At some point or other you're sure to find out for yourself. You might be old or you might be young, but eventually you will find out.
        Find out what? you'll ask.
        That man's existence is a tragic one, I'll reply. A friend of mine realized this, I'll continue, when he was well over thirty. He was preparing for the bar and serving as an assistant to a notary who was a friend of his father's. This young attorney was a rather shallow person, a pragmatic fellow bent on a quick, successful career. One day the old notary told him about a case he had just handled. It involved the estate of a forty-year-old woman who had died under mysterious circumstances. The notary was entrusted with the management of her effects. What did she die of? my friend asked. Of starvation, the notary answered. Honestly, you aren't going to believe this! And the child of wealthy parents at that. I knew her father at the time, he continued, a respectable official, but a strange fellow. His daughter, who was very good at drawing, was not allowed to go to art school. He had her teacher come to the house. They saw practically no one. When her father passed away about ten years ago, she could have done whatever she wanted--study, travel, but she didn't do anything of the kind. She was like a bird that won't leave its cage even though the little door is open. You mean, not quite right in the head, my friend said. I guess not, the notary answered, adding: There must be quite a few paintings there. Maybe they're worth something, but in any case, we have to have an inventory, a chronological itemization aside from the list of furniture. Why don't you run over there right away. Maybe you can get the job done today, or if not, tomorrow. Then give me a call.
        My friend took the house key, picked up a pack of white paper, and started out. He got into his car and drove down a Pink Hawthorn Street and then a White Hawthorn Street. When he asked a young woman for directions, she blushed, and he straightened his tie. It was a bright day in May, and he pictured how he would live in this little town and how he would make all sorts of conquests. The moment he walked into the designated house, he was (and I must make a point of this) in complete harmony with himself. Also, when he had unlocked the various complicated locks and stepped into the hall, his frame of mind didn't change. He found the house of the deceased less sinister and also less neglected than he had expected. Downstairs there was a well-organized library; as for the furniture, it was worn and of little value. Upstairs things looked different. There was a noticeable mess; apparently all the rooms had served the deceased as studios. The paintings that the notary had mentioned were hanging on the walls, but only some of them. Most of them were unframed canvases which were standing on the floor on easels or in stacks with the painted surface to the wall. There was a smell of fresh oils, and this clean and pungent smell heightened my friend's desire to get the job done. He noticed that the paintings were dated, and he decided to classify them according to these dates. He removed almost all the furniture from the largest room, where the artist apparently had also slept. Then he arranged the canvases there, placing the framed paintings on the floor and in their proper places as well. There wasn't a painting without a date, there was just one for each year, and not one year was missing.
        After he was done, my friend stepped into the middle of the room, wiped the dust off his fingers with his handkerchief and, a little absent-minded now, mopped his brow. He counted the paintings, most of which, as he noticed, were self-portraits. It was still not clear to him at that point that this label could have been applied to the few others as well. I may not have mentioned this, but he wasn't too familiar with the so-called fine arts, so he looked at the paintings the way a child would look at them. He got a pen and some paper out of his briefcase and sat down on an old crate, which he moved about as he went. Before he started with the earliest painting, he glanced at his watch. There were twenty-one paintings there altogether, and he figured on spending three minutes on each one for a total of sixty-three minutes. Even if he would get up to have a cigarette once in a while or catch a breath of fresh air by the window, he would surely be done in an hour and a half.
        But even as he examined the first painting there was an unexpected delay. At the time it was painted, the deceased was undoubtedly a young, beautiful girl, and my friend was upset that she had not portrayed herself that way, young, pretty, and in a lovely gown, kind of like the picture of his grandmother hanging above the sideboard in the dining room at home. He had always admired the way his grandmother directed her uncertain and somewhat melancholy gaze at some indeterminate point in the distance while her fingers played with a little string of pearls, a wedding gift from her husband. She was seated in what was obviously a Louis XVI chair, and a bowl of Marechal-Niel roses was clearly visible next to her on a small table.
