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To tell my story, I have to start at the beginning. If I were able, I would have to go back much further, to the very first years of my childhood and even beyond that, back to the distance of my origins.

When they write novels, poets usually act as if they were God and could completely survey and understand any human story and present it as if God were telling it to himself, without any veils, everywhere essentially. I can’t do that, any more than poets can. But my story is more important to me than any poet’s; because it is my own, and it is the story of a human being – not an invented one, a possible one, an ideal one or otherwise non-existent one, but of a real, unique, living person. What it is, a real living human being, is less known today than ever before, and people, each of whom is a precious, unique experiment of nature, are shot dead in large numbers. If we weren’t even more unique people, If you could really eliminate each of us completely with a shotgun bullet, there would no longer be any point in telling stories. But every person is not only himself, he is also the unique, very special, in any case important and strange point where the phenomena of the world intersect, only once and never again. That’s why every human being’s history is important, eternal, divine, that’s why every human being, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wonderful and worthy of everyone’s attention.

Few people today know what man is. Many people feel it and therefore die more easily, just as I will die more easily when I have finished writing this story.

I can’t call myself a knower. I was a seeker and still am, but I search no more on the stars and in the books, I begin to hear the teachings that my blood rushes within me. My story is not pleasant, it is not sweet and harmonious like the fictional stories, it tastes of nonsense and confusion, of madness and dreams, like the lives of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.

Every human being’s life is a path towards oneself, the attempt at a path, the hint of a path. No man has ever been completely himself; Everyone still strives to become one, one dull, one bright, each as he can. Everyone carries remnants of their birth, slime and eggshells of a primeval world, with them until the end. Some people never become human, remain a frog, remain a lizard, remain an ant. Some people are human above and fish below. But everyone is nature’s throw at man. We all have our origins in common, our mothers, we all come from the same pit; but each strives, a trial and throw from the depths, towards his own goal. We can understand each other; But everyone can only interpret themselves.

Two Worlds


I begin my story with an experience from the time when I was about ten to eleven years old and went to the Latin school in our town.

There is a lot of scent that greets me and touches me from the inside with pain and pleasant shivers, dark alleys and bright ones, houses and towers, clock chimes and human faces, rooms full of comfort and warm comfort, rooms full of mystery and deep fear of ghosts. It smells of warm confinement, of rabbits and maids, of household remedies and dried fruit. Two worlds ran together there, day and night came from two poles.

One world was my father’s house, but it was even narrower; it actually only included my parents. This world was mostly well known to me, it was called Mother and Father, it was called Love and strictness, role model and school. This world had mild splendor, clarity and cleanliness; gentle, friendly speech, washed hands, clean clothes and good manners were at home here. The morning chorale was sung here, Christmas was celebrated here. In this world there were straight lines and paths that led to the future, there was duty and guilt, bad conscience and confession, forgiveness and good intentions, love and worship, Bible words and wisdom. Our future had to belong to this world; it had to be clear and clean, beautiful and ordered.

The other world, however, began right in the middle of our own house and was completely different, smelled different, spoke different, promised and demanded different things. In this second world there were maids and craftsmen, ghost stories and rumors of scandal, there was a colorful flood of monstrous, alluring, terrible, mysterious things, things like slaughterhouses and prisons, drunks and brawling women, cows giving birth, fallen horses, stories of break-ins , homicides, suicides. All these beautiful and horrible, wild and cruel things were all around, in the next alley, in the next house, policemen and tramps ran around, drunks beat their wives, knots of young girls spilled out of factories in the evenings, old women could charm you and make you sick, robbers lived in the forest, arsonists were caught by land hunters – this second, violent world oozed and smelled everywhere, everywhere, just not in our rooms where mother and father were. And that was very good. It was wonderful that here with us there was peace, order and calm, duty and a good conscience, forgiveness and love – and wonderful that there was everything else too, everything that was loud and bright, dark and violent, which one had to deal with could escape from jumping to his mother.

