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was probably most beautiful in the buff.
    The café proprietor went bust.
    I ran into her on the street with a child.
    She peered back at me with a look that said: “I still have life before me, life, don’t you know it—?!”
    I knew it.
    A friend of mine had typhus. He was a well-to-do bachelor and lived in a lakefront villa.
    When I visited him, a young woman with light blond silken hair prepared his ice packs. Her delicate hands were red and raw from the ice water. She peered back at me: “This is life—! I love it—! Because it’s life—!”
    When he got well he passed the woman on to another rich young man—.
    He dumped her, just like that—.
    It was summer.
    Later he was overcome by longing—it was fall.
    She had looked after him, nestled close with her sweet gazelle limbs—.
    He wrote to her: “Come back to me—!
    One evening in October I spotted her with him entering the wondrous vestibule in which eight red marble columns shimmered.
    I greeted her.
    She peered back at me: “Life lies behind me, life—! Don’t you know it?!”
    I knew it.
    I went to the foremost hairdresser in the capital.
    It still smelled of Eau de Cologne, of fresh washed linen and fragrant cigarette smoke—Sultan Flor, Cigarettes des princesses égyptiennes.
    Another girl sat at the cash register, this one with brown wavy hair.
    She peered back at me with the grand triumphant look of youth—profectio Divae Augustae Victricis: “Whoever you may be, one among thousands, I declare to you that life lies before me, life—! Don’t you know it?!”
    I knew it.
    â€œDear God,” I thought, “a count will surely sweep you off your feet—but it might also be a prince!”

Schubert
    Above my bed hangs a carbon print of the painting by Gustav Klimt: Schubert. Schubert is singing songs for piano by candlelight with three little Viennese Misses. Beneath it I scribbled: “One of my gods! People created the gods so as, despite all, to somehow rouse otherwise unfulfilled ideals hidden in their hearts into a more vital form!”
    I often read from Niggli’s Schubert biography. Its intent, you see, is to present Schubert’s life, not Niggli’s thoughts about it. But I have returned a hundred times to the passage on page 37. He was a music teacher on the estate of Count Esterhazy in Zelesz, an instructor to the very young Countesses Marie and Karoline. To Karoline he lost his heart. Thus emerged his creations for four-handed piano. The young countess never learned of his profound affection. Only once when she teased him that he had never dedicated a single one of his compositions to her, he replied: “What for?! As it is, it’s all for you!”
    As if a heart about to burst revealed its grief and then closed up again for eternity—. That’s why I often turn to page 37 in Niggli’s biography of Schubert.

Gramophone Record
    (Deutsche Grammaphonaktiengesellschaft.)
C2-42531. The Trout by Schubert.
    Â 
    Mountain stream water burbling crystal clear between cliff and pine tree permutated into music. The trout, a ravishing predator, light gray with red speckles, lurking, standing, flowing, shooting forward, downward, upward, disappearing. Beautiful blood-thirstiness!
    The piano accompaniment is sweet, soft, monotone of gurgling torrent, deep and dark green. Real life is no longer needed. We feel the fairy tale of nature!
    Every day in Gmunden in the afternoon hours, a lady in a watch-maker’s shop had them play the gramophone record C2-42531 two to three times. She sat on a tabouret, I stood close to the device.
    We never said a word to each other.
    Henceforth she would always hold off on the concert till I appeared.
    One day she paid to have it played three times, whereupon she was about to leave. I paid to have it played a fourth time. She waited at the door, listened along to the end.
    Gramophone record