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losing myself in pointless speculation that only upsets me. I don’t understand how my dear friend Conrad could ever say that I write like Karl Bröger. If only.
    Thanks to Conrad I was introduced to the literary group Workers of Nyland House. It was he who put Karl Bröger’s Soldaten der Erde in my hands, and who pushed me, after I had read it, to embark on an ever more dizzying and arduous search through the libraries of Stuttgart for Bröger’s Bunker 17 , Heinrich Lersch’s Hammerschläge , Max Barthel’s Das vergitterte Land , Gerrit Engelke’s Rhythmus des neuen Europa , Lersch’s Mensch im Eisen , etc.
    Conrad knows our national literature. One night in his room he reeled offthe names of two hundred German writers. I asked if he’d read them all. He said yes. He especially loved Goethe, and of the moderns, Ernst Jünger. There were two books by Jünger that he was always rereading: Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis and Feuer und Blut . And yet he didn’t turn his nose up at more obscure writ-ers; hence his fervent regard—which we would soon share—for the Nyland Circle.
    How many nights after that did I go to bed late, busy not just deciphering the tricky rules of new games but immersed in the joys and miseries, the heights and depths, of German literature!
    Of course, I’m talking about the literature written in blood, not Florian Linden novels, which, according to Ingeborg, just keep getting more far-fetched. On the same subject, I feel it’s appropriate to air a grievance here: the few times that I’ve talked in public to Ingeborg about my work, going into some detail about the progress of a game, she’s gotten angry or embarrassed, and yet she’s always telling me (during breakfast, at the club, in the car, in bed, during dinner, and even over the phone) about the riddles that Florian Linden has to solve. And I haven’t gotten angry at her or been embarrassed by what she has to say. On the contrary, I’ve tried to take a broad and objective view (in vain), and then I’ve suggested possible logical solutions to the fairy-tale detective puzzles.
    A month ago, not to put too fine a point on it, I dreamed about Florian Linden. That was the limit. I remember it vividly: I was in bed, because I was very cold, and Ingeborg was saying to me: “Theroom is hermetically sealed.” Then, from the hallway, we heard the voice of Florian Linden, who warned us of the presence in the room of a poisonous spider, a spider that could bite us and then vanish, even though the room was “hermetically sealed.” Ingeborg started to cry and I held her tight. After a while she said: “It’s impossible, how did Florian do it this time?” I got up and looked around, going through drawers in search of the spider, but I couldn’t find any-thing; of course there were many places where it could hide. Ingeborg shouted, Florian, Florian, Florian, what should we do? but no one answered. I think we both knew we were on our own.
    That was all. In fact, it was a nightmare, not a dream. If it meant anything, I can’t say what. I don’t usually have nightmares. During my adolescence, I did, plenty of them, and all different, but nothing that would have given my parents or the school psychologist cause to worry. Really, I’ve always been a well-balanced person.
    It would be interesting to remember the dreams I had here, at the Del Mar, more than ten years ago. I probably dreamed about girls and punishment, the way all boys that age do. A few times my brother described a dream to me. I don’t know whether we were alone or whether our parents were there too. I never did anything like that. When Ingeborg was little she often woke up crying and needed to be consoled. In other words, she woke up afraid, and with a terrible sense of loneliness. That’s never happened to me, or it’s happened so few times that I’ve forgotten.
    For a few years now I’ve dreamed about games. I go to bed, close my eyes, and a board lights up full of