Her masochism [Weissmann wrote from The Hague] is reassurance for her. That she can still be hurt, that she is human and can cry at pain. Because, often, she will forget. I can only try to guess how terrible that must be…. So, she needs the whip. She raises her ass not in surrender, but in despair—like your fears of impotence, and mine: can it still… will it fail…. But of true submission, of letting go the self and passing into the All, there is nothing, not with Katje. She is not the victim I would have chosen to end this with. Perhaps, before the end, there will be another. Perhaps I dream…. I am not here, am I, to devote myself to her fantasies!

“You are meant to survive. Yes, probably. No matter how painful you want to make it for yourself, still you’re always going to come through. You’re free to choose exactly how pleasant each passage will be. Usually it’s given as a reward. I won’t ask for what. I’m sorry, but you seem really not to know. That’s why your story is saddest of all.”

“Reward—” she’s getting mad. “It’s a life-sentence. If you call that a reward, then what are you calling me?”

“Nothing political.”

“You black bastard.”

“Exactly.” He has allowed her to speak the truth. A clock chimes in the stone corner. “We have someone who was with Blicero in May. Just before the end. You don’t have to—”

“Come and listen, yes, Oberst. But I will.”

He rises, crooks her his official and gentlemanly arm, smiling sideways and feeling like a clown. Her own smiling is upward like mischievous Ophelia just having glimpsed the country of the mad and itching now to get away from court.

Feedback, smile-to-smile, adjustments, waverings: what it damps out to is we will never know each other. Beaming, strangers, la-la-la, off to listen to the end of a man we both loved and we’re strangers at the films, condemned to separate rows, aisles, exits, homegoings.

Far away in another corridor a loud drill-bit strains, smokes, just before snapping. Cafeteria trays and steelware rattle, an innocent and kind sound behind familiar regions of steam, fat at the edge of souring, cigarette smoke, washwater, disinfectant—a cafeteria in the middle of the day.

There are things to hold on to….

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