And the strangest thing was how the two worlds bordered each other, how close they were! For example, our maid Lina, when she sat by the door during prayer service in the living room in the evening and sang along to the song with her bright voice, her washed hands placed on her smoothed apron, then she belonged completely to father and mother, to us, into the bright and right. Immediately afterwards in the kitchen or in the wood shed, when she told me the story of the little man without a head, or when she argued with the neighboring women at the butcher’s little shop then she was someone else, belonged to the other world, was surrounded by mystery. And that’s how it was with everything, especially with myself. Certainly, I belonged to the bright and correct world, I was my parents’ child, but wherever I turned my eyes and ears, the other was there everywhere, and I also lived in the other, although it was often strange and scary to me, even though people were there regularly got a bad conscience and fear. At times I actually preferred living in the forbidden world, and often the return to the light – however necessary and good it might be – was almost like a return to something less beautiful, to something more boring and dreary. Sometimes I knew: my goal in life was to become like my father and mother, so bright and pure, so superior and ordered; but the road was long until then, Until then you had to sit through school and study and take tests and exams, and the path always led past the other, darker world, through it, and it was not at all impossible for you to stay with it and sink into it. There were stories of prodigal sons who had felt this way; I read them with passion. The return home to the father and to the good was always so liberating and great, I certainly felt that this was the only thing that was right, good and desirable, and yet the part of the story that took place among the wicked and lost was by far the more attractive, and if one could have said it and confessed it, it was actually sometimes downright It’s a pity that the lost man repented and was found again. But they didn’t say that and they didn’t think that either. It was just there somehow, as a hint or possibility, at the bottom of the feeling. When I imagined the devil, I could easily imagine him on the street below, disguised or open, or at the fair, or in a tavern, but never in our home.

My sisters also belonged to the bright world. It often seemed to me that they were closer in nature to my father and mother; they were better, more well-mannered, more flawless than I. They had flaws, they had bad habits, but it seemed to me that it didn’t go very deep, it wasn’t like mine, where contact with evil was often so difficult and painful, where the dark world was much closer. The sisters, like the parents, were to be treated with care and respect, and if you had a fight with them, you were later blamed own conscience always the bad one, the instigator, the one who had to ask for forgiveness. Because in the sisters people insulted their parents, the good and commanding ones. There were secrets that I could share with the most reprobate street boys far more easily than with my sisters. On good days, when it was light and one’s conscience was in order, it was often delicious to play with the sisters, to be kind and good with them and to see oneself in a good, noble appearance. That’s how it had to be when you were an angel! That was the most we knew, and we thought it was sweet and wonderful to be angels, surrounded by a light sound and scent like Christmas and happiness. Oh, how rarely such hours and days come! I was often at the game, at good, harmless, legal games, with a passion and violence that which became too much for the sisters, which led to arguments and misfortune, and when anger came over me, I was terrible and did and said things whose wrongness I felt deeply and burningly even as I was doing and saying them. Then came the dark, dark hours of remorse and contrition, and then the painful moment when I asked for forgiveness, and then again Ray of brightness, a quiet, grateful happiness without conflict, for hours or moments.

I went to the Latin school, the mayor’s son and the head forester’s son were in my class and sometimes came to me, wild boys and yet members of the good, permitted world. Nevertheless, I had close relationships with neighborhood boys and elementary school students whom we otherwise despised. I must begin my story with one of them.

On a free afternoon when I was little more than ten years old, I was hanging out with two boys from the neighborhood. Then a larger one came along, a strong and rough boy of about thirteen, a primary school student, the son of a tailor. His father was a drunkard and the whole family had a bad reputation. I knew Franz Kromer well, I was afraid of him and I didn’t like it when he joined us. He already had manly manners and imitated the gait and sayings of the young factory boys. Under his leadership, we descended to the bank next to the bridge and hid from the world under the first arch of the bridge. The narrow bank between the arched bridge wall and the sluggishly flowing Water consisted of nothing but rubbish, shards and rubble, tangled bundles of rusted iron wire and other rubbish. Sometimes useful things were found there; We had to search the route under Franz Kromer’s leadership and show him what we found. Then he either put it in his pocket or threw it out into the water. He told us to pay attention to whether there were any things made of lead, brass or tin, and he put them all with him, including an old horn comb. I felt very uneasy in his company, not because I knew that my father would forbid me from having this company if he found out about it, but out of fear of Franz himself. I was glad that he took me and treated me like the others. He ordered and we obeyed, it was as if it was an old custom, even though it was my first time with him.

