy breathing, of writhing navels thorough-attack-of-whooping-cough clink clink in a totally sanforized pardon me standardized society. And at this point, he felt he had to come to Nagel’s request. But now he feared he might have already pronounced a scathing condemnation of Nagel’s experiment. (Indeed, Schelmie later claimed that it did sound like one.) And so he quickly began to flog his theme, but then he lost the thread of the argument as well as his temper, becoming very offensive, even insulting—but that, thank goodness, was articulated only to the extent that the seventeenth and eighteenth bottles permitted. Besides, he had already been in the dream dimension of slow motion for a long time.

Still, he had enough strength left to call up Schelmie and, in a slurred voice, to tell her to pick up the tape and deliver it to Nagel promptly, and not to listen to a word of it or breathe a syllable about it to Scherping. After that, he was unconscious for the subsequent forty-eight hours—he was a strong man.

Fortunately, I do not have to introduce Nagel or Scherping to you, honored Herr Doktor J. G. Brodny. (Doctorate from the University of Czernowitz? German department? Improbable; more likely Berlin, late twenties, nonracist intellectuals’ paradise of the cursed Systemzeit; degenerate art; art deco. Fluorescence of the already rotten Geist. Romanisches Café. But that would require a whole biography, with the migration story, so let’s omit the “Herr Doktor.”)

In any case, you are familiar with both Nagel’s irascibility and Scherping’s vacillating hysteria. (After all, I had a carefully considered reason for imagining you as being partly clued in and familiar with the milieu—whereby it occurs to me that you may know about the incident I’m describing. But that wouldn’t matter much.) Thus, I can save myself the trouble of depicting what happened to Nagel when he played the tape . . .

In our early period, during the Hamburg ice years right after 1945, when Nagel and I were still friends and he still drank our home-brewed turnip schnapps in manly nonchalance, he once, as impetuous as ever (a Sagittarian), almost swallowed an Alka-Seltzer tablet (black-market item) without water. I picture his reaction to Schwab’s tape as rather similar. As Schwab remorsefully recalled, the foaming Nagel instantly hopped into the car (button gearshift for amputees) and drove to Scherping’s, brakes screeching. Together with the chief bookkeeper, the head of production, and the sales manager—three solid German men with correct haircuts—and with Schelmie as a witness, they listened to Schwab’s tape. Needless to say, Scherping swore on a stack of Bibles that he would finally can this editor, this increasingly uncontrollable drunkard; he would dismiss him on the spot without notice or severance pay; he would drive him in disgrace from the publishing house. (Nagel allegedly demanded this, and indeed it occurred seven months later.)