However, what occurred the next day was something that Schwab, in turn, did not have to depict for me—conosco i miei polli. When Schwab showed up at the publishing firm, he was not bewildered, crestfallen, intimidated—as he was now, here, at my side, in the Paris lunchtime rush hour (he did not know the meaning of fear, only fantastic anxieties, such as the anxiety of my killing him in my car). Towering upright and gazing straight ahead into space, disdainfully slamming doors with his provocatively pointed “Good morning!” he showed up at the office, still half-plastered and irritated by an acid stomach, angrily craving beer, his rumbling belly filled with leonine courage that recently (just when?) had spurred him to some daring deed he simply couldn’t recollect no matter how hard he tried (a tape? but what had he done with it? he hadn’t sung on it, had he?). At first, Scherping was speechless. Completely.

Completely speechless and filled with dark bliss, I assume. For that was exactly the situation he had been hoping for, had fantasized about time and time again. (“If you only knew to what far-fetched and insidious lengths we go to get our pleasure,” he once confessed to me.) Finding himself powerless before an underling whom he intended to push around, being tormented, humiliated, treated like a little pile of shit by him—that was a night of love. And Schwab was the very man whom Scherping dreamed of for the part. Far more, oh, ineffably more sly, stealthy, secretive than even the most severe woman: he was the FATHER in his heavy demonic nature, the Dostoevskian starost in his dark power (Schwab when the Slavic strain—his mother’s maiden name was Mietschke—began to predominate in his bespectacled Luther-head. “A mountain with a stormy peak,” Schelmie once said, frightened but poetic).

And if I knew my duck, he with his keen erotic instinct must have gone along with the part that was offered him, the old slut . . . In any case, he said it never came to an argument between him and Scherping about the Nagel affair. Before the subject could come up, he declared rather brusquely that he could no longer work for Scherping if he was not granted an appreciable sum to encourage the projects of certain authors. Scherping, who smelled a rat, asked, “Which authors?” pleasurably lying in wait. Schwab named not Nagel, as expected, but me. Scherping screeched out his fury into Hamburg’s anemic autumn air. (It was the time of the asters, and Schelmie had opened the window on Rothenbaumchaussee to let in a bit of afternoon sun.) Now, his fury was vented against me. For fourteen years, raged the pain-tested, pain-loving publisher, he had been waiting for my manuscript. The multiple advances were reaching astronomical heights. Meanwhile, he raged on, I had absolutely no intention of writing even one more line of the novel, I was still prostituting myself disgracefully with the movies. If he, Scherping, took the bait and forked over a new advance, the recurrent and promising beginnings I kept sending in would cease altogether.