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aroundthe car as it shot through it. When it was dusk I drifted through the streets with the fair-day throng, swam slowly down the avenue with the crowd, saw above me the foliage of the trees glide back in autumnal gold, felt the wind on my perspiring forehead, held up before me the stick with the Chinese lantern in which a candle burned, and joined in the song that was always welling up in waves before and behind me, Lantern, lantern, sun, moon, and stars. And underneath the circus cupola a creature of the air lunged from trapeze to trapeze, turned a somersault, let out shrill, reckless cries, dived out of the heights at me with outspread arms, a precipitously flying mane of black hair, close in front of me she pulled herself out of her dive and drew herself up again, a breath of wind, filled with a curiously drugging fragrance, rushed past me. Her ecstatic smile in her golden-brown, slant-eyed face, her piercing bird cry, burned themselves into me forever. Soon, soon I would travel after her, would fly back and forth across the circus arena, soon, soon, only a short time off, I will belong to you, only first I have to learn to read and write, to get through school quickly, soon, soon, I shall be with you, and see your ecstatic smile again, and hear your wild cry. I learned writing with Berthold Merz in the shed next door in the courtyard of the slate factory, we scratched our first letters on black flat pieces from the scrap pile, and the sun shimmered through the cracks in the planks. Berthold’s figure is fluid and fading, like dream figures in the morning shortly before waking, only his hand with the short stubby fingers and thebitten fingernails is clear. This hand grips the bow and shoots the arrow, the arrow with the feathered shaft, and the arrow rises high into the sky, so high that it disappears from our view and the arrow never returns. And Berthold Merz disappeared and Friederle took his place. A few years ago I stood in front of the house we had moved into at the time I was starting school. I had not seen the avenue for years, and now, seeing it again, I felt my childhood within me like the dull ache of an ulcer. The trunks of the trees at the side of the road had become strong and tall, the boughs spread far out over the road and their foliage closed together to form a thick canopy. Like someone entranced in an evil fairy tale I went toward the park to which the avenue led and in which our house lay hidden. On the pond at the edge of the avenue, a few white swans were swimming as before and in the hedge with the prickly leaves the white sweet peas bloomed as before. From the stream that separated the park from the avenue, I could see the house glinting bright red between the trees, it was intact, and in the adjoining garden lay the yellow villa in which Friederle had lived. Profound silence reigned, everything was steeped in its long past. In the muddy water of the brook a shoal of sticklebacks was flashing, tadpoles rowed with their tails around the algae, a frog with gaping eyes sat on the bank, a blue dragonfly whirred past. I went down the park path and stood still at the white posts of the garden gate in front of our house. The garden with its thicket of fir trees, its spreading copper beech and tall grass run wild extended to the elder bush at the edge ofthe fields. Beside the garden path lay the green henhouse, low and shrunken, and once we had jumped down from the dizzying heights of its skylight. The fenced-in hen yard was deserted, but a few white feathers still shone out of the dust. I asked a woman who came out of the house if she knew anything about the neighbors. She told me that out of the whole large family only one son was still alive, Friedrich, he had been an outstanding officer and had won the highest honors. He still lived in the town and she gave me his address. But I did not look him up, I knew what he was like. There stood Friederle at the fence of the neighboring garden, it was the day