MANES SPERBER
59
that I had walked into this trap for no good reason and had foolishly
remained in it until the door slammed shut on me. Sometimes the
night was filled with hopefulness, sometimes the early hours of the
morning flooded me with illusions . But it was certainly my greatest
accomplishment as a trained psychologist that I was finally able to
live as a dead man in suspension . From that time on I no longer felt
fear-the game was up; there was no more I could lose. I stopped
listening hard when the name of a prisoner, who was perhaps being
released, was called from the far end of the passageway where the
guards congregated. Many of these names sounded like my own.
But now it did not matter to me, for I was waiting for nothing and no
one.
When I look back these twenty-seven years or so, everything
comes back with an amazing clarity. That was my last detachment
from the present, through a perverted one, because cut off from any
future.
If
only one more week was to be permitted me, I thought I
might as well relive the entire past.
In
my head I wrote about all I
had seen in the course of my life, as in a landscape. I forbade myself
to linger too long over my feelings .
It
was dangerous to think about
the people I loved, had loved, who loved me . What violence I did to
myself, what toll it took-let it pass; I shall not describe it.
My impatience grew to the degree that I took it for granted that
many people- in Berlin, but surely also in Vienna- were
energetically working for my freedom. I was sure that my father
would leave no stone unturned to save me, and that he would suc–
ceed. That I had been transferred back into the custody of the police
seemed to me the first of his achievements.
In
the course of those days I retraced all my steps to those peo–
ple who would not accept the idea that I was done for. I clung to
them, while awake and in my dreams. So I was no longer alone for
even a second. And I spent hours conjuring up the fulfilled promise
of freedom, as though it were already a reality, merely obscured by a
thick morning fog. I conjured up Dalmatia before me, its skies at
noon and a silver crescent moon at evening mirrored in the water of
a tiny inlet.
"You see, today is the Fuhrer's birthday," said the policeman
who took me over from the guards. He walked behind me through
many corridors, at each of whose innumerable intersections I would
stand and wait until he directed me with one word: right, left, or
straight.
In
the office they handed me the release form, telling me
