“You see, friend S.: the difference between our current states of being—mine here at your flower mound, and yours underneath it or perhaps dissolved in the air we breathe, in the heavenly blue with which even this rainy-gray day may be lined—this difference only in degree between two varieties of dead man boils down to the fact that I have to keep asking the same old questions, while you—unlike the pastor, who believes he has an answer to these questions—no longer have to ask them. Witness to your satisfaction that this time it is I who envy you).

•

“Back then, in Vienna (and we must not forget: it was always the same weather, beribboned with springtime blue but arctically cold, and the sun stood still in the heavens), back then this honeycomb was pumped empty, down to the last rat hole. Anyone with legs or even without, anyone who could at least manage to creep or crawl or drag himself along on crutches or on the leather seat of his pants, or roll himself along on a rolling board, or be supported, carried, or pulled along by a nurse, a son-in-law, a daughter, a grandchild, on litters or in a mackintosh sack; everyone, down to the last man, the last woman, the last child, the last old man, the last old hag not yet dead in some cellar was sucked out of his home and had flooded to Heldenplatz, Heroes’ Square, and was damming up into an enormous gruel of human flesh, thickening into a human dough strewn with particolored sugar and proliferating and fermenting and rising higher and higher: the horses of the rescuer from the Turks and of the victor of Aspern reared in vain to escape this human dough, which welled and swelled up to them and eventually covered them, a dreadful cake of millions of individual creatures—and it roared.

“The human dough palpitated and roared in short, gasping breaths at the icy blue sky stretching overhead: Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .

“The individual voice might have been articulating the flower woman’s hysterical Siegheil! on the first day; but in millionfold accumulation, it was a fluttering, shallow-breathed roar. And it rose all the way to the celestial vault, which sent back a ruthlessly icy smile, and the roar reverberated back, echoed hauntingly through the empty city, which had now become its own charnel house: Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .

“And then it choked, whirling and retching, bellowing in a vomitatio that turned the innards inside out and burst into the cosmos . . .