72
PARTISAN REVIEW
I didn't destroy the unsigned note. I can't bear to throw anything
away. I can't even bear to discard old magazines.
It
is not the first note I
have received. Did they really believe that I moved here
to
escape from
them.
Sometimes I really can't understand the Germans, said Daphne. I
speak the language. I read Klude, yet ... despairingly she shook her
head ... I can't make you out. Is this the new Germany? she asked
mockingly.
My brother Helmut studied architecture at MIT. He likes to wear
button-down shirts. One day he hopes to design a sixty-story office
with an underground garage in Detroit. I guess he's the new Germany.
But what about you?
15.
In addition to killing two postal workers, the explosion of at least
twelve to sixteen sticks of dynamite at the new post office des igned by
Helmut also totally destroyed four recently acquired sorting machines,
as well as two dozen large sacks of unsorted first-class mail. Had the
explosion taken place an hour earlier, a great many more people might
have been killed. As it was, the damage to the building was consider–
able. Half an hour after the explosion, a woman called a local radio
station and announced that the newly formed
Seventeenth of August
Liberation Group
took full responsibility for the action, which had
been designed to draw attention
to
the plight of the eight imprisoned
members of the Einzig Gruppe, all sentenced to long jail terms on the
seventeenth of August, one year ago. So a year had passed. I had just
reached page 134 of a manuscript that was entirely based on events that
had occurred since then. Until the explosion had destroyed the new
post office I felt pretty confident that nothing would interrupt my
work. I would go on writing the book until I was ready
to
submit it to
my publisher, and then I would take a brief vacation, after which I
would start thinking of the next book. Now I was no longer certain.
With one explosion the name Hargenau was in all the papers
again. Great outrage at the senseless killings and at the mutilation of
thousands of letters. Those letters would never reach their des tination .
Naturally there was also some speculation as
to
the identity of the
