But already in Berlin, the nights defected. They no longer belonged to me alone. The mournful howl of sirens tore the sleepers from their beds and pillows and drove them into the cellars where they huddled together like a herd of animals in a thunderstorm, while outside the anemic tentacles of the searchlights probed the sky, crisscrossing and joining together and sometimes capturing a thing pale as a moth, and the clatter of the flak swelled to a thunder and flames billowed up where the bombs went down. All that fierce action robbed the nights of their grandeur, constricted their spaces, and made the darkness dense and ominous, the night air choking. Turning away from the sunlit sky was not an invitation to contemplation, I said, it did not make us conscious of the isolation of the planets in space as it was revealed to the desert prophets when they had eaten their grasshoppers and gazed in unison up into the firmament. Night was the lightless part of a twenty-four-hour cowering under a deadly, humiliating assault, a daily recurring extension of the sentence for our guilty existence, and the nights remained so up to the last painful bite of the Ice Age in Hamburg, and even later. I don’t know how Christa came to terms with it. She slept like a statue in our marital lair, her curves and concavities a confirmation of Canova’s art. Her regular breathing calmed the world around her—except for me. I started up from a sleep haunted by wild nightmares and had to force myself not to flail about. I lay there panting, and the old hag lay next to me, her gray stringy hair smeared with blood and brains and pasted across her staring eyes. And although I knew it was nothing more than a dream—a nightmare vision that repeatedly haunted me—there was no trace of relief in knowing I was awake. She would not let go of me, that terrible old woman, it all surrounded me in a dreadful, timeless present: the office building devoid of people with its paternoster elevators whirring endlessly up and down. At any moment their empty cabins could be followed by one from which my pursuers would spring. The clammy clinker-brick walls of the cellar I had lured her into. She saw the pile of coal and a shovel and looked at me at the same time and didn’t take her eyes off me as I struck, transforming her face into a portrait by Bacon.

• • •

Letter to a Son

Dear little man,

I call you that because you’ve been born with the curse of being a man and being raised to be a man. I can’t spare you that, even if I wanted to. It’s your destiny to be a man one day, whatever I may tell you about it. I’m not very skilled at writing declarations of love. Ask your mother: she got only a few from me in writing, although I stammered countless ones into her ear, some in embraces from which she expected more concrete proofs of my love, some in the encoded form of monologues in which, in my masculine extremity, I tried to explain myself to her. Only in my youth was I able to give my love voluble expression on paper—if one can speak of youth in the case of a mixture of nostalgically retarded child and precocious misanthrope, which is what I was in those days. Mind you, a misanthrope from the noble line of a Karl Kraus (about whom I would have known little if Stella hadn’t hammered him into me, line by line and sentence by sentence). But you’ve only just been born and have no idea what I’m talking about. Talking too much, as usual. This letter is meant as a declaration of love.