Finally we sat down on the floor. Franz spat into the water and looked like a man; he spat through a gap in his teeth and hit where he wanted. A conversation began and the boys started boasting and boasting about all sorts of student heroic deeds and evil pranks. I remained silent and yet feared, especially through my to stand out in silence and draw the Kromer’s wrath on me. My two comrades had distanced themselves from me from the beginning and had committed themselves to him; I was a stranger among them and felt that my clothing and manner were a challenge to them. As a Latin student and a gentleman’s son, Franz couldn’t possibly love me, and I felt that the other two would, if it came to it, deny me and abandon me.

Finally, out of sheer fear, I began to tell the story. I invented a great story of robbers and made myself the hero. In a garden near the Eckmühle, I said, I and a comrade had stolen a whole sack full of apples at night, and not ordinary ones, but only the finest Reinettes and Gold Parmaines, the best varieties. I took refuge from the dangers of the moment in this story; I was familiar with inventing and telling stories. In order not to quit again and perhaps get involved in something worse, I let all my art shine. One of us, I said, always had to stand guard while the other was in the tree throwing the apples down, and the sack was so heavy that that at last we had to open it again and leave half of it behind, but we came back after half an hour and got them too.

When I was finished, I was hoping for some applause; I had recently warmed up and had become intoxicated with my fables. The two little ones remained silent, waiting, but Franz Kromer looked at me piercingly with half-squinted eyes and asked in a threatening voice: “Is that true?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So really and truly?”

“Yes, really and truly,” I protested defiantly, choking with fear inside.

“Can you swear?”

I was very scared, but I said yes immediately.

“So say: By God and blessedness!”

I said, “By God and blessedness.”

“Well,” he said then and turned away.

I thought that was all right, and was glad when he soon got up and headed back. When we were on the bridge, I shyly said I had to go home now.

“It won’t be so pressing,” Franz laughed, “we have the same path.”

He strolled along slowly and I ventured not to run away, but he really went towards our house. When we were there, when I saw our front door and the thick brass handle, the sun in the windows and the curtains in my mother’s room, I breathed a sigh of relief. Oh homecoming! Oh good, blessed return home, to brightness, to peace!

As I quickly opened the door and slipped in, ready to slam it behind me, Franz Kromer pushed his way in with me. He stood next to me in the cool, dark tiled corridor, which only got light from the courtyard, held me by the arm and said quietly: “Don’t push so hard, you!”

I looked at him in shock. His grip on my arm was as tight as iron. I wondered what he might have in mind and whether he wanted to mistreat me. If I screamed now, I thought, screamed loudly and violently, would someone from above be there quickly enough to save me? But I gave up.

“What is it?” I asked, “what do you want?”

“Not much. I just have to ask you something else. The others don’t need to hear that.”

“So? Yes, what else can I tell you? I have to go up, you know.”

“You know,” said Franz quietly, “who owns the orchard near the corner mill?”

“No, I do not know. I think it’s the miller.”

Franz had wrapped his arm around me and was now pulling me so close to him that I had to look him in the face at close range. His eyes were evil, he smiled wickedly, and his face was full of cruelty and power.

“Yes, my boy, I can tell you who owns the garden. I’ve known for a long time that the apples were stolen, and I also know that the man said he would give two marks to anyone who could tell him who stole the fruit.”

“Dear God!” I cried. “But you won’t tell him anything?”

I felt that it would be useless to appeal to his sense of honor. He was from the other world, for him treason was not a crime. I felt that exactly. In these things the people from the “other” world were not like us.

“Don’t say anything?” Kromer laughed. “Dear friend, do you think that I am a counterfeiter that I can make two marks for myself? I’m a poor guy, I don’t have a rich father like you, and if I can earn two marks, I have to earn it. Maybe he’ll even give more.”

