(In memory, it’s all connected to the sight of the bleak, icy landscape across the frozen Elbe: a streak of crepuscular red haze in the glacial blue limns a desolate horizon. In the foreground, the dense filigree of bare lilac branches on the slope facing Övelgönne cuts a black border between the ruinous premises and a world gripped by frost. Above them the villa’s silhouette rises into a sky of iron—a neoclassical structure, half Schinkel and half Palladio—in massive Wilhelmine pretension, but the mangled left wing lends it the romantic enchantment of a ruin—a foreign world: wildly foreign and bedecked with icicles like wintry Bessarabia long ago—and in it, me, the foreigner, turned into a foreigner . . . Isn’t it weird that I should yearn to go back, that I feel homesickness when I think about it? . . .)

• • •

Teutonically gigantic in a dyed soldier’s greatcoat that reaches down to his feet; his hands buried in its pockets and a head like Luther’s, topped by a grizzled shock of blond hair and thrown back haughtily in the turned-up coat collar; his sensitive mouth clamped bitterly shut, he gazes dully forward at nothing through thick glasses, striding through the seagull ruckus of the girls’ jeering welcome. He carries a whiff of contempt, the good citizen with his ambiguous morality, cast iron, corrupt and rotten: the right hand should not know what the left hand is doing. Has he come to snatch the prey from one of them again? Last time, he led away a patron who’d been under treatment by Gisela for three days and nights, led him like a prisoner. In this same gnomish rigidity, hounded by curses and threats, he’d walked along beside the john who was still racked by sobs of happiness. And everybody had known their cries of protest were hypocritical. Nobody wanted anything more to do with that fuckedup guy he was leading away. He’d been fleeced to the last penny; his watch and even his gold eyeglass frames were gone; shreds of shirt hung out of his jacket sleeves because someone—probably the supposed pimp who had been hired to beat him up—had ripped out his cuff links. But who asked him to come get the guy out of here as if he needed to be rescued from something? He had come and stayed of his own free will to the end of the treatment. Gisela wouldn’t have released him any sooner even if she’d been threatened with violence; she’s a reliable girl who takes customer service seriously.

It’s especially not the job of this former POW in professorial spectacles to meddle in this business. What’s he really want? Gisela has no customer at the moment. It’s high noon and business is slow. Out of rank boredom, the girls make catcalls as he passes. Some tap their keys angrily against the glass of the windows behind which they loll on display—not to lure him but to draw his attention: look here, we’re whores and we despise you! Why aren’t you at the office or home eating Mommy’s hash? Or are you up for a quickie? . . .