And I will always love you and love you all the more painfully, unselfishly—how do you say that in German? And not just for the sake of the short span of a few years in which you love me too and think I’m upright, unambiguous, reliable, and creditworthy (as far as you’re concerned, I probably will be), but rather because you’re something I created, even more abstract than the book I’ll have to write to keep the promise I go around conning people with. A promise not to others and not to myself, but—as Uncle Helmuth would have said—decreed by my karma. And to that extent, a maternal product, conceived in pleasure and languorously incubated, nourished by my mind and brought into the world amid torments and joys. Must I explain the paradox? While you, my son, flesh of my flesh, are not really my child no matter how many of my genes are kicking around inside you, my very own most personal creation would be my book—if I ever write it. And while I, as your biological progenitor, am permitted to call myself your father—i.e., a man who has produced another man—I would be the mother of my book, and therefore all the more a man. Do you understand? You are your mother’s child and my contribution to your begetting was one moment of death-like oblivion, while she did everything else: carried you inside her in all your vital reality, nourished you along with herself, let you mature and then released you amid pain, brought you from her womb into the light of day.

Soon, my son, the faster you grow into a man, you may forget that it was she (almost) alone who made you in nine months of speeded-up recapitulation of the development from tadpole to stereotypical example of the zoological species Homo sapiens. (If only there was a puddle left in the concrete desert we live in where I could show you some tadpoles! How many hours I spent at a pond in Bessarabia, under the guidance of my pompous prince of an uncle, Ferdinand, looking at the frogs’ eggs and the swarming tadpoles, nimbly sliding past one another—“like sperm,” Uncle Ferdinand said—their mysterious development, limb by limb, into frogs that the kiss of a princess could transform into a handsome prince . . . If only there were a chance here to show you such things, little man. Until recently, there were plenty of tiny bodies of water in the bomb craters, but they were dull and barren and got buried in the rush to rebuild: life which began in the waters will come to an end in concrete.) Forgive the digression. I was speaking man-to-man about your parentage. With all the great love you bear your mother, little man, you won’t thank her for making you (almost) by herself—or for needing a contribution from your father and thus making you into a man who’s inherited the curse of the fathers of men: to be a DRONE, incapable of bringing forth a human being out of your own body the way every mother can. May Father Freud rest in peace in the spermatozoal swarm of his adepts and disciples.