She delightedly moves back into her parents’ house, and lies there, among golden-winged angels. And Odilo? Where are our parents, for Christ’s sake? Suddenly I’m in a five-floor boardinghouse, turbid with cabbage and gym shoes,
sharing an attic with Rolf and Reinhard and Rüdiger and Rudolph, and living a nightmare, an Alpdruck, of towel fights and textbooks and jokes about courtship and corpses. That’s right: I’m at med school. In the New Germany too, and feeling rather jumpy and furtive along with everybody else. Even the streets are like a dorm these days, with much peer-group pressure and unpredictably intense scrutiny, adolescent, unpleasant, sexual but sexually obscure or half-formed, and made up of ridiculous postures no one is allowed to laugh at. Laugh at these ridiculous postures, and everybody will want to kill you. How fortunate that I am unkillable. Unkillable, but not immortal. What happened to our manhood?
It could be worse, because we still see Herta every day, at the school: she’s a tight-skirted secretary in Superintendence. I often get ten minutes with her in a corridor, and sit quite near her table in the cafeteria, and there’s a stairwell where we go and kiss—where we breathe into one another. Apart from that it’s park benches and dark archways. Mickey Mouse sniggers and Greta Garbo averts her pained gaze from our mortified writhings on the shallow fur of cinema seats. We cling close in the safety of crowds under streetlights and torchlights. During certain ten-minute intervals in her parents’ front room, while they set out the filthy plates for dinner, I have achieved much . . . Also on our spring and summer picnics. Among the delphinium, the snapdragon, the hollyhock, and the sweet pea, on a blanket, by a basket, she will grant me a nostalgic caress—always followed, on Odilo’s part, by hours of sniveling entreaty. Where once we ruled, now we serve. His most prosperous theme is that the frustration is damaging his health. Another thing that usually works is the naming of flowers, in English. The woods embolden her. The German girl is a natural gir . Odilo is
hysterically grateful for any sylvan handful or eyeful or mouthful that comes his way. But I’m not. He forgets. I remember. This tormented groping. I am excoriated by erotic revanchism. And I know something he seems unable to face: it will never happen again. The future always comes true. Sadly we gather forget-me-nots. She loves me. … Actually we hardly dare look at her now, the tiny typist, such power does she wield. Ja say the ghosts of painted letters on the trees in the avenues. Nein says Herta as she takes my hand and places it, for an angry moment, between her thighs. Then, in the late afternoon, to the school: zygoma, xanthelasma, volvulus, all drained from him, at least, at last, all that ugly shit. But most of his lessons, to my surprise, aren’t about the human body being a machine: they are about hospital administration. Sometimes, late at night, Odilo and I sneak out alone onto the roof of the board-inghouse, while the Germans dream their dreams. There we enjoy a precocious (and faintly paranoid) perfecto, and watch the stars, which seem to soothe our sight.
A parallel pleasure and comfort, for me at any rate, was to watch the Jews. The people I had helped to dream down from the heavens. And I was inspired by the size of the contribution they were clearly destined to make. It would all work out. Wisely cautious at first—awed, probably, by sheer numbers (because they were coming in, now, from all over the shop, from Canada, from Palestine)—German society duly broadened itself to let the newcomers in. Their brisk assimilation, and their steady success, caused some harsh words to be spoken. The Jews were walking into all the plum jobs, in the medical profession especially, which infuriated Odilo and his friends, and which, to be frank, even worried me. I hadn’t come all this way to see my sons turn into doctors. But what the hell. Somebody’ got to do
it: for some reason. Despite my worsening cares and loneliness, the racial-law repeals always rallied me. Even here, though, there was a sadistic irony at work, because these progressive measures always coincided with some fresh interdiction of Herta’s. Yes, very droll, no doubt. With step after step the Jews move blinking into the sunlight. While I am gradually declassed: mocked and spurned by all the liberties of love. For example.