like any other habitué and better to enjoy the concerto floating around me while leafing through the paper in that relaxed, cultured way typical of the place, I could’ve it wouldn’t have been hard, if I’d only followed the natural inclination of culture as ushered on by the establishment, retreat and arrest-cure, I wouldn’t right now be exploding on the inside in European airspace, between nought and nought, indifference on all sides. Instead of making the most of that hallowed arena reputed the most conducive to culture, I was considering it now in the plane, therefore much too late, in shame, deep shame, I re-coiled my legs like venomous snakes and hunched my shoulders, what’s more I’d blitzed the pianist with a blizzard of shameless data in the purest tradition of girls without any self-control, inflicting on him the worst tortures of the Inquisition with my ill-educated habit of breaking the rules of conversation, which I’d never learned but I could at least have aped, the ape copies man better than I do I was thinking, catching sight of my misplaced girl’s head in the Café Einstein mirror; nothing of the ape to be seen there, apery as limitation and imitation as a guarantee of decorum, the decorous ape missing from the mirror where the extra-to-requirements indecorous girl sees herself as she truly is, what are you doing here, far from the ape, what is it you’re really after, leaping from branch to branch in front of the mirror like an ape-imitator, the inhumanity of the animal aping not man but ape, in instinctive imitation I leapt at any old straw. But what is it you’re really after? the pianist finally asked, blushing at my volleys of apery, my sister aping her ape for one act and I aping my sister for act two, we, my sister and I the Ape Inquisition and the pianist begging for mercy, how I ever came to this, interrogating an innocent pianist in the hot-seat of a popular intellectual café I don’t know, what I do know is that nothing will ever make it not have happened. I had to interrogate him, I had to trample barbarously upon the oh-so-French rules of conversation that I ought to have learned from Madame de Staël who I always refused to read, the quality of Madame de Staël’s conversation in the Prussian salons a model of restraint and French good taste but I just had to interrogate him in the most obnoxious way, I tried out my inquisition on the pianist who had come here specially to see me, the venue his choice, here precisely in all Berlin, to see me, he had chosen this perfect spot to promote from the start a peaceful, reassuring and cultured climate between us, tailor-made for our conversation and its disposition, instead of which he found himself hauled in for interrogation by an entirely shameless girl descended from apes, accompanied by a sister clearly fruit of the same tree and with hardly more moral compass than the first girl as far as he could tell.
One more piece of luck: I didn’t explain to the pianist how to play the piano, it was touch and go, I told myself later in the plane, it was a close-run thing, I could very well have done it, I’m perfectly capable, I know I’m capable of explaining the art of the well-tempered keyboard to a pianist as if I myself were a virtuoso. I don’t know anything about music, I’m sitting in front of a virtuoso pianist and explaining exactly how your fingers should rest on the keys, see what I’m capable of. I’m explaining to him how to do it, as if the virtuoso pianist were just waiting for me all along to show him the best way to go about it at last, as if he was going to be filled with wonder at all the little pianistic techniques that I would generously furnish him with so he could improve his playing and become even more virtuosic thanks to me. I truly am capable of leading a masterclass for a great pianist of worldwide renown. Of explaining (I can just see myself) how one ought to tackle the second movement of Beethoven’s Concerto in C major, for example, the opening attack, the crisp yet simultaneously resonant C chord and, in sweeping overview, on the generosity—I could hear myself in full flow—discoursing upon the generosity in Beethoven as if this were possible, and then upon the detail, a marginally lighter touch here, a little more color there; I would quite have expected the pianist ultimately to modify his interpretation of the second movement and to follow these little tips freely given by me, who cannot play the piano and know nothing about Beethoven. A piece of luck I narrowly squeaked out of that.
Two days later, leaving the Kaiser Café where I had once again all but spelled out to the virtuoso pianist how to handle his piano, a stroke of luck that I’d stopped myself just in time, I uttered my notorious Ich habe zu viel gesprochen for it was true, I had said too much, so much too much that I had to proclaim this brand-new truth the very moment it occurred to me; my noble pianist: no, not at all, it’s quite all right, he sweetly replied, warmly replied, even though it wasn’t fine, not only not fine but catastrophic, so catastrophic as to be irreparable, besides I didn’t repair anything but on the contrary promptly went and dug myself in deeper: of course I had to interrupt again, when I had only just said Ich habe zu viel gesprochen, I didn’t pause and count to ten, not to ten nor to any lesser number, I didn’t count at all; I just had to go on and on in the underground car park when he, our poor pianist, was already and indeed for some time had been, broken, kaput, as they say,
