Now, the aunt sat between Schwab’s niece Uschi and her brand-new fiancé, Klaus (with Herr von Rönnekamp standing at his side as an auntie-father). The old lady had finally become something she may never have wanted to become, but that she had to be and was actually meant to be in accordance with her true essence and true vocation: the upper-class daughter who never married and made herself the pillar of the family. The tavern original of the past twenty years (the former grande dame, known to everyone and always trailing after her boozy nephew) was merely the cross between this actual life-reality and the life-dream of a career on the stage. And even though (or because) it had been a life-lie, it would now give her a certain glory in a life-reality that had finally come true. She was the one predestined to become a myth for the family, and not the star-crossed nephew for whose sake she had lived past herself and then in the end to herself.

•

They would always be victorious in their way—these honorable tavern denizens and sedate brothel regulars, from whose angular shopkeeper-skulls their grandfathers’ eyes peered, clear as water (grandfathers who had tilled the marshland between Pöseldorf and Ohlsdorf). The god who was their mighty middle-class fortress never allowed them outside its ramparts. Even their most daring fictions rooted them all the more deeply within its walls. As a result, their major and minor fictions—from world improvement to persecution complex, from artistic intention to manic conformism—all these life-dreams and life-lies, all this constant as-if, were somehow repulsively perverse, a gamble of the imagination with only a seeming risk, an art pour l’art of spiritual gesture that turned their lives into the caricature of authentic drama. I now understood the core of John’s dislike for what he called the “bloody fucking middle classes,” and I understood how fundamentally different they were from the Middle Kingdom of Uncle Ferdinand, Sir Agop Garabetian, and Bully Olivera. “Psychology begins with the bourgeoisie,” Stella used to say.

I now also understood what Schwab had meant when he said that the German novel, as the bourgeois art form (self-destructively aimed at the bourgeoisie), has to have something of the barbarian splendor of the German renaissance: its country-squire gaiety, through which the still lumpish severity of the middle ages still shone; and at the same time, something of Richard Wagner’s kaleidoscope technique, in which leitmotifs, within an extraordinarily complicated structure, produce order, clarity, and recognizability out of heterogeneity. All these people lived in a nonuniformity and noncompatibility of wishes and desires and, consequently, in a steady spiritual volvulus; this twisting of their bowels could not be depicted more lucidly than in an arabesque from which they themselves regularly kept peering out as their own actual leitmotifs.

Here too, by trying to see through me, my trials and possible tribulations, they looked at me through themselves. Herr von Rönnekamp (black hat, but cream-colored gabardine coat with mink collar) let his private-detective gaze, rising darkly from his own private sphere and diving deep into mine, play over me with an ironic smile of sweetly puckered lips, in order to catch me slipping up and thus giving the lie to my claim that I was not occasionally afflicted by homoerotic stirrings. His protégé Klaus, fermenting in more and more densely, more and more darkly hirsute young manhood (which was about to expand to tavern-bouncer dimensions), dreamed of himself in movies through me. And his fiancée, Uschi, Schwab’s niece—who could never say no, thus suffering spiritual torments that emanated from her like a sharp body odor, so that any man, from the milkman to her doctoral adviser (her major was German), felt impelled to lay her on her back—Uschi hated me for being one of the many men who had done so. Then, behind these people, I saw a tearstained face—and there she was at last, my nixie, who had announced herself with Christa: Lovely Heli.