And he was flesh of the flesh and bone of the bone of the mourners around him here, and blood of their blood (if not spirit of their spirit).

With all the distance that they, respectful toward his “genuine values,” recognized as existing between him and their more modest altitude, he had nonetheless emerged from their midst. They had produced him. And even though he had sometimes made them feel his scorn, he had never repudiated them. On the contrary, he had testified to his fateful attachment to them in many a painful utterance.

And it was to be that way for all eternity. He allowed it. It seemed to amuse him mildly. He was free now, hence without hatred.

And I realized that I had been taken in by his final act of crafty wickedness.

I was attending an ill-timed festival of reconciliation. Not, as I had secretly expected, an apotheotic demonstration of his passionately lived fundamental otherness (some of whose dark majesty I would have shared). He too now made me feel that I was what the burghers here considered me to be: chaff in the wind.

•

Furthermore, I had arrived a moment late, and I sneaked into the devotional temple when the mutely moved hellos and the mutual displays of presence were largely done with and everyone was primed for the actual act of devotion. And once again, I was embarrassed to realize that here too I had joined in more or less randomly, anyway peripherally, and that I had never been properly involved in the social biotope of the man whose intimate confidant, yes, indeed, only friend and spiritual brother I had considered myself to be. So as not to hug the temple door as an obvious straggler, I squeezed forward along the wall, running a gauntlet of gazes, and in so doing my eyes, as they say, were opened.

And quite literally: my eyes encountered another pair of eyes and were entirely lost in them: I henceforth gazed with them—gazed at myself. Saw myself not as in a mirror (Gaia: “Tiens—c’est comme ça que tu te vois!”), but with the gaze of the eternally unattained other. And in it I finally recognized myself.

The astonished “So that’s you!” in those other eyes signified a lightning-like illumination for me: “So that’s me!” For amidst the lymphatic scattering of Hanseatic heads, in which, between hairline and coat collar, the physiognomic characteristics of Frau Professor Else Schumann (bosom friend of the aunt and culture vulture), chauffeur Jochen Zoelke (African battle cap), housekeeper Frieda Harms, and auditor Horst Herbert Siemers (black hat) had bled out and left only the pale glyphs for female contemporary and male contemporary, Christa’s doll-face stood out sharply: the round Gothic forehead ringed by scattered blond curls and crowned by a small, brimless mourning hat, a so-called toque, its flat, unadorned cake-form giving chic and fashionable expression, if not to a nun’s renunciation of the world, then at least to her unconditional submission to the rules of her order.