Even now, as I write these lines, so many years after the event, I don't quite understand what happened to me then; the magnitude of the danger alone cannot explain my behavior; to be more precise, I do understand but am deeply ashamed of those little scenes of falling to pieces, of insanity, buffoonery, betrayal, and cringing, in which I hoped to find refuge; my shame is like a stuck blood clot, and no justifiable motivation or elaborate explanation can be the pill to dissolve it; the painful clot has remained proof positive of my fall from grace.
It was a short letter, barely a page, conceived no doubt in a sudden paroxysm of happiness: My darling, my dearest, my one and only, it began, and this salutation, brimming with joy, caught my eyes immediately; I went over it twice, thrice, and again; I wanted my eyes to comprehend what they were seeing, because with this salutation, suddenly it was a ghost speaking to me from this letter, the ghost of a woman whom I've already mentioned on an earlier page of these recollections, a woman who even as a ghost is more alive in me than anyone living but about whom I mustn't talk, for I cannot; and it was her image, no, not her image but her smell, the smell of her mouth, of her secret parts, of her armpits, that wafted toward me from that opening line, a fragrance I could never quite reach, only she could write to me like this, only she loved me and called me tender names in this way, only she — even though I knew very well that I was reading Helene's letter.
It was during that fraction of a second, while longing for that evanescent fragrance, that I made up my mind: I can't stay with her, I must run away from Helene.
It was ten long years of my life which I had rejected and wished to forget that stared back at me from the salutation; Helene may have expropriated them, but they couldn't have been hers, I couldn't let her have them; thinking of this just then could not have been an accident, for I knew that the police had detailed and creditable data about my ten-year association with secret anarchist societies; if, therefore, I did not act with animal cunning, I'd have to pay for those ten years, and my attempts at finding refuge from the subversive, even murderous activities of those years in Helene's arms would have been in vain.
Death spoke to me from that letter, death multiplying itself and still unique, death lurking at every turn, in every corner, death desired and death dreaded, the death of that one special sweet-smelling woman, rising from the bloody corpse of my now publicly rejected and abandoned friend; but every other murder and death also called out from that letter: my mother's unspeakably slow and painful wasting away at my father's side, and Father's own ignominious death under the wheels of a speeding train between Görlitz and Lebau, at Signal Station 7, and the mutilated body of the girl he had violated, that hideous lye-soaked sack oozing sweat, piss, shit, and snot; all deaths of the body, and yet Helene's letter was in fact sending blissful waves toward me, the prospects of a wonderful life: "That achingly beautiful morning," she wrote, "when we had to part, has become a morning of consummation whose fruit I now carry under my heart"; we had to move up the date of our wedding, she said, and therefore I should hurry back to her without fail, and that was her parents' wish as well; this was followed only by her initial, the first letter of her Christian name.
If fate chose to stage a scene such as this, having me read this letter while a detective investigating a murder keeps his moist eyes on me, then everything but everything is but an illusion and a bunch of lies — so thought one half of my split self, while the other half of course couldn't help being dizzy with joy, thrilled at the mere thought of life's relentless continuation, and the more it felt that this, too, was but an illusion, a deception, a false hope, the more it let itself go in absurd jubilation.
She wanted to give a son to this body oozing with corruption, the body that hoped to find its freedom in blissfully dreaded death.
What monstrous demons can crawl out of one's thoughts.
I began to laugh, a loud, harsh, boisterous laugh; I was laughing so hard I had to hold on to the back of the armchair to keep myself from falling over.
I don't know at what point I slipped the letter back into the envelope, but I can still see my trembling hand fumbling with the paper.
First there was a little tussle between my hand, the letter, and the envelope, and it was after that hard-won victory that I had to grab the back of the chair to stop myself from bolting out the door, and perhaps it was the uncontrollable trembling that made me explode in laughter.
I was laughing insanely, I could say, but the sound of my laughter betrayed the fact that by laughing I was trying to drive myself insane.
From then on I was carried along by the demon of my own sound.
Nearly a decade later, in a huge tome by Baron Jakob Johann Uexküll, I came across this illuminating and endearing statement: "When a dog runs, it is the animal that moves its legs, but when a hedgehog runs, it is the legs that move the animal."
This subtle distinction helped me understand that it was a primitive animal's instinct to escape that had appeared in my laughter; it wasn't I who sought refuge in that loud laugh but the laugh that saved me from my plight.
At the moment of its explosion the laughter revealed my utter desperation, but in the very next moment it tripped over itself and changed direction, route, and above all intended meaning, so that it could pretend that it wasn't even a hearty laugh but a titter, and not even that, only the inane display of overwhelming joy, though nothing like total abandon even then, for the incongruity of the situation inhibited this sort of tittering; my ears registered every shift, modulation, and distortion as if I were hearing it with the inspector's ears; and then it was the joy of life, cleansed of everything and bathed in bliss, that was laughing along with me, until I managed to be moved by my own performance to the point of tears, which in turn made the sound tremulous and faltering, and I felt moved even more, until I finally regained control and, haltingly, could say something.
"Do forgive me," I stammered while wiping my eyes, and my demon, so very sure of itself, still holding my voice captive, clinging to it, guiding it, graciously allowed me to sound sincere, as if to claim that lies and deceptions could very nicely turn into truths, there was nothing to be ashamed of! they became more convincingly real this way, more authentic than purportedly simple and immaculate truths; anyway, we can never gauge the moral worth of our actions so it's useless to fret and agonize over them, we might as well push ahead, especially since my demon used my fiancée's very intimate letter to refute, and refute triumphantly and unequivocally, any suspicion about my own involvement in this affair: "Do forgive me," I repeated, "this outburst was totally inappropriate, I am deeply embarrassed; yet if I say that I must nevertheless decline responsibility for it — for without being requested to do so, I would not have dreamed of perusing such a letter in front of a stranger — then I am in effect begging the forgiveness of my dead friend lying in the next room"; I said all this in my demon's cool, measured, dignified voice, though also affecting the nonchalance of a man of the world; "However," I continued, "I would be as loath to offend you as I would my poor unfortunate friend; I can assure you, therefore, that the content of the letter is strictly private, and with an eye to dispelling any lingering doubt that it might have something to do with today's tragic occurrence, I am willing to dispense with proprieties and reveal, ah, hell and damnation, what could possibly keep me from saying it — what I received was very happy news, the kind of news one should be only too glad to share with anyone."