And that was wonderful and amazing: persuading Nagel to listen seemed like a gift, a gift from the god of friendship. It made me serious; I dispensed with the cheap thrill of teasing him and taking it out on him instead of Hertzog. I even made an honest attempt to suppress my bile against Hertzog, my bitter rejection of him for intellectual—no, for physical, for physiochemical reasons with an admixture of straightforward schoolboy envy. I loved my friend Nagel but there was something about the man who called himself so pretentiously Hertzog with tee-zee that concentrated all my hatred, my hatred of the curse inflicted on this country, this people, and of what would soon return—relentlessly step by step—and one day change the world instantly and forever.

Sometimes I was so overcome by despair that everything within me was destroyed—literally: my will to live, my ravenous, wolf-like will to survive, the hungry, emaciated beast from the steppes that had kept me safe through the infernal madness of the Third Reich and its destruction and was determined to hang on by the skin of its teeth through the Ice Age that followed. Resigned to its fate, it sank impotently to the bottom of my being and lay there in feigned peace—

it was a remarkably happy feeling of dissolution, of being adrift in the current of time . . .

Why the hell was I here? No reason. I was washed up here. Uncle Helmuth would call it my karma—and he, Nagel, angrily returned to his garden house and wrote—wrote page after page of his first book with his left hand—how envious I was behind all my irony! How impatient I was to be seized too, seized somehow or other by such devotion to something, to be redeemed by a passion . . .

(In memory, it’s all connected to the sight of the bleak, icy landscape across the frozen Elbe: a streak of crepuscular red haze in the glacial blue limns a desolate horizon. In the foreground, the dense filigree of bare lilac branches on the slope facing Övelgönne cuts a black border between the ruinous premises and a world gripped by frost. Above them the villa’s silhouette rises into a sky of iron—a neoclassical structure, half Schinkel and half Palladio—in massive Wilhelmine pretension, but the mangled left wing lends it the romantic enchantment of a ruin—a foreign world: wildly foreign and bedecked with icicles like wintry Bessarabia long ago—and in it, me, the foreigner, turned into a foreigner . . . Isn’t it weird that I should yearn to go back, that I feel homesickness when I think about it? . . .)

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