He suddenly let go of me again. Our hallway no longer smelled of peace and security, the world collapsed around me. He would report me, I was a criminal, they would tell his father, maybe even the police would come. All the horrors of chaos threatened me, everything ugly and dangerous was arrayed against me. The fact that I hadn’t stolen at all was irrelevant. I also swore. My God, my God!

Tears welled up in my eyes. I felt that I had to buy myself out and desperately reached into all my pockets. No apple, no pocket knife, nothing was there. Then I remembered my watch. It was an old silver watch and it didn’t work, I wore it “just because”. It came from our grandmother. I quickly pulled it out.

“Kromer,” I said, “listen, you don’t have to show me off, that wouldn’t be nice of you. I want to give you my watch, look there; Unfortunately I don’t have anything else. You can have it, it is made of silver and the workmanship is good, it only has one small flaw, it needs to be repaired.”

He smiled and took the watch in his big one Hand. I looked at that hand and felt how raw and deeply hostile it was to me, how it was grasping at my life and peace.

“It’s made of silver—” I said shyly.

“I don’t give a damn about your silver and your old watch!” he said with deep contempt. “Just let them fix it yourself!”

“But Franz,” I cried, trembling with fear that he would run away. “Wait a little! Take the watch! She is truly silver, real and true. And I don’t have anything else.”

He looked at me coldly and contemptuously.

“So you know who I go to. Or I can tell the police, I know the sergeant well.”

He turned to leave. I held him back by his sleeve. It couldn’t be. I would much rather die than endure everything that would come if he left like that.

“Franz,” I pleaded hoarsely with excitement, “don’t do stupid things! Gelt, it’s just for fun?”

“Yes, fun, but it can be expensive for you.”

“Tell me, Franz, what I should do! I want to do everything!”

He looked at me with his narrowed eyes and laughed again.

“Don’t be stupid!” he said with false good nature. “You know as much as I do. I can earn two marks, and I’m not a rich man to throw them away, you know that. But you’re rich, you even have a watch. All you have to do is give me the two marks and everything will be fine.”

I understood the logic. But two marks! For me that was as much and unattainable as ten, a hundred, or a thousand marks. I had no money. There was a savings box that stood at my mother’s, and there were a few ten and five pfennig pieces in it from uncle visits and such occasions. I had nothing else. I didn’t get any pocket money at that age.

“I have nothing,” I said sadly. “I don’t have any money at all. But otherwise I want to give you everything. I have an Indian book, and soldiers, and a compass. I want to get it for you.”

Kromer just twitched his bold, evil mouth and spat on the ground.

“Don’t talk around!” he said commandingly. “You can keep your rags. A Compass! Don’t make me angry now, you hear, and give me the money!”

“But I don’t have one, I never get any money. It is not my fault!”

“So then tomorrow you bring me the two marks. I’ll wait down at the market after school. Done with that. If you don’t bring any money, you’ll see!”

“Yes, but where should I get it from? God, if I don’t have one – “

“There is enough money in your house. That’s your thing. So tomorrow after school. And I tell you: if you don’t bring it—” He shot me a terrible look in the eye, spat again and disappeared like a shadow.

II couldn’t go up. My life was destroyed. I thought about running away and never coming back, or drowning myself. But these were not clear images. I sat down in the dark on the lowest step of our house steps, crawled into myself and gave in to misfortune. There Lina found me crying as she came down with a basket to get wood.

