He snapped the third coin onto the bar and looked up. The bartender just stood there. His lips pursed as if to whistle a silent song, he added a fourth mark and said, “Eighty cents for the Coke and two marks forty for the schnapps, comes to three twenty.”

“Exactly!” snorted the bartender. “I thought you were trying to get away with three marks.”

“Nothing’s too much to get out of here, not even if you made me pay twice for the Coke.”

Bewildered, the bartender started to object. “Forget it,” he said. “We can’t all do sums in our head. Keep eighty cents of this filthy money for yourself and throw out the Coke, or . . .” with the beginnings of a malicious smile he turned to the boys behind him, “. . . give it to these gentlemen here. A refreshing soft drink for youngsters.”

None of the boys moved. He waited three breaths, then turned back to the bartender. “I’ll have a kümmel or a vodka. Or a Steinhäger, please. Or whatever you have on hand.”

Without a word, the bartender took the brown stoneware bottle from the cabinet and poured a glass. He picked it up and tossed it back with studied nonchalance. The schnapps burned his throat.

“Keep the eighty cents yourself,” said the bartender belligerently. “I’m not taking no tip from you.”

But he’d already turned on his heel and waved off the threat, twiddling his fingers at his temple like he’d seen Gary Cooper do in Morocco. Where had that been? In Vienna, a fallen world ago. As an orphan, a boy not yet fully grown: a dreamy experience in the world of the philistines. Long before he’d met Stella. Long before the advent of the Ice Age in which the world of the philistines would disappear along with the world of the fortunate—only to rise again with doubly hardened hard currency.

The unresisting hipsters manqué opened a path for him. Halfway down the tunnel he heard a voice calling a bitingly sarcastic “Byebye”. . .

• • •

. . . was already writing back then, laboriously, with his left hand, the damned right hand together with forearm and a good half of the upper arm having been left behind in Russia—he wrote in simmering fury at how clumsy the pen was and at the scrawly letters it scratched onto paper, the stack of writing paper I discovered in the villa under the ruins of a desk and brought out to him in his garden house. The letterhead bore the august address Hamburg, Elbchaussee in elegant cursive. It looked very cultured, genteel as a frock coat, and Nagel’s scribblings on the page below were quite touching. At first glance you would think they were the clumsy attempts of a well-brought-up grandchild to write a birthday letter to Grandpa, a prince of international finance. He wrote on that paper with grim and stubborn determination.

Nevertheless, he still never missed one of our gatherings. Poured turnip schnapps with a generous hand and shared our homegrown tobacco. When Hertzog and the others left, we’d have a little hour of quality time, just the two of us. The joys of friendship—and only yesterday, but it wasn’t just our friendship that had vanished. In the meantime the whole world had changed.