“And forget about the laughable Steppenwolf of your much admired colleague Hermann Hesse—have you ever read anything as ridiculous as his characterization of metaphysical starvation in the lines

I’m Steppenwolf, trotting and trotting,

the world is white as snow,

a raven wings from the birch tree,

and nowhere a hare, nowhere a doe—

Isn’t that laughable? No, dear friend, even if such distress makes the tears roll down your cheeks—nowhere a hare, just imagine, nowhere a doe. What’s left but to traipse through the world of philistines and find comfort in a group fuck? Self-discovery! Liberation! From what, I ask you? From starched collars and sleeve protectors? Ask Uncle Ferdinand or John if they ever felt such an itch. No and again no, honored friend, that was not my kind of wolfishness. The tropical world of a tamed jungle in Schönbrunn’s enchantingly beautiful iron and glass palm pavilion is not a symbol for some world of adventure that I was missing out on and searching for back then like our friend Nagel, the round-the-world yachtsman. No iridescent parrot “wings” from the agaves, suggesting there’s no aardvark and no gazelle for poor hungry Bingo, and for the time being no group fuck in the apartment blocks of Vienna’s Twelfth District that could redeem his suffering soul. No, no, that was not the impetus behind my trotting and trotting (a Rilkean cornet hoofing it) through the lovely town of Vienna. My hunger was not for the usual needs. I was not hunting for my Tom-Dick-and-Harry-, my Jean-et-Jacques-, or my Ivan-Ivanovich-identity like your Hesse’s Steppenwolf; nor was I after some lost paradise: Bessarabia and the Côte d’Azur were my inalienable possessions. What I was searching for was the meaning, you understand?—Back then, same as today, I was looking for the meaning.”

(Consternation. Sweet revenge for their exchanging glances. I take my anger out by making them uncomfortable. If S. now looks at Christa, he’s not seeking her agreement but trying to convince himself that she doesn’t notice his confusion. She notices, of course. And what a joy it is to make her lose her stirrup too, as the equestrienne in her would have put it. The eager young man I’m presenting can’t be observed from an ironically skeptical distance like the mythic little prince of my childhood years. The distress he suffers is a phase everyone is condemned to live through. Involuntarily, one goes through it with him in the recapitulation and S. and Christa wait fearfully to see how I’m going to chop this psychological state into pieces.)

First, a meticulous depiction of the milieu. S. doesn’t know Vienna and probably imagines some Alpine version of Dresden, “Old gold like a stem of Kaiser’s crown lost in a green meadow,” he says. (Christa’s sapphire eyes betray no inner image whatsoever, to say nothing of her parsimonious mouth. She’ll agree with any cliché.) I drape their beautiful vision with tattered, grayish-yellow Habsburgian baize, moth-eaten to a filigree by the inflation, and against that background paint an autumnal late nineteenth-century Bruges. But in place of Beguine Sisters silently scurrying down deserted canyons still as canals between neo-Gothic palaces of finance, we have potbellied, goateed old Socialists in frock coats worthy of privy councilors marching in silent protest against the rise in the subscription price for public soup kitchens. From the darkly reflective windows of coffeehouses lined with plush smoke-stained as a meerschaum pipe, they are followed by eyes that clamber over the top of yellowed newspaper pages with the sluggishness of clock hands and after a wintery, flat trajectory sink back, unsatisfied, into their nests of printed letters.