because except for my gnome’s urge to clamber all over her at night whether she wanted me to or not, I’m an underachiever. The heavenly delights of the PX (nylons! Hershey’s chocolates!) were abruptly at an end after I confessed to John that I intended to marry her (“Oh, well—my congratulations!” and not another word), and then in the following years of the harsh fade-out of the Ice Age in Hamburg, I let her starve as if I was the one who’d lost the war and personally responsible for the ice-covered condition of the world—

the world around us, which lay in silence. But we blatherers in Nagel’s garden house talked ourselves dry with cracked lips about our dream of the future, of at last reshaping this world to be good and beautiful and true

and the bitterest disappointment is that I am not reviving that dream, now that everyone around us is revivifying a dreamland of unfettered consumption.

and yet I had so many interesting things to offer from the world of film (a friendship with Astrid von Bürger, for instance. A Woman Plays Foul). If I wasn’t going to blossom out into a serious novelist, at least there was a lot of money to be made in film—

And how can I explain to Christa that the movie money, which (provisionally promised) I first have to earn before I get it (and thanks to the arithmetic of my swinish bosses will probably get only a fraction of, if any at all)—that this money is a much more dubious currency than the old reichsmark was; although it’s sometimes paid out in hard deutschmarks, it slips through my fingers before I can hang on to a fistful—

and now S. is the sole bearer of all her hopes—S. and the book I’m supposed to write (Nagel’s already gotten an advance on his third book; they say by now he has some gold bars stashed under his bed in Witte’s garden house)—

I notice Schwab exchanging looks with Christa too. He comes to see us often now—that is, he “drops by” after visiting Nagel in his garden house. Nagel doesn’t come with him. The gatherings of the primal community under the direction of Professor Hertzog (Hertzog with tee-zee, if you please) are almost legendary today. Now Nagel lives for nothing but literature: short stories, novellas, books, and plays for stage, screen, and radio. He’s not on speaking terms with me since I stabbed him in the back with Stoffel in front of Astrid von Bürger. In his fury at that, he has left the Stoffel field to me. Even his passion for A. v. B. is snuffed out. Nagel, the super-grouch. If he still had his right arm he’d try to “bash my face in.”

So S. and Christa glance at each other when talk turns to my past. But that has less to do with the fishiness of a “stateless individual of obscure origins” than with my fantastic stories and the tissue of lies that makes me doubly fishy. And yet that is exactly what I’m supposed to do from now on: tell fictitious stories about myself. In book form. S. is waiting for them. He spurs me on to tell stories, any stories, like a new Baron Munchausen. Even if it leads Christa to secretly take me for a confidence man.