Nagel, however, had gotten up and left the premises without a word of good-bye. When I tried to dash after him, the idiot, to get it into his thick head that I had wanted to help him with my parody, Astrid von Bürger held me back: “Leave him alone until he’s over his anger. He’ll realize how childish he’s acting.” But he never did realize it, my friend Nagel. He never spoke to me again.

•

Ah, that was the point when pretty much everything in my life began to go wrong. We had our little son, whom I could love above anything else, and he too loved his daddy above anything else, but things just wouldn’t work with Christa and me; she kept getting more and more bitter, more and more uncommunicative; I had disappointed her, I had not brought prosperity and conviviality into her life, only want and shame; I, the husband, had lost the war, Hamburg was a flattened city, you could see all the way across town, only the red-light district near Gänsemarkt and the other one behind Davidwache had been spared, symbolically, by the bombs (incidentally, the theater, tax office, and police station too). I was doing my best for the reconstruction of conjugal tenderness, but it was not easy, nor was it successful: Christa’s perfidious way, the instant she got to bed, of placing her arm across her face so that her elbow lay on her mouth like a bulwark—the mean little mouth that I liked to kiss so much—frustrated my feeble attempts (until I recognized it as Hitler’s signature and didn’t want to kiss it anymore). To be sure, she was very frightened, the poor thing, there was a shortage of everything, you really didn’t know how you were going to survive from day to day. At night, the rubble killer roamed the streets. I myself often had horrible dreams, I murdered a cleaning woman with a coal shovel in a cellar, ran around during the day in Witte’s shattered library and made up cock-and-bull stories for Stoffel, Spouse & Associates—see, I had become the house author at Astra Art Films; every other week, either a new project was tackled or an old script reworked and revised, they were busy for the sake of busyness, and I had to lubricate it with brain grease; but I didn’t have the moral grit to toss the whole business aside, there was always that prospect of an incredible amount of money, and it remained a prospect, it soon had something religious about it, this constant promise of pecuniary grace, salvation, and bliss; Christa believed in it with as much ardor and unfulfillment as Witte (a Protestant) believed in the Virgin Mary.

But I also felt a certain defiance toward Nagel. He wouldn’t greet me even when we ran into one another in the ever wilder, ever ranker garden of the villa on the Elbchaussee, he wouldn’t respond when I called out to him, telling him not to be such an asshole, he turned his back on me and slammed the door of the garden house behind him. The light burned in his little window late into the night; he was nearly done—Witte told Christa—with his first novel and was already working on a second one; his play, said Witte, wasn’t going so well, but there were very interesting things in it; as for movies, he (like Witte himself and most likely Christa too) did not consider them real art. In a word, a full-time artist.