Lovely Heli, bravely defying her timidity toward appearing among respectable people, had emerged from the whorehouse to accompany to the grave the man she had loved and would love to the end of her days. Her standing behind Uschi was a subtle irony of chance. For she, Heli, had given herself to any man who wanted her, from the milkman to the professor, because she was trying to make up for the ignominy of normally being paid as a professional joy girl (“A person shouldn’t have to pay for joy,” she had said to Schwab with professional naiveté; and if it hadn’t been for Gisela, who brought her to her senses, Heli would have ruined herself).

She was very beautiful in her powerful, common way, with her fresh complexion and auburn Hamburg hair, which was now demurely upswept rather than loosely tied into a working girl’s ponytail. And I envied Schwab for her love, which was pristine, like in a folk song, and which he had squandered with the recklessness of the untrue beloved in a folksong. All sorts of memories whirred through my head—for instance, Schwab and I sitting in Heli’s room at Gisela’s whorehouse, delighted by our view of the narrow whores’ alley, whose serried gabled houses preserved a final bit of pre-Wilhelmine Hamburg; our enjoying the soft, yellow light in the small windows and mellow shadows down in the street and talking about women as being the natural proprietors of reality, each of them able to give birth to a human being, no matter whether a man or another woman; we said that they carried humanity inside themselves and were capable of renewing it out of themselves—while we men bore the curse of unreality because our contribution to this renewal was so abstract and implausible, an ejaculation and nothing more, so that we could not justly believe that we really existed and, in order to have reality, had to realize ourselves in some sort of activity, in a work aimed at re-creating the world, at creating a new reality—in short: some kind of fiction; and therefore, we kept looking for ourselves, always and everywhere, and could not really love anything but what keeps reflecting only us: always only us . . .

It was probably Lovely Heli’s loveliest hour, a professionally intimate experience. She could sit at Schwab’s feet, her head in his lap, his hand in her hair, and she could listen to him talking to me—

and he had spoken about the nixie, whom he knew from my tales about Aunt Selma, and he had said that the bewitched creature that gazed with listening eyes into an alien world (although something there is calling to it that this was once its world too)—the nixie was to float ahead of the story I wanted to tell in my book, precede it like the figurehead of a ship, her hair flowing in the great headwind and her countenance stretching forward, blindly clairvoyant with listening eyes. . .