The questioner, facing me again: “An interesting life you’ve led. And now you’re going to write a book about it?”

“I don’t think they’re expecting a book about my life. Probably something else, I’m not quite sure myself.”

(To be precise, Stoffel’s expecting a story for a movie. What S. expects only he can know. In any case, his interest is what reawakened Christa’s interest in me. Should I too perhaps abandon the mundane writing of film scripts and become a serious writer like Nagel?)

“Well, our sort could tell a story or two as well. How things used to be, and then the war, fleeing our old homeland, etc. . . .”

For the sharing of stories that follows I don’t count. All I can do is listen and learn which of their close or distant relatives, acquaintances, friends of their parents, of their youth, bosom buddies, friends of friends from their good old lost homeland a few miles across the Elbe is still alive and who fled to where and found refuge or is still a vagabond looking for a place to stay. It’s been just four and a half years since the end of the war and the refugee crisis is not over yet. (“You’d think that people of the same class would eo ipso show some solidarity. But surprisingly, experience proves otherwise . . .”)

Christa says it was a piece of luck that we found shelter in Witte’s bomb-damaged villa. Not of the same class of course, Witte, and not a Hamburg patrician either. Comes from a humble background, mother ran a little steam laundry, but by his own initiative he’s joined the business elite. “It’s a well-known fact that the old families of Hamburg councilmen were too proud to accept patents of nobility. . .”

. . . but I really did love her. It wasn’t just being moved by her appearance in the canteen in Nuremberg or my deep sympathy with this fellow creature whose conscious sense of self consisted of nothing else than the almost forgotten pleasure ingestion and digestion produce in the alimentary canal—

as though the World Spirit could be fulfilled on its way through her maw—

It wasn’t just the German tragedy in her childlike face that tugged at my heart, not just the fairy-tale eyes and beneath them the small, tight mouth whose one end the conflicted tension between self-pity and arrogance forced to droop as steeply as Hitler’s signature—

it was also quite concretely the beautiful, lissome young equestrienne with smooth skin and hair bleached bright by the sun of morning rides—

and how does Schiller put it? “When I encounter a body I also see a mind.”

Well then! My mind has rubbed itself sore on hers, but that doesn’t alter the fact that I loved her body with a love that is too large to end and so continues as hate—

a gnome’s love: With hungered flesh, obscurely, he mutely craved to adore

and I can’t blame her for having higher expectations of me and being bitterly disappointed—