It’s black as pitch in our cramped room. Only a single thread of dim light penetrates through a narrow slit in the shutters and cuts a straight line across the blackness into the blackened blood red of the linoleum floor before climbing up the shit-brown dresser and breaking off on its white marble top . . . It’s stuffy in our crypt-like bedroom, moldy as a grave: since it gives onto a light shaft it never gets properly aired out. We’ve inhaled the last bit of night air and lie in our beds under rumpled quilts, our eyes staring into black nothingness, all our senses focused on what we hear—

and so I can conjure with my whisper and banish Cousin Wolfgang and everything around him—Uncle Helmuth, Aunt Hertha, and Aunt Selma—into unreality, as if they were only a bad dream, and free myself from distress, the incomprehensible transformation of the world that snatched me from my bright, expansive, fresh, jovial, blissful former life and stuck me in this dull, narrow place—

can lend fate’s cruel triviality a note of something intended by a supernatural force—wasn’t my mother driven into the pond by a curse pronounced on her by higher powers that provoked horror in everyone. Even Miss Fern, who until then had cared for me like the apple of her eye, shrank back from it, brought me here, and departed as though she had to flee from me . . .

“This picture here is from much later.” (The box isn’t empty yet.) “An adolescent already, in my school years in Vienna. That frumpy woman between us—that is, between me the orphan boy and this ur-German youth here, my cousin Wolfgang, who looks so much like you—is my Aunt Hertha, Wolfgang’s mother. What an impossible hat, don’t you think? If there’s such a thing as an unmistakable symbol of social status, then it’s the hats of middle-class ladies . . . No, of course it’s not India—very funny—it’s the Palm House in Schönbrunn. I often went walking there alone, even when I was young . . .”

—And here I can ride my hobbyhorse and conjure life from the banal snapshot of an adolescent who’s skipping school and wandering around gray Vienna, fleeing into the once feudal domain Uncle Helmuth calls “the Schönbrunn greenery.” It represents the topography of his mythical land: a park! An extensive park! The home of his yearning . . .

genuine life experience—not pieced together from clippings out of long-since-lapsed newspapers, not a dime-novel land no one else would think to call home—

—Truth, tangible reality: a pavilion in the formerly imperial and now nationalized park open to the public (documented history, adapted to the spirit of the times) and in front of it, the adolescent in question, gray of face and too quickly grown, skinny, a poorly dressed child of the present—

(S. might be able to recognize himself in that image if his similarity to Cousin Wolfgang was not more blatant—)

—and the lad in front of the Palm House has something wolfish in his gaze, a hunger for life that’s out of the ordinary, not to be fobbed off with bourgeois adventures in emancipation—