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The branches of the wild chestnut trees on our street reached out to touch each other. Vault overgrown with ivylike leafage thrust in between these tall arcades. On ordinary windless days, this whole architectural structure would stand motionless, solid in its daring. From time to time the sun would hurtle its futile rays through the dense leafage. Once they had penetrated the slanting, intertwined branches, these rays would quiver for a while before melting and dripping onto the Turkish cobblestones like liquid silver. We pass underneath these solemn arches, grave and deserted, and hurry down the arteries of the city. Silence is everywhere, the dignified solemnity of a holiday morning. The postmen and salesclerks are still asleep behind the closed, dusty shutters. As we move along past the low one-story houses, we glance at each other and smile, filled with respect: the wheezings of the last sleepers are audible through the dark swaying curtains and accordion shutters. The great ships of sleep are sailing the dark Styx. At times it seems as though the engines will run down, that we are on the verge of a catastrophic failure. One engine starts to rattle, to lose its cadence, to falter, as if the ship has run aground on some underwater reef. But the damage has apparently been repaired, or possibly there had never been any damage at all. We are sailing downstream, at thirty knots. Alongside the panting sleepers stand large metal alarm clocks, propped up on their hind legs like roosters, pecking away at the fine seeds of the minutes, and then – charged to the point on an explosion, stuffed, enraged – they strain their legs against the marble surface of the night table just before beginning to crow triumphantly, to crow in swaying, bloody crests.

Lugging her cardboard boxes, Fräulein Weiss shows up on the street corner facing the caserne. Thin, gnarled legs in orange socks peer out from underneath her ragged clothing. Fraulein Weiss, an elderly German woman, sells sugar candies. As she sways along, bent under her burden, sheltered by her boxes and tied to them by a cord made of paper, only her head peeps out, as though she were carrying her own head in a box under her arm. Age and illness have transformed her face into a dark puddle. Wrinkles have spread radially from her mouth, which, like the wound in Christ’s palm, has shifted to the center of her face. All the channels of her wrinkles flow, starlike, into that one place, that huge old wound. You see, children, this heap of eroded bones, this shuffling, this rattling – is a while brilliant, kitschy novel, the last chapter in a threadbare volume, replete with splendor, festivities, defeats. One of the survivors of the spectacular sinking of the Titanic, Fräulein Weiss had once attempted suicide. Imitating some famous actress, she had filled up her hotel room with roses. All day the bellhops and elevator boys were delivering bouquets of the most fragrant flowers, like cherubs. The elevators that day turned into great hanging gardens, into greenhouses that carried the burden of their fragrances up into heaven and then came back down again at a dizzying pace, their orientation all gone. Thousands of pink carnations, hyacinths, lilacs, irises, hundreds of white lilies, all had to be sacrificed. But her soul, lulled by the fragrances and intermixed with them, would soar up somewhere, hovering above, relieved of one life, on into the rose gardens of paradise, or would turn into a flower, into an iris … The next day, she was found unconscious amidst the murderous flowers. Subsequently, as the victim of the vengeance of the flower gods, she fell beneath automobiles and streetcars. Peasant carts and swift fiacres ran over her. Yet every time she emerged from under the wheels hurt but alive. Thus, in her passionate brush with death, she had come to know the secret of everlasting life. Groaning and emitting painful sounds from her depths, like a child crying, she passes by us like the filthy, yellowed pages of some worn novel. … Gut’n Morgen, Fräulein Weiss, küss die Hand!