(It’s a waste of time trying to explain this to Scherping. What he wants is a juicy narrative that includes the liveliest possible scenes from a picaresque career. And make it as sexy as possible, please.)

Apropos “gimmicky commonplace”: as he says that, Scherping leans his head to the side as if it was a nervous tick. He narrows his eyes behind his glasses. The plosives burst from his lips. “He’s foaming at the mouth again,” as Christa Reiterlich says. What’s his problem? Is it the publisher’s mistrust (remorsefully foaming at the mouth as though in self-incrimination, he refers to himself as a “bookseller”)? Is it the unease of a middleman toward the authors who earn him a living? The hatred of the half-educated for “intellectuals” (especially me!)? Or simply his helpless wrath that Aristides is costing him money? Whichever it is, it gives him pleasure. After our irritating argument, I unfortunately found myself adrift and stumbling into a low dive, return home veiled by benevolent amnesia.

Postscript: a preface is probably not necessary.

Postscript to Uncle Ferdinand’s chat about time. The way time “slips from your grasp”: experience accumulates and always remains present while “pure” time flows away unnoticed. “We pour our lifetime through a sieve. It catches not just the facts but also what moved us inwardly; and the finer the mesh of our sieve or net, the more intensely we experience ‘time.’ But we don’t feel time itself; it flows away while everything else stands still and is always there . . .” (include in the preface?)

• • •

HAMBURG, 1949 (?)

“As if he had been cast away among the lotus-eaters, he seemed to have forgotten his fatherland. He knew he was a stranger. The tired ocean-wind told him so, tossed it into his face—the wind that blew, day in, day out, sweeping across bleak marshland and weed-choked rubble fields and straying into the gaps and ruins of meandering streets.”

That’s how he had wanted it to begin.

How long have I lived here? he asked himself. He couldn’t remember. The bloom of reconstruction after the Ice Age had erased his memory. As it thawed, fog drifted in. He saw the world through a veil. The constant trickle of tinny vehicles through streets that shortly before had still afforded distant panoramas of the rubble fields flickered before the image of the resurrected city and distracted him. Sinister things were in progress here, high-rises sprouting from the bomb craters like mushrooms. Over the fire-blackened ground, a herd of construction cranes stretched out skinny necks like skeletal dinosaurs, nest-building monsters designed by Paul Klee. Cement covered yesterday’s rubble. Mortar dust obscured the daylight and made him thirsty.

The room he entered, down a few steps from street level, was dark and narrow, a tunnel dug into the subsiding walls of an old half-timbered building that encased the bleak new space: the rudiments of superannuated good old days, folkloristically preserved and dedicated to the dullest of all vices: sitting on a barstool to soothe the soul. Like the careworn face of a war widow, the light of an autumn day pressed against two narrow windows at sidewalk level fashioned from bottle bottoms cased in lead. Twilight reigned in the depths. Dark paneled walls and carved wooden dividers between the booths: thick clusters of grapes and putti wearing grape-leaf wreaths—bacchanalian German baroque. Pools of shadow swallowed the light his eyes had carried in from the street. He couldn’t see a thing and only sensed the presence of people in the booths, caught the scent of their rain-wet clothes below the sour smell of beer. Above the bar at the far end of the tunnel, neon tubes flickered. Red and violet stars were reflected in the zinc sink where the glasses were washed. Like an aurora borealis cased in metal, a resplendent jukebox pushed back the darkness, shimmering in all the colors of the spectrum. Its lantern-jawed visage bared the teeth of selection buttons and farther back, the baleen-like rows of 45s.