I asked her not to say anything upstairs and went upstairs. My father’s hat and my mother’s parasol hung on the rake next to the glass door, home and tenderness flowed to me from all these things, my heart greeted them pleadingly and gratefully like the prodigal son greeted the sight and smell of the old home rooms. But all of this no longer belonged to me, it was all a bright world of father and mother, and I was deeply and guiltily immersed in the foreign flood, entangled in adventure and sin, threatened by the enemy and awaited by danger, fear and disgrace. The hat and parasol, the good old sandstone floor, the big picture above the hall cupboard, and inside from the living room the voice of my older sister, all of that was dearer, more tender and more delicious than ever, but it was no longer a comfort or a safe asset, it was loud accusation. All of this was no longer mine; I couldn’t share in his cheerfulness and silence. I carried dirt on my feet that I couldn’t wipe off on the mat, I brought with me shadows that Homeworld didn’t know about. How many secrets I had had, how much anxiety, but it had all been fun and games against what I brought into these rooms with me today. Fate was running after me, hands were stretched out towards me, from which even my mother could not protect me, which she was not allowed to know about. Whether my crime was a theft or a lie (hadn’t I sworn a false oath to God and blessedness?) – it didn’t matter. My sin was not this or that, my sin was that I had shaken hands with the devil. Why did I go with you? Why had I obeyed Kromer better than I had ever obeyed my father? Why had I lied about the theft? Boasted about crimes as if they were heroic deeds? Now the devil held my hand, now the enemy was after me.

For a moment I no longer felt fear of tomorrow, but above all the terrible certainty that my path would now lead ever further downhill and into darkness. I clearly felt that my offense would lead to new offenses, that my appearance at my siblings, my greeting and kiss to my parents was a lie, that I carried with me a fate and a secret that I hid from them.

For a moment there was a flash of trust and hope occurred to me as I looked at my father’s hat. I would tell him everything, accept his judgment and punishment and make him my accomplice and savior. It would only be a penance such as I had often undergone, a difficult bitter hour, a difficult and remorseful request for forgiveness.

How sweet that sounded! How beautiful that was! But there was nothing with it. I knew I wouldn’t do it. I knew that I now had a secret, a guilt that I had to deal with alone and myself. Maybe I was at a crossroads right now, maybe from this hour on I would forever and ever belong to the bad, share secrets with the bad, depend on them, obey them, become their equal. I had played the man and hero, now I had to bear the consequences.

I was pleased that my father commented on my wet shoes as I entered. It was distracting, he didn’t notice the worse, and I was allowed to endure an accusation that I secretly related to the other thing. A strange new feeling sparked within me, an evil and cutting feeling full of barbs: I felt superior to my father! I felt one For a moment, a certain contempt for his ignorance, his scolding about his wet boots seemed petty to me. “If you only knew!” I thought, feeling like a criminal being interrogated about a stolen roll while he had to confess to murders. It was an ugly and forbidding feeling, but it was strong and had a deep appeal, and it bound me to my secret and my guilt more firmly than any other thought. Maybe, I thought, Kromer has already gone to the police and reported me, and thunderstorms are gathering over me while they look at me like a little child here!

Of this entire experience, as far as it has been told up to this point, this moment was the most important and lasting one. It was a first crack in the holiness of the father, it was a first cut in the pillars on which my childhood life had rested, and which every human being before himhe himself can become, must have destroyed. The inner, essential line of our fate consists of these experiences, which no one sees. Such a cut and tear grows over again, it is healed and forgotten, but in the most secret chamber it continues to live and bleed.

I was immediately horrified by the new feeling that I would have wanted to kiss my father’s feet straight away to get it out of him. But you can’t ask for anything essential, and a child feels and knows that as well and deeply as any wise person.

I felt the need to think about my case, to think of ways for tomorrow; but I didn’t get around to it. All I had to do all evening was get used to the changed air in our living room. The wall clock and the table, the Bible and the mirror, the bookshelf and the pictures on the wall all sort of said goodbye to me. I had to watch with a freezing heart as my world, my good, happy life became a thing of the past and separated from me, and I had to feel how I was anchored and held with new, sucking roots outside in the darkness and strangers. For the first time I tasted death, and death tastes bitter, because it is birth, is fear and anxiety about terrible innovations.

I was happy when I finally lay in my bed! Before that, the evening prayer had passed over me as the final purgatory, and we had sung a song that was one of my favorites. Oh, I didn’t sing along, and every note was bile and poison to me. I didn’t pray when my father said the blessing, and when it ended: “Be with us all!”, a convulsion tore me away from that circle. The grace of God was with them all, but no longer with me. I left cold and deeply tired.

