and his head whirrs with ideas and images, and his heart leaps blissfully in his body because of the wonderful, wonderful life next to the small stove in Witte’s garden house on the grounds of the halved villa on the Elbchaussee—and he’s already sold two stories to the radio network, and one is printed in Die Welt, which is publishing again, and now the movies have approached him too. (“We have a specific project in mind for you, dear Herr Nagel: would you like to write a screenplay for us? If so, then we’ll come to you.”)—and he instantly has an idea for a screenplay, a lovely idea, after all it’s to be the first postwar German film and it should have something symbolic in it too. So, somewhere in South or Central America—in any case, the guys are wearing sombreros—a man is wandering, a scientist, ethnologist, anthropologist—right?—he’s traveling to a remote Indian tribe to study a bizarre custom: you see, the Indians believe that every fifty-three years, corresponding to a cyclical eclipse of the moon (which can be observed from their territory), the world comes to an end, only to be re-created and resurrected the next day. En route, this scholar meets another man with the same destination, and he introduces himself as a government-licensed executioner. He explains that during a famine, a woman of this Indian tribe went to the communal store of grain and stole a handful for her child. According to the natives’ law, which is respected by the government, she has to die for her crime, except that the government reserves the right to perform the execution—typical, eh? Hahahahaha! Well, the two men, the scholar and the executioner, reach the Indians at the very moment when they are preparing for the end of the world. Tomorrow night, at one a.m. on the dot, the world will end. Ten after one, it’ll be re-created. This is shown very graphically—it’s a movie, you know: all fires are put out, everyone strews ashes on his head and lies down to die. Voices howl and teeth chatter when the eclipse begins, and then, when the moon lights up again, the past is past, the world is as neat as a new pin, they rekindle the fires and start baking tortillas with purged souls. Question: does the woman still have to be executed or not? . . .

a nice story, a profound story, as simple as a legend, you can almost tell it in three sentences, and Piglet King Stoffel is crazy about it and even more so his wife, Astrid von Bürger, the Beautiful, the Marvelous, whom Nagel, during the final years at the front, secretly carried in his heart like a schoolboy in love (“Man, if you ever get out of this shit alive—you’re gonna marry a girl like her!”).

Astrid von Bürger, now making movies with her husband, Stoffel, finds the story fabulous, simply heavenly. But there’s that moron of a scenario editor they’ve picked up, plus a head of production, an absolute prick, who thinks he knows something about moviemaking because he used to push lights around, and then, of course, that phenomenal asshole of a banker who’s supposed to finance the project—and those guys check every single scene to make sure it’s understandable and probable and psychologically and anthropologically and astronomically correct, and they want the symbolism clear, they want to hit you over the head with it, and Stoffel himself begins messing around with the story because he figures on difficulties in casting and in finding expensive locations . . . well, to make a long story short: