when I found myself before the mountain of shit that I had to chomp through in order to be allowed brief sojourns in never-neverland, where I was quickly permitted to play the rich daddy for my little boy and bring Christa some pathetic bit of black-market luxury, which she didn’t even want; when I perhaps achieved, temporarily, an even more pathetic bit of respectability, which Christa truly and very sorely missed in her marriage to me: a threshold swept clean of embarrassing creditors and scandalous rumors, a threshold her Junker relatives could cross, willingly and honorably—

when I was walking home from Pöseldorf, the site of the clinker-brick Valhalla that the occupation authorities had requisitioned for Stoffel, Spouse & Associates, and when I headed toward the Elbchaussee, where my darling little boy was waiting for me, as was Christa with her elbow over her mean little mouth in Witte’s halved Swiss villa, and when I had brooded enough about what it was that always kept bringing me to strange worlds and alien people and dream-like and traumatic experiences, I would then turn off on the Reeperbahn, right behind Davidswache, make a left on Herbertstrasse, and seek refuge with Gisela in the whorehouse, which had migrated from Gänsemarkt to the more lucrative zone.

•

The day was usually dawning, even though most of the lights were still burning on the empty Reeperbahn: the stars of the streetlamps piercing the stone sky like needles; and the bulbs in the grottoes of pinball arcades giving off a gaudy, theatrical glimmer; and the garlands of lamps hanging over the war-damaged façades of the dance halls; and, across the street, a wretched kerosene lamp smoldering sootily on the counter of a sausage stand, where a couple of bleary-eyed loafers and gadabouts were hanging around. In the empty vastness beyond this cheaply scrubbed-up poverty, there was something of the forlornness of Bessarabian cities, left all to themselves in the tension between a yearning for the twilight west and the agonizing promise from the east. And I entered the red-light alley as if I were coming home.

I don’t know for sure now whether this took place in the midst of the Ice Age or after the grand, world-changing fraud of the currency cut—the criminal conjuring trick in which Stoffel, Spouse & Associates took part as fascinating shamans. It probably occurred on the threshold between the two; the crèche period, at any rate, was past, and one of the few clean places in the world was the brothel.

At some point, I left a few pages there, the draft to a screenplay presumably, it couldn’t have been anything else back then. Scherping, who was a regular customer of Gisela’s, found these pages, read them, and took them along—ever the publisher. He showed them to Carlotta, who had meanwhile left Witte and had become Scherping’s secretary and dame de compagnie. And Carlotta showed them to Schwab, with whom she was still living in conjugal union then, and said she thought she knew who the author was—we were seeing each other from time to time.