I’m caught in a double bind between him and Scherping. His writing me off so disdainfully could be irritating, but curiously enough, it animates me. I even find it enjoyable. (Is Scherping’s hunt for a sublime increase in pleasure rubbing off on me? Rönnekamp claims that any relationship between two men is in the end homoerotic and sadomasochistic.) “What should I write about?” A. asks me. “What is there left to say these days? After Beckett. The same thing, only more banal. I grant you, a wordier, watered-down, muddied version makes it more comprehensible for the average reader. It bolsters his resistance to perceiving his essential self by a gradual approach to the shock of recognition. All well and good. But am I supposed to stoop to interpreting for idiots? Or be a miserable epigone of yesterday’s colossal mediators of reality—Proust, Joyce, Musil, Broch? We kneel before them, but should we strive to imitate them? With a bush jacket over our hairy chest like Ernest Hemingway? Goes down like butter—et ça passe le temps, as my legendary patron Uncle Ferdinand would have said. It’s well known that reading is the best pastime. It can even become a vice. In the years between 1939 and 1945, while your kind were forced to carry out mass murder, this malingerer was doing nothing but reading, day and night, in and out of bomb shelters, whence my modest knowledge of the subject. In any event, it’s brought me to the insight that a person with even a half-developed feeling of modesty isn’t permitted to pinkle his own, personal contribution into the already existing oceans of fountain-pen and printer’s ink. Am I not expressing exactly what you think and feel? You’re also a world sailor on that murky sea. Would you venture to increase it with even a half bottle of Johannes-Schwab-Trocken-Letter-Auslese?”—

Nothing makes me more convinced that he will write. He’ll have to, so as not to kill himself. I tell that to Scherping and curiously enough, he understands and agrees with me.

• • •

Draft:

He goes to Witte’s office at the appointed hour. The headquarters of Witte Laundromats (“Wittewash Washes Whiter than White!”), a brand new high-rise put up on the rubble heap of the old building from the turn of the century, replacing that hybrid of neo-Gothic fortified villa and barracks, with glass and concrete in Le Corbusier style. The windows of Witte’s office (he sometimes refers to it with the old-fashioned term “countinghouse”) on the fifteenth floor look out across churned-up construction sites populated—for now!—by backhoes and cranes, all the way to the duty-free port which also still displays the unhealed wounds of the bombing.

A. tells the assistant secretary (Carlotta is with Witte, taking dictation) that he was asked to come by “at eleven sharp.” Half an hour passes, then Witte appears at the door, turns, and recognizes him. “Ah yes, of course—just a moment and I’ll be right back!” And he bends down to the secretary and whispers something in her ear. She nods, gets up, and disappears behind the door to his office that closes silently but smartly. A. is alone. Another twenty minutes pass. It’s a sunny day, clear and pale except for the unceasing trickle of vehicles along a stretch of street visible from so high up, tiny beetles in loud, synthetic colors.