(If only it had been like that! But what irony in the double entendre of the title “A Woman Plays Foul”! Irony masking as profundity. Nagel is genuinely proud of it. I’m having trouble persuading him not to make a novel out of the story. Moreover, some very unpleasant arguments about it with Scherping, who’s all fired up about the project and willing to underwrite it if only to contradict me.)

Insufferable remarks by Stoffel, producer and husband of the leading lady (“. . . I’m especially proud of you, my dear Astrid, making such an important contribution to correcting the image of collective guilt . . .”). Abashed faces on all sides.

By the way, Nagel brought a friend along who supposedly lives with him in Witte’s bomb-damaged villa on the Elbchaussee. An exotic apparition (here?). Pleasant, but with something faintly disreputable about him. Elegant clothes that don’t seem to belong to him. Fashionably well worn and out of date. Out of the ordinary, at any rate. He’s one of those people whose features you forget sooner than how they affected you. In retrospect, he escapes precise description although leaving a strong impression. Only a sketchy physical description is possible: strongly built, pleasant outward appearance without distinguishing features—perhaps except for very bright, intense eyes; melodious voice; cultivated manner of speaking with unmistakable Austrian overtones, but speaks a vaguely alien German, as if it’s a perfectly learned language but not his mother tongue. Said to be from Romania. I noticed him as I was standing at the window gazing out at the foggy Outer Alster. The clubhouse, originally requisitioned for the exclusive use of officers of the British occupation and now serving the cause of German-English rapprochement, stands almost exactly opposite Witte’s house on the opposite shore. (Witte’s residence in town; his bomb-damaged villa on the Elbchaussee was left standing for the time being as the half-ruined and barely habitable domicile for Nagel and his friend.) Interpolated correction: Nagel lives in the garden house. Only the friend and his wife are in the villa.

At any rate, you couldn’t see the far shore of the Alster at all. It had been swallowed by a thick, yellow fog. The world lay under that misty blanket and even the surface of the water could only be guessed at. Soundless and weightless, two ducks glided by through the gray pea soup: a Zen image. Abruptly walking over to me without having exchanged a word or even being introduced, the stranger said, “Beautiful, isn’t it? A Japanese screen, the gold a bit impasto. German roux. What might lie behind it? In the war they’re said to have built dummy buildings out into the water as camouflage to fool the approaching bombers. I always imagined they could have been pagodas or Attic temples. Or maybe Indian teepees or Eskimo igloos. Why not? If you’re going to do it, do it right. Nothing gets in the way of art, after all. Don’t you agree?” For a moment I was captivated by the vision: an artificial city installed in the real one, starkly picked out of the darkness by the light of slowly falling rocket flares. As if he sees the same thing, he continues. “Hamburg is still back there, isn’t it? The Gateway to the World?” A surprise question I prove not equal to answering, and remain silent. Must have seemed fairly dull (and drunk). While he continues to look out into the fog, I awkwardly declare myself allergic to anything that reminds me of the war. I can’t escape the awareness that there was no point to that global conflagration. The constant thought that we were standing on fields of corpses and reconstructing exactly what led to them in the first place . . .