Doctor Faustus on his shelf, the other a plaster devil. One knows Leverkühn’s conversation with the Prince of Darkness in the original, the other has the dust of a pathetic copy on his collar. One is mine, the other yours. One in a book, the other on the shelf. One is plaster, the other paper. Each has the one he fears. Do we understand each other, my curse? Our Satan was everywhere. He was in hard candies. He was in lemonade. He was in vanilla ice cream. He was in soccer, in chewing gum, and in music. In the radio and in the television set. There isn’t any point in talking about cigarettes, beer, and short skirts — they were all his work. In the summer, he sunbathed at the swimming pool and swam in the river. In the evenings, he showed films in the summer movie theater. He played the electronic organ at the band shell. He danced at parties in the House of the Spa. He removed the chiffon blouses from the Czech strippers. At night, he rummaged through pieces of junk in the attic. He slept in the bogs. He lay in the empty, ice-cold entryway. He ran along the railway embankment. He stood on the bridge and brushed snow from his overcoat. The yellow light of his flashlight wandered along the dark blue slopes. On winter evenings, he gave us things to read that we were unable to put down. He would shove a pencil into our hands and tempt us to record random thoughts. Luther did battle with him his whole life and often lost. But in the final analysis Luther was a colossus. Luther stood in the same rank with the Prophets, with the Evangelists, he was near Lord Jesus Himself. He wished to marry Katharina von Bora — so he made a schism. And us? What were we supposed to do? What sort of schism were we supposed to make so that, without fear of the fires of hell, we might buy a bottle of lemonade or go to the movies? The matters of the world are simple. If you risked hell over a lemonade, then — let’s party! — seven lemonades for me, please! If nothing but greedy (in the originaclass="underline" lustful) gazing upon a suntanned female vacationer is already adultery, then only a sucker would stop at gazing. If the devil is everywhere, that means that he doesn’t exist at all, or, at best, he is made of plaster and comes from the GDR. If we blather on about Satan, over and over, and without cease, then there is no Satan — there is only blather. What were we supposed to do? For want of anything better, you could start up a soccer game on the grounds that it is supposedly good for your health. For want of anything better, music might praise God. The TV could spread knowledge about the world, and whoever lived to see the epoch of unpunished reception of foreign stations could watch them under the pretext of learning foreign languages. Toward the end, my folks were a pair of barely moving oldsters. All day long they tottered and rustled about the house, thought up for themselves some sort of absurd, but seemingly useful occupations: Mother ironed scarfs that had never been worn, Father punched additional holes into his pants belt; finally, as evening came, they would sit, dead tired, in front of the TV; they sat, however, with shame and in deliberately uncomfortable and fleeting poses, so that it would seem that they had sat down only for a moment and by chance; and once they had settled in for good, they would turn on SAT1 or CNN. They weren’t watching TV, they weren’t going easy on Satan: they were learning foreign languages. In daily life, Satan and Lutheran principles are sufficient. Father had significantly greater difficulty with this than Mother. Throughout all his life. He would take me to Cracovia matches, and he always had a toothache during those matches. Not metaphorically, on account of the pathetic play. It was in the strict sense that he would have tooth attacks during Cracovia matches, and he would light up a cigarette in order to soothe them. He would ask someone he knew, or didn’t know, in any case, someone nearby who was smoking, and in those days, almost every fan smoked, so it wasn’t a problem. My old man would ask them to give him one, or even two, because his teeth were hurting him horribly, and — pretending to inhale smoke especially intensively on the sore spots — he would smoke away. It seems to me that eventually, just in case of a sudden toothache, he started carrying with him a package of mentholated Giewonts. It really didn’t happen soon, and in fact it was quite late, even very late, that I understood what was going on here. Quite another matter that the thing was, for the brain of a ten-year-old, quite complicated. My old man smoked, which was deviltry, and so, wishing to neutralize the deviltry, and even to rein it in entirely, through the observance of Lutheran principles, he pretended that his teeth ached, and that he smoked for the pain, which was a lie, in other words heightened deviltry. The truth was different, and this was the seven-fold deviltry, because my old man smoked out of fascination with the director of the personnel department at the polytechnic, Mrs. Przekrasicka. She smoked, but he wanted to give her a roll in the hay. When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. The steadfastness of Lutheran principles lies in their exclusivity. Beyond them there is nothing. There are, to put it succinctly, situations in which the observance of Lutheran principles turns out to be absolutely fatal. Father’s undoing was the fact that, finally having given the director of the personnel department at the polytechnic, Mrs. Przekrasicka, a roll in the hay, he was incapable — once it was all over — of getting rid of the handkerchief, which had been soiled during the amatory frenzy. In a word, his undoing was the Lutheran principle that nothing is ever to be thrown away. I know what I’ll hear now — that the principle of never throwing anything away is not only a Lutheran principle, that it is a supraconfessional principle, and even supracultural. Very well. But when the principle of never throwing anything away becomes a Lutheran principle, it takes on a special shape and and a special terror. Once he had given the director of the personnel department at the polytechnic, Mrs. Przekrasicka, a roll in the hay, my old man folded the handkerchief carefully, put it in his pocket, and set off for home. I know the details. I know the details, because I am an omniscient Lutheran narrator. A Lutheran narrator can be no other. Even when the narrator is a Lutheran child, then it, too, is omnipotent, omniscient, and chosen by Our Lord, the One in the Trinity, Amen. Father was intoxicated by his amorous success. He was especially intoxicated by the class aspect of his amorous success. Przekrasicka — this wasn’t just anything! And it absolutely wasn’t a matter of the fact that she was the director of personnel at the polytechnic. The position, of course, was important and key, but it was nonetheless in the administrative sector. Father, as a researcher, a doctoral student, lecturer, etc., etc., was, in this regard, of infinitely higher standing. But Przekrasicka was a well known Krakow name! Her husband, Mr. Przekrasicki — he was a well known Krakow figure! To tell the truth, an artist! In a certain sense, a painter! A poet, who had his verses printed in