In bed, after I had lain for a while, when warmth and security lovingly surrounded me, my heart wandered back in fear, fluttering anxiously about the past. My mother had said goodnight to me as always, her step still echoed in the room, the light of her candle still glowed in the crack in the door. Now, I thought, now she’s coming back again – she felt it, she gives me a kiss and asks, asks kindly and promisingly, and then I can cry, then the stone in my throat melts, then I put my arms around her and say it to her, and then it’s good, then salvation is there! And when the crack in the door had already become dark, I listened for a while and thought that it must and must happen.

Then I returned to things and faced my enemy. I saw him clearly, he had one eye squinted Mouth laughed rudely, and as I looked at him and consumed the inescapable, he grew larger and uglier, and his evil eye flashed devilishly. He was close to me until I fell asleep, but then I didn’t dream about him or about today, but I dreamed that we were sailing in a boat, my parents and sisters and I, and that all the peace and splendor of a holiday day surrounded us. I woke up in the middle of the night, still felt the aftertaste of bliss, saw my sisters’ white summer dresses shimmering in the sun and fell out of all paradise back into what was and was once again face to face with the enemy with the evil eye.

In the morning, when my mother came hurriedly and shouted that it was late and why I was still in bed, I looked bad, and when she asked if there was anything wrong with me, I vomited.

This seemed to win something. I really loved being a little sick and being able to lie in bed for a morning with chamomile tea, listening to my mother tidying up in the next room and listening to Lina greet the butcher in the hallway. The morning without school was something enchanted and fairytale-like, the sun then played into the room, and it wasn’t the same sun against which the green curtains were drawn at school. But that didn’t taste good today either and had the wrong sound.

Yes, if I had died! But I was just a little unwell, as I often have been, and that didn’t help. That protected me from school, but it certainly didn’t protect me from Kromer, who was waiting for me at the market at eleven o’clock. And this time the mother’s kindness was without consolation; it was annoying and painful. I soon pretended to be asleep again and thought. Nothing helped, I had to be at the market at eleven o’clock. So I got up quietly at ten o’clock and said that I was feeling well again. As usual in such cases, it was said that I either had to go back to bed or go to school in the afternoon. I said that I like going to school. I had made a plan.

I wasn’t allowed to come to Kromer without money. I had to get the little money box that belonged to me. There wasn’t enough money in it, I knew that, not nearly enough; but it was something, and a sense of the weather told me that something was better than nothing and that Kromer had to at least be accommodated.

I felt bad when I crept into my mother’s room in my socks and took my rifle from her desk; but it wasn’t as bad as yesterday. The pounding of my heart was choking me, and it didn’t get any better when, when I first checked the box down in the stairwell, I found that it was locked. It was very easy to break it open; all you had to do was tear through a thin metal grille; but the tear hurt, only then did I commit theft. Until then I had only snacked, pieces of sugar and fruit. This was stolen, even though it was my own money. I felt like I was one step closer to Kromer and his world again, how things were going downhill so nicely, step by step, and I put up with defiance. Let the devil take me, there was no turning back now. I counted the money with fear, It had sounded so full in the can, but now in the hand it was miserably little. It was sixty-five pfennigs. I hid the can in the downstairs hall, held the money in my closed hand and walked out of the house in a different way than I had ever walked through this gate. It seemed to me that someone was calling to me upstairs; I walked away quickly.

There was still a lot of time, so I took detours through the streets of a changed city, under clouds I had never seen, past houses that looked at me and people who suspected me. On the way I remembered that a schoolmate of mine had once found a thaler at the cattle market. I would have liked to pray that God would perform a miracle and allow me to make such a discovery. But I no longer had the right to pray. And even then the can would not have been whole again.

Franz Kromer saw me from a distance, but he came towards me very slowly and didn’t seem to pay any attention to me. When he was near me, he gave me a commanding sign that I should follow him and, without looking back once, he continued calmly down the Strohgasse and over the footbridge until he stopped at the last houses in front of a new building . There was no work being done there, the walls stood bare without doors or windows. Kromer looked around and went in through the door, I followed him. He stepped behind the wall, beckoned me over, and held out his hand.

“Do you have it?” he asked coolly.

