complete love, hermaphroditic love, enclosed in itself, and self-consuming. My beloved was part of me, she was the female element in me, I knew every one of her movements, and she responded to every one of my movements. When I embraced her I embraced myself, offered myself, pressed into myself. And then, after the spilled happiness, the room resumed its shape, the terribly same old room, and destroyed my imaginings. The dream scattered like ashes and I lay and listened to the ticking of the clock in the hall. This wakeful loneliness was part of ourencounters, this was the price, that I had to lie awake a long time, with aching eyes, in a slow dying, in a slow inward decay. But next morning my longing for a new meeting made itself felt again and I waited impatiently for the evening. In the lethargic hour between two and three I lay on the sofa in the living room, with my hands folded under my head, staring up at the color print of Hannibal’s Tomb on the wall. Beneath a grayish brown, massive, many-branched tree there rose a heap of stones, next to which stood an old shepherd, leaning contemplatively on his crook, while before him a flock of sheep grazed in the wild, dry grass. The window onto the street stood open, outside motes of white sunlight danced, and from the tennis court on the opposite side of the road sounded the heavy, dull thuds of the ball being hit. Occasionally right beneath my window a car hummed past, or a bicycle bell rang. The thought of the city outside put new life into me, I saw in front of me the long, broad blocks of streets, the giant houses borne up by bent stone slaves, the castles, museums, monuments, and towers, the overhead railways on their viaducts and the underground railways with their bustling crowds and their rattling advertisement boards. I was about to get up when I saw my mother standing in front of me, I never noticed how she got into the room, she always appeared suddenly in the middle of the room as if she had grown out of the ground, dominating the room with her omnipotence. Have you done your homework, she asked, and I sank back into my weariness. Once again she asked, Have you already finished your homework.Out of my indifference I answered, I’ll do it later. But she shouted, You’ll do it now. I’ll do it afterward, I said in a feeble attempt at defiance. Now she raised her fist, as in a coat of arms, and shouted her heraldic motto: I won’t put up with contradiction. She stepped up close to me and her words fell onto me like stones. You must plug and plug away, you will have a few years, then you’ll go out into life and for that you’ve got to be able to do something, otherwise you’ll go to rack and ruin. She pulled me to the desk, to the schoolbooks. You are not to let me down, she said, I suffer sleepless nights because of you, I’m responsible for you and if you’re a failure, it will reflect on me. Life means working, working, and then more working. Then she left me alone, next to me on a board stood a model city that I had constructed out of paper and cellophane, wires and rods. After my destructive games this was the first attempt to be constructive. It was a city of the future, a utopian metropolis, but it was incomplete, a mere skeleton, and I suddenly knew that I would not build at it any further, I saw only crumpled and glue-cracked paper, and everything was bent out of shape and fragile, one could blow it over with a single breath. I had to look for other means of expression. While I was brooding over my diary the door opened and my father entered. He saw me crouching over my desk busy with something in which he was never allowed to share, he saw how something quickly disappeared into the drawer. What are you up to over there, he asked. I’m doing my homework, I said. Yes, that is what I wanted to discuss with you, he said. Therewas an embarrassing tension, as always with such discussions. You are old enough now, he said, for me to be able to discuss the
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