        In his client's paintings there was no hint of such pleasant surroundings, as my friend confirmed. You couldn't tell what she was sitting on or where she was standing, she was dressed in ugly coarse fabrics, the background was a dull black or a dull white, occasionally also a kind of sea of fire or a jumble of jagged rays, out of which the painted head slumped toward the onlooker as if tormented. The first painting suggested an ugly city scene: gasometer, fire walls, elevated railway, and so on, none of which could be seen from the windows of this house at all. Shrugging his shoulders, my friend wrote "Self-Portrait with Gasometer" on his list and was ready to move on to the next painting. Yet he stayed where he was and stared at the girl, who stared back at him with at least one of her crossed eyes and with a crooked smile around her mouth. Crazy woman, he thought, what does she want from me? It didn't occur to him that whoever paints his own portrait looks into a mirror.
        In the second painting, the mad woman raised a little skull toward him while gazing into his eyes in that same urgent way, this time with both eyes. The third unframed canvas showed not only the girl but also a man half hidden behind her, a kind of phantom resembling Adam not yet created by God as portrayed in the relief in Chartres, which my friend didn't know anything about because he hadn't yet been to Chartres. The feeling that came over him in the face of this phantom was really quite foolish, a kind of envy, a blind rage. Self-portrait No. 3, he wrote in that smooth, handsome handwriting he had then, while thinking angrily: What's with the fellow there? I thought the girl wasn't allowed to leave the house; she was an old maid and finally starved herself to death. But that didn't concern him. What did concern and confuse him as he moved from one painting to the next was the gaze directed at him, the question "Who are you?" which the artist had asked herself but which he immediately applied to himself.
        When my friend glanced at his watch as he stood in front of the fourth painting, he realized it was late afternoon, a time of day he could call his own. He had started daydreaming, something he had not done since he was a boy, and now he got hold of himself, jumped up, and pushed the crate aside. The bats fluttering around a pretty but distorted face in this fourth self-portrait had brought him to this point. He remembered that when he himself had gone exploring in a dark shed once, he had scared up a whole swarm of bats, and he recalled the horror he had experienced when that happened. It didn't occur to him that the artist had used these soft-winged, ominous creatures only to express another deeper fear. He felt drawn to her and thought he recognized himself in the boyish facial expression of the surrounded person. Nonsense, he then thought angrily, she and I, by which he meant a successful young man in good health and a crazy woman. Thus he was doubly frightened when he took a look at the next painting, for in this fifth portrait, which showed the artist in man's clothing, an amazing likeness to himself was now readily apparent.
        When we discussed the matter later, my friend couldn't tell me anything further about the technique used on all these canvases, sheets of water color paper, and blocks of wood. A connoisseur would probably have found a certain quality in the paintings, I thought, and he might also have seen reflected in them the artistic changes of half a century, which may seem surprising since the deceased never left the house or had any contact with the outside world. But as we all know, these things are in the air and are carried by the wind like winged seeds, and, of course, the girl wasn't confined to a hermetically sealed room. My friend, who no longer looked at the paintings quite so systematically now nor quite so disinterestedly as in the beginning, didn't notice any of these changes. He saw only the passion expressed here, and even if he had never put it in these terms himself, he somehow had a feeling for the existence of another human being, and for the first time at that. This person bore a strange resemblance to himself, and she gazed at him out of constantly changing faces in a manner that made him feel extremely uncomfortable.
        That one there is me, and that one, too, is me, he probably thought, if he thought anything at all and didn't just abandon himself with foolish astonishment to this unexpected extension of his personality that bordered on the perilous, the abysmal. It was seven o'clock by now, and he could have left, eaten dinner in the boarding house, taken a walk, and gone to bed. But he didn't do anything of the sort; he stayed on. One painting lured him to the next, and the next one to yet another, the way you're carried along by a well-written biography as you live with the character through old age and till death. Before he had prepared even half of his inventory, it was dark. The ceiling light didn't work, but he did find in a store room a projector-type floor lamp that he could drag behind him by a long cord. It was quiet outside now and even more so in this large, abandoned room. He wrote standing up, by this time with a hand that was beginning to tremble. Self-Portrait with Algae and Fishes, Self-Portrait as Tightrope Dancer, Self-Portrait with Head of a Dog in Her Lap. The dog was especially sinister because it looked up at the girl with human eyes (his eyes!). The fishes, too, had human eyes, but the little figure on the rope had no eyes at all, only black holes in a white face. Even so, as far as my friend could recall, it was precisely this portrait drawn with crayons that awakened in him a new feeling for the presence of the person portrayed.
