and I had to think of how enthusiastically I had gone home, straight from the brothel to Christa and our little boy in Witte’s halved villa on the Elbchaussee, in order to renounce all the deceptive promise of the movie piglets Stoffel, Spouse & Associates and to become Nagel’s good buddy again, and start on the story right away (for all this had taken place in the mythical past, in the very last days of the Ice Age: Lovely Heli was still practically a child). And Christa and our little boy had been so dreadfully poor that I had gone back to Stoffel, Spouse & Associates after all. And later, I never mustered the ethical strength to emulate our good Nagel and devote myself to pure, literary writing—a part-time artist indeed, in Witte’s categorization. And as for the story that Schwab had liked so much, I could never really launch it, I kept bringing it back to the dock and rigging it up again, until it had become its own wild and gigantic construction site and never sailed out on its blue adventure . . .

The nixie, at any rate, was still waiting to be nailed to her bowsprit. I kept encountering her blindly clairvoyant gaze, now wept empty in Lovely Heli’s eyes. At last I knew why she had been a symbol for me through the many years, a symbol of the never-fulfillable, of the aiming-beyond-all-reality, everlastingly listening ahead into the nothingness of male love. I realize this shamefacedly. For here, in Lovely Heli’s eyes, the female force that maternally says yes to anything, the love that holds reality in its hands—here, it wept itself out.

•

All this, as I’ve said, began to wear gently on my nerves. It bewildered me to perceive that the whispering stopped when I slipped into an angle of the visual field of mourners who had not reckoned with my approach from behind:

“. . . fall coming so early again—why, I could lie in the sun three hours a day—day in day out . . .”

“. . . it used to be the club in Hamburg, and we’re hoping that it’ll be the club again . . .”

“. . . well, I’m Protestant, but I’ve got a certain weak spot for the Virgin Mary. . .”

“. . . what does it have to offer? It’s got a delightful atmosphere, there are chic people, there’s a fabulous band—the great advantage is that when you feel like a bit of chic dancing in the evening, then you can . . .”

I had thought I knew what it was that made them go quiet upon seeing me. And evidently, nothing had changed in this respect. I was still fundamentally alien to them, hence suspect, even sinister: a member of an altogether different species, whom you couldn’t trust any farther than you could throw him. Thus, I was all the more bewildered by the shameless goodwill that now appeared in their gazes. It could not be due to their having grown accustomed to foreign workers in Germany or vacations on the Costa Brava. The more probable cause was that they knew I wasn’t going to contest their claim to anything. Not even to a share of his grave.