Christa, the relentless woman on whom I had failed so miserably—without ever reaching her, like the sailors in the fairy tale about the magnetic mountain, which pulls the nails from their ships before they can land, so that the ships fall apart in the open sea;

Christa, who always remained standoffish, alien, and who, no matter how hard I tried to get her to forgive me (after our love was lost) had proved so unyielding that my despair made me do all the mortifying things that make any helplessly demanding lover despicable,

the ultima ratio of the no-longer-beloved, whose lamentable inconsistency draws sympathy to the side of the standoffish,

the begging tenderness and the feigned coldness that yearns for its own thaw,

the false magnanimity with the schoolmaster’s hickory stick held ready,

the mistrustful understanding geared to recognition and the rage with an eye out for reconciliation,

the tears, torment, and torture, and—the worst disgrace of all!—always putting the other in the wrong

(as though a stubborn demonstration that the other is full of failings must ultimately arouse his self-knowledge, which reaches into the depths of his awareness, from which, with all other virtues, mercy too is bound to spring),

in any case, always far too much talking,

the monologues flowing along, as wide as the Volga,

the cascades of chatter, released by the most trivial things and never coming to a standstill until every possibility of bypassing them is washed away by a flood of words, of which—when the verbal torrent has finally ebbed—the vicious words remain, decaying and poisoning the ground;

and all this constant instructing, moral reproving and edifying, preaching of salvation and disaster in the breathless urgency of the indignant man who asks for justice (while sentences bubble out of him like blood, shrieking “Staunch me!”—and all the shamelessly flaunted misery that makes those who are appealed to—and hard of hearing—even more hard of hearing:

because silence is the ultimate haven for dignity).

•

That’s what had become of what had started as love, and I regarded myself in Christa’s eyes accordingly, and her smile could have exonerated me. Mais hélas!

I saw myself through the eyes of the others, saw myself squeezing along the edge of the black block of mourners, along the milk-and-lily-whitewashed wall, on which my wet raincoat was probably leaving an ugly streak. It wasn’t hard to guess what those who had known me for years were seeing: hair that had grayed and thinned, a little extra weight, even a certain casualness in the clothes that had once (as Schwab had phrased it) been indecently elegant. They were also, I assume, paradoxically familiar with the alien streak in a man who is a stranger not only here but abroad as well—an alien streak intensified by this alien quality, even though he had returned home. They saw runes of life, which may have given them insight into themselves.

Scherping, seeing me, was cut to the quick, I could tell, at the thought of advances running to tens of thousands of marks for a book that would never be published. But, experienced as he was in many kinds of wile, he most likely could not fail to applaud my frequent success in unbuttoning his pocket. Such relationships, he knew, also lead to a friendship of sorts. So he saw me as embodying something of the obstinacy of money: if you surrender to it on a large scale, then it will always demand some irrational interest from you on a small scale. Perhaps he was even grateful to me. He knew this femininely stubborn pettiness of money, accepting it like a good husband who overlooks minor defects in a wife with a number of merits and pleasant traits. I thus made him feel generous. So he took on the air of a generous man. He looked upon me not without a certain delight. A warm feeling in his chest brought out his better nature, so to speak, and with it, his checkbook.