Unconsciousness can never examine consciousness; but the reverse is possible, for consciousness is reliable, like a Ju-52 transport plane. On a sunset as purple as the identity card of an NKVD agent, I passed behind the Iron Curtain once more, and this time I meant to maintain a death-grip upon my impressions. Oh, the mysterious East! I was there for a good long while, I couldn’t tell you how long exactly, but I do remember snow and darkness; I think I experienced a symphony which stunned and chained me with chords of steel, although it’s possible that I heard not the orchestral elaboration but the core of it, in which case it would have been performed by a bespectacled genius who played by memory for me on a grand piano which was for sale, payment to be made in bread; I remember kissing somebody named Elena, but I’m not certain anymore whether she was named Elena Konstantinovskaya, Elena Kruglikova, or possibly Elena Rosetti-Solescu, with whom I seem to associate the nickname Coca. I’m fairly sure that the pavements were shimmering and shining with ice; I believe that I might have seen children peeping at me from within their fur-ruffed hoods; but I have a West German friend (codenamed HIRSCH) who subscribes to National Geographic, and he once showed me a pictorial about Canada, where there are people called Eskimos, in whose existence I disbelieve because they live in conditions which the phenomenon of our Iron Curtain can’t explicate: daylight for six months, darkness otherwise; but should there in fact be Eskimos, then the fur-hooded children in HIRSCH’s article may be germane; although it’s equally plausible that the children I met were Kazakhs; I could have easily gone that far east; I was in a land as deep and broad as the devil’s antitank trench; I heard the ticking of a metronome.
Well, was she Elena Konstantinovskaya or Elena Kruglikova? And what was she to me? I’ve retained an ice-clear memory of the tight black fur caps which seem to match Kazakh women’s hair, so I must have been in Kazakhstan. I can also recollect blonde Russian girls whose blonde fur shoulders—yes, they must have been wearing fox or maybe white sable, so was I at the opera?—resembled sunlight on the snow. But the rest was dark; that I’d swear to.—What category of darkness, did you ask? Dirt-black like a soldier’s hands, iron-black like the Curtain itself—with a taste of blue and grey, as is customary in metals.
That’s the sum of all intelligence I managed to gather, which really wasn’t bad for a first trip. So I decided to cross back into West Berlin. I yearned to see how successfully I prevent these recollections from effervescing away; and I might have had any number of additional objectives, too, but I can’t remember them. When I got up to the Iron Curtain itself, where darkness is particularly dark, the border guard kept his light upon me for a such a long time that I began to wonder whether he had always done this; and then he said: Why are your eyes so shifty today?
Shocked and frightened, trying to formulate an answer, I fidgeted, and then I could actually see him lean forward behind the dark glass, much as if I were looking into the dark water of the Kryukov Canal and then glimpsed the darker darkness of some fish or monster swimming up toward me; yes, he leaned forward and he crooned: What are you, actually?
I feared that official; so next time I determined to dig my illegal way; in this rubbled earth we all dig like gravediggers, mindful that some fleeing 
-man might have stopped here to bury a golden coronation sword, or maybe even a suitcase filled with gold and silver spoons from a castle in Krakow; we all hide things when we see death coming, and it may well be that by thus interring our treasures, we prepare our minds for our own entombment. Pharaoh must have been comforted to know that his scepter and his women would sleep forever with him. All the while, to be sure, one longs to believe that it’s possible to awake from that sleep, crawl back under the Curtain and reclaim one’s property, which remains (another hope!) safely cached away from the expropriations of Commissar Death—aren’t human beings absurd?
Lifting up a corner of the Iron Curtain in the vicinity of what would soon be called Checkpoint Charlie, I discovered darkness within, but I was prepared; I had with me the latest “Eagle” electric torch! Now I could see domes, bells, eagles and round windows. My eyes were already getting heavy, but I was ready for that, too; I started pinching myself. This must be Yugoslavia. The edifices of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, shellholed although they might be, spread themselves out before me like the pages of a book, with windows in place of words. What should I have read there? This place (so I’ve been told—by Yugoslavs, coincidentally) is the soul of Europe, or at least the Slavic soul. But why accept a map drawn by others? As lightly as a soap bubble I sleepwalked farther east. What did I see? Better yet, what didn’t I see? My tale is cluttered with visual bric-a-brac, none of which matters; it’s all rubble, so to speak; and if I lead you down an alley where red stars and red spiders dance on strings, that’s mere reality, which, being itself instead of ourselves, remains inherently alien, like the pretty flames which ought to be ornaments but betray the child by burning its hand. Actually, nothing’s nearly as real as a certain old West Berliner lady in black who gazes lovingly at me from deep-set eyes, crouching beside her empty basket; nowadays I see her every morning just before I slip beneath the Wall. She’s an operative of the Gehlen Organization, and she’s codenamed NEY. She neither alters nor sleeps. And now here I was in Byelorussia; well, well. That must have been why I started to dream of something pale—snow, maybe; well, whatever it was, it was almost as white as the service colors of the Organization Todt Frontline Command… so I pinched myself again. And now my flashlight beam picked out a Slavic hero on a rearing charger; the pediment was bas-reliefed with other Slavs; then came the war wreaths, graves and fires, nationalism being kept decently within Communist bounds. I admit that I was definitely getting sleepy by then. The faces of the inhabitants seemed to drift about me like seaweed. I had somehow entered a crowd of them: Slavs or dream-figures; their bony white faces, made terrifying by black mouths and broken black eye-sockets, kept gazing out at me from long black cloaks and dresses which were interrupted only by the white triangles of wrists emerging from dark sleeves and entering black pockets. I thought I heard the name Elena Kruglikova; perhaps it was Konstantinovskaya. Pinching myself as hard as I could, I discovered that a beautiful woman was kissing me. Probably I was on the Tverskaia then, in one of those icy doorways where they sell wooden toys.
Everything which has existed will always exist. This is the chief consolation, however spurious, of both religion and mathematics. Somewhere farther back in Russia, Nicholas II’s salon de réception survived with its gilt-edged screens and chairs, a carpet of dizzying ornamentality, mainly white, like a jigsaw puzzle of ice-floes; and on the wall, a depiction of an immense military column—are they on horseback?—this room’s so dim!… Someone is saluting; it seems to be sunset—probably this now obsolete receiving area had been transferred, as would have been an entirely correct decision, to an iceberg. And this woman kissing me, whoever she was, I had to believe that even if I lost her she would always be with me. But that won’t be true of Shostakovich, because, you know… Elena was kissing me, kissing me! Now where had she gone? My flashlight battery was dead; I started digging blindly westward. The war between Germany and Russia had been a conflict between lava and ice; ice had won, but everything that the ice had chilled to death, and everything that the lava had seared away, were safe somewhere, meaning Russia, since Adenauer has proved that Russia is the collective unconscious. According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, volume fifteen, love for an idea, which is to say for the no longer consciously “existent,” can take the form of an intellectual ecstasy that may be possible only at certain cultural levels, each of which must be guarded and demarcated, first by the People’s Police, then by the Soviet Military Authority, then finally by home units of the Red Army. This is why the Iron Curtain was in everybody’s interest.