Embarrassed silence and uncontrollable agitated movements as after an unpleasant coup de théâtre. S. huffs uneasily. Christa’s blue lights tinkle solo. Her little mouth is disdainfully shut. Once and for all.

• • •

At night, took out Nagel’s Craterland again and read it into the gray dawn. Some depictions (returning home) excellent. Very vivid scenes of combat. Fundamentally different from what I experienced under the hail of aerial bombardment: the illusion of being able to influence fate. (“The wise man smiles.”) His depiction of people, formulaic; of human relations, disarmingly naive. I found myself getting angry about it. I had expected him to produce something better than what I could have done better, even with my left hand. In one of my ugly moods I wrote a poem about Astrid von Bürger. The tombstone of our friendship. All the more shameful because it’s a shame it’s over.

• • •

Draft:

He’s been invited to dinner at Witte’s. The reason why is undoubtedly Christa: she and her East Elbian entourage are an extremely convenient avenue for Witte to procure an entrée into the Holstein aristocracy, possibly even to Bismarck’s descendants in Friedrichsruh (“civil pride before the thrones of power!”). And in fact, among the guests is—along with Rönnekamp and just as queer—a Count Lentzau-Wilmersbüttel, doubly interesting because on his mother’s side, he comes from a patrician Hamburg family (the Timermanns, with two m’s, as opposed to the proletarian Timmermanns with three). Everyone else present is only family. A niece among them deserves special mention, a widow (husband fell early, in Poland) with a pair of fourteen-year-old twin daughters. Witte, magnanimously presiding at table, drones out praise for the “valiant commitment” with which the mother got herself and her children through the difficulties of the war and the still greater difficulties of the postwar years without masculine protection and support, all the while seeing to it that her daughters received a perfect upbringing. “To have achieved what you did, my dear Helga, you owe wholly and completely to the ironclad rigor with which my beloved sister, Wilma here” (she sits facing him at the other end of the dining table as ersatz lady of the house, bolt upright, ice-gray bob, a schoolmarm’s steel-rimmed spectacles) “raised you, according to family tradition, in the spirit of our unforgettable mother, your grandmamma” (that presser of gentlemen’s fine under-garments), “who never let us get away with anything either. If even the smallest thing was not as it should be, she said: Children OUT!—” The word isn’t yet fully articulated, its final, explosive t yet to sound, when the twins leap up and start to leave the room in lockstep. Everyone calls them back amid general hilarity. No, no, Uncle Witte didn’t mean you (this time). He was only showing how things were when he was a kid. Obediently the twins sit back down.

There are other children at the table, the youngest among them showing signs that the traditional rigor of a Witte upbringing was not as ironclad as it had been two generations ago. A particularly cheeky little miss insists on telling them a riddle. Witte—obviously it’s a favorite niece of his—gives his permission. The child blares, “What’s the difference between a squirrel and our head teacher, Herr Müller?” Everyone pretends to ponder this question seriously; at last they ask for the answer. The girl merrily crows, “The squirrel has a long, red appendage and Herr Müller doesn’t.” A second of shock, embarrassed silence, nervous clearing of throats; then someone (probably Rönnekamp, glancing imploringly at Count Lentzau-Wilmersbüttel): “Can anyone fouch for zat?” The girl’s mother feels called upon to reply with dignity, “The child means on the backside, of course.”