“Why don’t you come along to a meeting, they call it a ‘conference,’ I’ll tell them you’re a Young Writer too, then you can see the endless dimensions of human stupidity. . .”

and I went along and was introduced to Stoffel and his primordial piglets as a Young Writer and was permitted to lean over the hand of Astrid von Bürger and kiss it and peep into her blouse décolletage, and I was forced to watch my friend Nagel being tormented and tortured, to watch a pen-knife vivisection of a fellow Young Writer and to witness a systematic slaughter triggered by an instinctive hatred of one kind of human for another, the murder of the seedling of a work of art—and my eyes bored into the smugly ironical eyes of Astrid von Bürger in order to learn what she was feeling and thinking during this slaughter, she couldn’t have overlooked the way poor Nagel loved her, his boyish chivalry and willingness to suffer. And because her eyes endured my gaze so long and amply that they swam, my gaze was lost in them and I suddenly heard her say, “Look, before you kick each other’s heads in, let the other Young Writer tell us what he thinks about this whole business. I have the feeling he has some ideas about it.”

Was this the right time to say that I found Nagel’s story simply fabulous? They kept saying they did—only to pounce on it all the more furiously and tear it to shreds. I figured it was better to point out what they might object to in it; the von Bürger bitch was right, I had thought about it while they kept yakking and yakking, and I believed I had found what was wrong. And so I said: I think the difficult thing about all stories with an open ending is that they sound wonderful in three sentences because they contain an insoluble problem in a single situation, but if you tell them in detail for an hour and a half, breaking them down into a series of situations, then you can’t intensify the problem or present it any more clearly, much less resolve it. The story always remains a “what if?”—

I wanted to add that they have to get beyond this; that the ending, which they had been arguing about for hours with their narrow, stubborn minds, was quite harshly and plainly obvious: the movie had to end with the young woman’s execution. The audience could then argue on the way home about whether it was just or unnecessarily cruel. But they all pounced on me as if I had tried to grab their favorite toy. Even Nagel yelled, “Goddammit, don’t you understand that it’s us in that what-if situation? Are we supposed to pronounce sentence upon ourselves?”