Georg Letham

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Authors: Ernst Weiß
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door, was silent too. He yawned discreetly. My father yawned openly.
    At last he was sufficiently lucid. He turned to me, eyeing me as though I were an adolescent son asking him for money to meet paltry obligations. With his scrawny hand he fumbled on the night table, where loose change lay next to an old pocket watch. Finally I lost patience. I ordered the servant to run down and pay the cabdriver, thus leaving me alone with my father. I sat on the edge of his bed. My father ran his fingers through his snow-white, still thick hair, then wrapped his long, gaunt body more tightly in the bedclothes, rolled over again, a little closer to the wall, as though avoiding contact with my coat. And yet he knew nothing! Had he always been so observant, such a good judge of character? I took a carafe of water from the night table, poured out a glass. I put it in front of me without drinking from it. My father looked surprised, but still said nothing. Was he half asleep even now? How was it that an old man slept as soundly as a child? But he had to wake up eventually. I gave him the full glass. I made him drink it, and only now did he come to full awareness and take fright.
    I will never forget what happened then.
    But just the fact of it. My motive, what drove me to do it, that had become inexplicable to me even five minutes later, and five minutes earlier I had had no premonition.
    It arrived like a shot from a pistol, or, to use a more topical expression, from a Pravaz syringe, or like a torpedo from a submarine, or like a poison gas bomb out of a clear sky. I torpedoed the old man with a brief report of the incident. This “torpedo,” the response to anotherthat had been launched fifteen years earlier, had an incredible effect. As an experimental dog, unprepared by anesthesia, howls when its peritoneum is opened with a neat incision, so my father began to howl. Only not so loudly. But so horribly that I immediately held his lips shut. At first he bit into the ball of my thumb, but then he understood the necessity of his silence and frantically held my hand more tightly against his flaccid lips and his silky, warm mustache.
    And if what I had done made no sense, what he did was no better. Without giving me any counsel (at that point there were still many expedients that might have saved me), he sprang shakily out of bed, dressed in frenzied haste, rushed behind my back (I stood trembling at the window, looking out) to the door, then through the hall and down the stairs. It all happened in no time. Despite his age, he moved so fast that he was able to overtake the cabdriver. For the latter, drowsy as drivers often are at such a late hour, had trundled off at a crawl after carefully counting the fare he had taken from the old servant and placed in the breast pocket of his leather jacket. My father leaped into the old crate, and away they went. I did not hear what he shouted to the cabdriver, I only saw him wave to the old servant, who had run after him and was still standing there despondently; then he had the cab roar off at high speed.
XI
    I will now be extremely brief, despite the fact that what follows, what I wish to get out of the way in this section, the eleventh, is the bread and butter of that literary genre considered the most enthralling in our era, namely, the detective novel. What concerns me here is facts, such asthose of the original “torpedo” episode, which dates back at least fifteen years now and in which my father plays a starring role, and then facts that did not come to light until after my sentencing, and also those later facts surrounding the figure of that friend (as I have actually only been able to call him since he ceased to be one) of my youth, Walter.
    First, however, comes my return home (I went on foot, made detours, and it took me almost an hour), my surprise upon finding two burly uniformed policemen waiting for me on the dark landing. They brutally but adroitly seized me the moment I

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