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PARTISAN REVIEW
And it did. A few hasty telephone calls, a few conferences, a few
tears, a few negotiations, a few promises, and the Ministry of Justice
was prepared to overlook, this once, our indiscretions. The day after
the trial, the newspapers quoted Paula as saying pointedly that she and
her group had been betrayed. No, she said. She would prefer not
LO
name names. Well, she had said rather smugly when we met briefly in
our house, this affair can't have hurt the sale of your books, or has it?
8.
What are you working on, my publisher asked me when we met shortly
after my return to Germany. Something quite intriguing, I said. A love
affair in Paris. He looked relieved. So much has already been written
about your past political involvement, he commented tactfull y. Still, I
was under the impression that you might wish to add your ... recollec–
tions.
Had he been about to say, your version?
I still receive a good deal of hate mail, I said after one of our
customary prolonged silences.
We must have you over for dinner soon, he said politely. He had
known my father quite well.
It
was an impossible situation, he had
once told me, referring to my father. As a man of honor, he had no
other option.
9.
I told the young American woman who had moved in upstairs that on
my mother's side I was a distant relative of Albrecht Durer. I said this
without the slightest desire to impress her. I would not have brought
up the subject had I not run into her in the university bookstore
holding a book on Durer. She greeted my statement with an appropri–
ate skepticism, staring at me as if trying to gage my intentions. My
mother's maiden name is Durer, I explained. Her family moved to
Wurtenburg in 1803. At one time my family owned six drawings by
Durer, but now we are down to one. For lack of anything else to say I
kept on talking about Diller. I described one of the drawings that had
been in my family's possession. It was one of his last drawings, the
Double Goblet.
As the title indicated it offered the viewer a view of the
two ornate goblets, one balanced on top of the other, as well as
revealing upon closer scrutiny an entirely different picture, one that
disclosed an explicit sexual content.
You like that, don't you, she said, chall enging me.
What? The sexual content?