I pulled my clenched hand out of my pocket and poured my money into his palm. He had counted it before the last five had even ended.

“That’s sixty-five pfennigs,” he said, looking at me.

“Yes,” I said shyly. “That’s all I have, it’s not enough, I know that. But it’s everything. I don’t have any more.”

“I would have thought you were smarter,” he scolded, with an almost mild rebuke. “There should be order among men of honor. I don’t want to take anything from you that’s not right, you know that. Take your nickel back, there! The other one—you know who—isn’t trying to talk me down. He pays.”

“But I have and no longer have! It was my savings bank.”

“That’s your thing. But I don’t want to make you unhappy. You still owe me one mark and thirty-five pfennigs. When do I get it?”

“Oh, you’ll certainly get it, Kromer! I don’t know now – maybe I’ll have more soon, tomorrow or the day after. You understand that I can’t tell my father.”

“Which does not concern me. It’s not like I want to harm you. I could have my money before noon, you see, and I’m poor. You have nice clothes on and you get something better to eat for lunch than me. But I don’t want to say anything. I want to wait a little for my sake. The day after tomorrow I’ll give you a whistle, in the afternoon, then you’ll sort it out. You know my whistle?”

He whistled it to me; I had heard it often.

“Yes,” I said, “I know.”

He walked away as if I didn’t belong to him. It had been a transaction between us, nothing more.

Even today, I think Kromer’s whistle would startle me if I suddenly heard it again. From then on I heard him often; it seemed to me that I heard him all the time. There was no place, no game, no work, no thought where this whistle did not reach, which made me dependent, which was now my fate. I was often in our little flower garden, which I loved very much, on the soft, colorful autumn afternoons, and a strange impulse prompted me to take up boys’ games from earlier eras; In a sense, I played a boy who was younger than me, who was still good and free, innocent and secure. But right in the middle, always expected and yet always terribly disturbing and surprising, came the Kromer sound Whistled from somewhere, cut the thread, destroyed the imagination. Then I had to leave, I had to follow my tormentor to bad and ugly places, I had to give him an account and ask for money. The whole thing may have lasted a few weeks, but to me it seemed like years, it seemed like an eternity. I rarely had money, a fiver or a dime, stolen from the kitchen table when Lina left the market basket there. Every time I was scolded and showered with contempt by Kromer; It was I who wanted to deceive him and deprive him of his rights, it was I who stole from him, it was I who made him unhappy! Not often in my life have hardships come so close to my heart; rarely have I felt greater hopelessness or greater dependence.

I filled the money box with tokens and put it back in its place, no one asked about it. But that too could come over me any day. I was often even more afraid of my mother than of Kromer’s harsh whistle when she came quietly to me – didn’t she come to ask me about the can?

Since I have been without money many times at my After the devil appeared, he began to torture and use me in other ways. I had to work for him. He had to get exits for his father, I had to get them for him. Or he would tell me to do something difficult, to hop on one leg for ten minutes, to pin a piece of paper to a passerby’s coat. In dreams of many nights I continued these torments and lay in the sweat of the nightmare.

I became ill for a while. I vomited often and felt cold easily, but at night I lay in sweat and heat. My mother felt that something was not right and showed me a lot of sympathy, which tormented me because I could not respond with trust.

One evening she brought me a piece of chocolate when I was already in bed. It was an echo of earlier years when, when I had been good, I had often been given such comforting morsels to help me fall asleep in the evenings. Now she stood there and held out the piece of chocolate to me. I was so hurt that I could only shake my head. She asked what was wrong with me, she stroked my hair. All I could gasp out was, “Don’t! Not! I don’t want anything.” You put the chocolate on the bedside table and left. When she tried to question me about it the next day, I acted as if I no longer knew anything about it. Once she brought me the doctor, who examined me and prescribed cold ablutions in the morning.

My condition at that time was a kind of madness. In the midst of the orderly peace of our house, I lived as shy and tormented as a ghost, did not take part in the lives of others, and rarely forgot myself for an hour. I was withdrawn and cold towards my father, who often confronted me irritably.

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