—I stood and, with the bird of my fear violently fluttering against my chest and eyes, held my guilt captive—my guilt for everything happening to and around me, for what was going on there in the darkness at the base of the arch, for the cry I never uttered that did not bring back the policeman, for my intention to drown myself, and for the fact that I never would drown myself, the guilt in me for everything the monstrous body of night was pregnant with—indecipherable, uninterpretable, unspeakable.

Driven onto the embankment’s footing by the trip hammer of my heart, trembling at its every beat, I glued my eyes to the pregnant belly of night, riveted my gaze on its dark fruit, hoping to eviscerate it, to decipher the indecipherable, interpret the uninterpretable, suck speech from the unspeakable . . . the meaning, the MEANING . . .

And in S.’s hand, the involuntary gesture of resistance, of overtaxed patience. . .

Since he doesn’t know what else to do, he says in a mockingly forced falsetto, “It really happened that way?—Or did you just this minute make that all up?”

I’m exultant: “You’re trying to persuade me to write a book, no? So what’ll it be? Ideally something after the heart of your boss-man Scherping, right? Something for the series Truth Is Better Than Fiction? Maybe the refugee tale of one of Christa’s relatives and friends—the good old days and what happened to them. At your service: I can do that. Get it off my chest. As we all know, the poet sings just like a bird: today—splish!—deign to lend your noble ear to my humble song; tomorrow—splash!—onto the great guano pile of world literature. Why not give it a try yourself? You’re hatching a book plan in your head. I can tell by looking at you: you’re not making notes every second for nothing. Well then, what’s holding you back? Juvenile literary retention out of respect for the false idol Art? Because creating is valued more than plain reporting? But then where does that leave friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom we both so admire? Still on his pedestal? Because it doesn’t depend on what you have to say, but on how you say it, namely, as self-sacrifice. As a butcher’s counter of author’s ego-entrails, and the reader as haruspex . . . You see? So you’ve got to leave me a little room for embroidery too. Content’s easy to come by. If you’re coming up a little short, feel free to borrow some. What’s mine is yours. The main thing is that the report retains its confessional character—just like in Master Jean-Jacques. This is just for your ears, dear Diary—and leave the print run to Scherping. Whether it’s authentic or not concerns at best only the arch-idiots of literary history. What does ‘authentic’ mean, anyway? Don’t try to tell me you didn’t see yourself in the boy who wants to drown himself in the Danube Canal! You, the Endymion of pale water-lily moons in the black-mirrored water that terrifies and attracts him . . .‘From the starry pond the angler pulls a big, black fish, face full of cruelty and madness’—right? You, the congenital orphan yearning to go home to the womb of Death until a good citizen holds you back with the words ‘Life is beautiful!’. . . You’re asking me if I really experienced what I was telling you? But of course I did: I experienced it—in your eyes. You experienced it for me while I told it. Isn’t that authentic? Take something authentic from my magic box: that picture we looked at and you thought was me—and the camera lens doesn’t lie, as we know—here it is. Actually, it’s a picture of my cousin Wolfgang who looks so much like you he could have been your twin. Does it matter at all that he was in Vienna and you were in Hamburg at the time? This picture—if I may—is you: the strapping adolescent with the blond thatch and fabulous grades and glasses so thick your eyes look perpetually astonished, with young man’s fuzz on your upper lip, a pimply chin, calves with more than fuzz, and a cowhide briefcase which—thanks to misplaced sandwiches and damp swimming trunks—has taken on a disagreeably cheesy smell that announces the model student’s return home from school, soccer field, or organ practice in the chapel when he’s still coming up the stairs, a little out of breath under the load of pounds of books, every one of them a thick, crabbed tome containing pure intellect—is that a portrait of me, of you, of Cousin Wolfgang, or simply the image of a prototype, the stereotype of a social situation? Unfortunately, I never had the honor of knowing your honored Papa—he was a German professor, wasn’t he? Beg your pardon, a classicist—but I seriously wonder if he wasn’t in the depths of his being any different from Uncle Helmuth. In him, in Uncle Helmuth, you have the stereotypical father of the stereotypical son—