“How much of your story do you have so far?”

“Nothing that’s finished. I’ve begun a few chapters. Several hundred pages. Several thousand notes.”

“So no outline.”

“A sort of notion of the form, all the same. But it’s assuming a form all on its own. Or rather, an antiform. An explosion, consistent with the zeitgeist. A hybrid cell growth. After all, cancer too is just an explosion in slow motion.”

“And this keeps you from completing it?”

“Sooner or later it’ll complete itself—somehow or other.”

“Why don’t you make it happen right away?”

“Because I love you. Because I can’t write and I don’t want to write when I’m in love. Because right now I want to live. Make love, not literature.”

“But I’ll soon stop loving you if you don’t do what you have to do.”

“I know. But if I do it, my piglets will get very mad at me and not give me any more money. Then I’ll have to live on your money, and you definitely won’t love me then.”

“Don’t forget that I’m a professional promoter. I make a good amount of money financing talent.”

“Musicians. Do you know what a writer earns on a book?”

“A lot of prestige, with which he can squeeze a lot more money out of his piglets than before. I know. I’m the piglet of my musicians.”

And naturally this ended in a paroxysm of amorous blisses and the solemn promise that I would start working first thing in the morning.

•

Everything that begins with a lie, says Dostoevsky, has to end with a lie. In this case, it was that I soon started putting page numbers on every abortive draft, every commenced and aborted, recommenced and reaborted chapter, every lengthy note, and finally every bit of even slightly bedoodled paper. I could no longer bear the disappointment in Gaia’s voice when she looked over my shoulder and said, “Toujours à la page treize, mon ours!” I had to make her believe I was forging ahead. After all, I was writing for her and our love. Hence, unassailed by everyday cares thanks to her, I had to write fluently and toward a foreseeable end . . .

And meanwhile, the hybrid cell growth was running riot not only in my papers, but in her too—in Gaia’s chocolate-brown giantess’s body.

But this wouldn’t come to pass until later. It was still in the future. I wasn’t yet carrying it inside me, carrying it always, like all of the past. And added to this now was Schwab’s funeral, and it made the burden heavier. The day was already past on which he had lain under his hill of blossoms, waiting to be delivered to the fire in the belly of Ohlsdorf Crematorium in order so to speak to rise through the chimney in a different, airier state and merge into the clouds of Hamburg, like Stella in her time at Theresienstadt.

•

Thus I had come from Paris to say good-bye to my friend S. and to be witness to Hanseatic chivalry, according to which you pay last respects even to an enemy, so long as his life can be falsified and re-purposed into an edifying testimony to your own favor in the eyes of God. I squeezed along the wall of the cremation temple and saw myself through Christa’s eyes. Still and all, it would have been nice if she really had nodded at me and smiled: