Maybe he came for a session of his own with Gisela? He looks like he needs it. His miserable existence is written all over his face. You can tell he drinks so he must have a reason to. This is where the girls can give you solace, a shelter for the lost. But you have to be profoundly desperate to come here in the middle of the day, driven beyond the limits of the bleak, blessedly dull escape from yourself to be found in the bottom of a bottle.

It’s different when the lights go on in the evening all around the little gingerbread houses spared by the bombs hailing down in the fire-breathing nights of the Ice Age, as if a magic spell had protected Whores’ Alley from the fate of the respectable town that was collapsing in a fiery mass into its burst-open cellars; when those squat houses with their old-fashioned gables—still intact among the ruins that are sprouting more and more concrete cubes—stand jagged against the smoke-blue sky that soon turns inky and would swallow them up if not for the windows of the girls’ rooms, shining yellow as buttercups; when the glass boxes light up to display the half-naked girls sitting on plush sofas in tiny carpeted parlors, teasingly tricked out in black silk bodices and fire-red feather boas, thighs showing white through their net stockings; when their harem pants and plump tits in open-necked sailors’ blouses and Spanish boleros advertise the motley, wonderful, erotic as-if in the golden light that fills the narrow alley, then the hour has arrived for those who hope to press a few moments of oblivion from the last dregs of illusion, the wine of self-deception. Anyone who comes in the middle of the day has realized what constitutes redemption; he’s heading straight toward his own destruction.

The girls are mistaken. They don’t know him yet. He has only recently been released from a POW camp. Though he was born here and was a longtime resident, the business of committing genocide has estranged him. In a city where in good times everyone knows everyone else and everything about them (a truly democratic city: the mayor is the cousin of the waiter serving the soup at the banquet for the town council), now he’s just another of the countless people who’ve washed up here: refugees, forced laborers, the stateless . . .

The girls have no way of knowing that someone will write of him:

Because he exudes an aura of weighty destiny—or at least, an extraordinary sensitivity, a bitter consciousness of being helpless in the face of the termite-like power of all the vulgar, malicious, stupid people in this world, a consciousness that cripples him and lends him the pathetic unwieldiness of a fallen giant, a Titan with severed tendons—one can’t help but perceive all his impulses as much too forceful, much too sweeping and tragic, all his utterances as grandiose and brittle, his person as an ivy-clad ruin, thereby overlooking the alertness of a sensitive and vulnerable person as well as the quite concrete stratagems by which he copes with daily existence: his healthy sense of the practical and merciless eye for the ridiculous, his shrewd and often hard-nosed tactics for handling others—in short, all the routines that make possible the paradox of an emotional economy that keeps the hatefulness of his environment at arm’s length and at the same time allows him to wallow all the more extravagantly in his melancholy—