He gives me an ironic look out of the corner of his eye, nods briefly and, it seems to me, with astonishing cordiality, turns away, and leaves.

Almost at once, Scherping accosts me. “Did you talk to him?” Excitedly: “I think he’s the author of the script I found at our friend Gisela’s place” (convulsive bleat of laughter) “and left there by accident. He seems to be for Nagel what Merck was for Goethe.” (Interrupts himself and gazes up at me like a jackal)—“Okay okay, I know what you’re going to say. I shouldn’t go around parading my solid partial education, but if you would please drink a little less and look out a little more for the interests of the publisher, you’d go after that man. An interesting apparition. How else would his manuscript have ended up with Gisela? Fellow brothel patron.” Another bleat of laughter.

I turn around and walk out into the fog.

Sentimental idea: Le grand Meaulnes. Powerful urge to throw up.

• • •

For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.

Since S. has been coming to the house, a certain interest in me seems to have reawakened in Christa. “As if you had discovered,” I say to her, “that an old hand-painted chamber pot can also serve as a vase for flowers.” She doesn’t answer. Her haughty little mouth remains disdainfully shut. She finds my comment tasteless. Correctly, I have to admit. A vulgarity from my school years in Vienna that I haven’t been able to shake off. A cynicism born of opposition to the milieu of Uncle Helmuth, Aunt Hertha, Cousin Wolfgang, and Aunt Selma. An occasional fart to clear the air.

I’ll leave aside the question of whether such means are effective in a marital situation. In any event, they’re part of the chemical composition of the prevailing miasmic moods. You grasp at anything that could enrich the air you breathe, even the pinch of resentment that prevents a tepid resignation from precipitating out of sheer habit. Give us this day our daily drop of gall! It gives us a taste of how deeply the slightest error in the choice of spouse cuts into one’s life. Especially ours!

Poor Christa! That I succumbed to the enchantment of the young equestrienne (the female edition of the standard bearer in The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke? What an illusion!) in the canteen of the Fürth courthouse is all too understandable. How could I resist? What primal privation had led this pretty young woman to wolf down the canteen slop? It was terrifying to watch her stuffing it in, utterly preoccupied in chewing and swallowing, so completely absorbed in ingestion that her entire being had trickled into this process and only her sapphire gaze, glazedly turned inward, bore witness to a bewitched higher form of existence . . . It was enough to melt a heart of stone. But her? What delusion took her in? She was the victim of a much more banal misapprehension: if it wasn’t going to be a prince from the fairyland of the Allied press corps come to rescue her from the humiliation of German defeat and a starveling existence, it might as well be her stateless mess companion under British protection. In any event, somebody with access to the heavenly delights of the PX (nylons, Hershey’s chocolates!) and the cocktails and floor shows in the Grand Palace Hotel Excelsior (or whatever it was called). At any rate: “Something else for a change,” as they used to say in her circles. Big mistake!