        Although the picture was really just a sketch, this dancer who was merely suggested with a couple of strokes seemed to move on her rope and come closer and closer to him. He suddenly felt slaphappy, kind of intoxicated. It wouldn't surprise me if he even shouted a couple of words to drown out the eerie silence: Come to me, my doll, spreading out his arms toward the dancer. Needless to say, she stayed where she was, and he, too, stayed where he was, sheepishly picking up the sheets of paper he had dropped on the floor. But he now sensed that he had loved this girl like no one else he had ever cared for or was ever likely to care for.
        No sooner did my friend experience this love (love for a dead woman!) before he, too, was made to suffer. For if all the portraits he had examined so far had expressed a youthful curiosity or a wish to know something--in any case, a strong desire for life or love--then by the fifteenth portrait these feelings suddenly gave way to silent despair. The face, which up until now had been full, seemed emaciated. Through the delicate skin the beholder thought he could already see the skull shining through. Frightened, he pushed the lamp back, then pulled it closer again, but he kept seeing the same thing, death residing in a human being, and he fearfully touched his own smooth cheeks and his own firm chin. From now on, the strange face was no longer his reflection, nor was it his brother. It was still--in fact, more than ever now--his beloved, and he had to stand by helplessly as she deteriorated before his very eyes.
        My friend didn't leave the house that night. He made up a bed with pillows and blankets on an old couch, but he hardly slept a wink. Before lying down, he finished his inventory. Things had gotten to the point now where he was also designating as self-portraits a mad hodgepodge of fine lines, a tiny little face emerging in the middle of nothing but a meaningless scrawl, the head of a bull emerging above apocalyptic watery waste. He was no longer annoyed that he didn't understand any of this. Maybe he even preferred the fact that something else had become of his beloved, the mad woman: a crest of waves, a piece of shell limestone wall, a banner of chlorophyll above a nothingness of a world. As he lay there unable to sleep after he had turned out the light, he tried to imagine how the girl had lived and how she had died. He caught himself walking through the room with the steps of the artist and reaching for the brush with her fingers. Because it was the first time he wasn't concerned about himself, he did it thoroughly, giving no thought to the ambitious assistant attorney and only musing and guessing at whatever was there: unimaginable human beings and human fates and the faces in the portraits coming at him from all directions.
        The next morning he didn't know where he was at first. Then, as he remembered, he couldn't figure out why he had spent the whole night in that dusty death chamber. He jumped up and leaned out the window. A child in a little red jacket was sitting in the swing in the yard next door; a clean, brisk wind blew through the flowering trees. The inventory was already in his briefcase, only one sheet of paper was left behind on the desk. He wanted to take that along, too, and quickly glanced at it. The sheet was not a part of the list of paintings. Something was written on it, but there were no names and no dates, only a brief, continuous text which I can't repeat verbatim, of course. As far as my friend could recall later on, it said in rather indistinct handwriting something to the effect that whereas one person might recognize himself in the world, another might recognize the world in himself. And it also said something to the effect that everything was just one thing, outside and inside, stone and plant, life and death. You, too, my love, it said at the end ("my love" no less, he thought upset) will live a tragic life some day, but let me tell you that a tragic life is the only one worthy of man and, therefore, the only happy one.
        The statement seemed to end here without any punctuation, and my friend took the sheet of paper over to the window to see if in the light of day he might be able to make out a handwriting that perhaps had gotten weaker. But as he stood there holding the sheet up to the light again, he could hardly believe his eyes, because what was written on it he had written himself, only he didn't know when, and he certainly didn't understand what it meant.
        You would probably like to know what became of my friend after that. I may have given you the impression that he couldn't part from the paintings anymore and that he didn't want to leave the house. You may have thought the notary had to call the young man's father to say: I'm so sorry, but I had no idea. I didn't know him that well. Really, you'd better come over right away, and do bring a psychiatrist along. But that's not the way it was at all. My friend didn't lose his mind after this nocturnal adventure. He went home, shaved and changed clothes, and then he made his report to the notary, keeping most of what he had experienced to himself. In the afternoon he did some paperwork, and that night he went out with a girl who was in the same vapid state as he, both shy and brash. After that he continued to live as he always had, or almost. Only much later did he realize that during that night he had heard the drumbeat which each one of us eventually hears: the drumbeat with which life seriously begins.

Translated from the German by Anni Whissen