salesmen and with pimps and with students.  I ran around with bicycle artists and with lawyers.  I let no man pass without looking him in the eye.  Whether it rained.  Or was winter.  Or the sun shone.  No one could call me his woman.  No one was my man.  One shot himself.  One jumped into a swamp.  I am guiltless...  One went mad.  One kicked me.  Most went away as though nothing bad had happened...  You, blue-eyed sorrowful face beneath me, oh, would that you were my man, that I might bloom in you.  Are you my man, in whom I blissfully sink—­”

And the actor sang to the student as they wrestled:  “I am the actor Schwertschwanz, the man, the lecher.  In all the bodies in which I have drunk, I sought you.  I have become a drinker.  Out of longing.  I have poisoned my blood out of love.  How meaningless it would be if I—­half dead—­found you now.  I have looked for you too long to find you yet.”

Then Maria Mondmilch called out as she fell on him:  “Little Schwertschwanz, do you love me—­” And already intoxicated:  “He does not love me.”

The man fall back in utter indolence.  The student spat on his collar.  Rammed the hat on the head of the spineless man.  Pressed a gold coin into his hand.  Threw him out.

While the actor Schwertschwanz, trembling with desire, went about searching for the right whore, Maria Mondlich sat over a thick anatomy textbook.  She looked at the drawing of a completely naked man, And howled like a dog at the sea.

The suicide of the pupil Mueller

A Mr. Ludwig Lenzlich was a teacher and tutor in a mental hospital for psychopathic children.  He was always called “Mr. A.B.D.”  He was beardless, like an actor, and he spoke like one.  Generally he wore a severe, sharp mask on his face.

This Mr. Lenzlicht, two days after the burial of the pupil Martin Mueller (who had hanged himself with the stockings of the teacher Nora Neumann on the window bolt of a skylight), found in a dark corner of his desk a notebook.  He took it out and looked at it.  On the label was written:  This work Martin Mueller dedcates to the new primitives.  On the first page was written:  Dear Lenzlicht, you are the only one of the imbeciles in the institution whom I believe capable of half-way understanding the observations which I have written down here.  But reading this will demonstrate to you that you also, poor blind man, came into only glancing contact with my personality, as if it were some empty face, without feeling its powerful sensibility.  Perhaps you will get an inkling (then you could call yourself lucky).  I shall kill myself on the top-hung window, alone in the realization.  My work will endure.  Martin Mueller.

Mr. Lenzlicht was surprised when he read the sentences.  Then he thought about the dimensions of childrens’ imaginations.  He was neither happy nor sad, but he seemed dark.  Thinking was for him no passion, therefore he soon continued reading.