TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Matthias Nawrat

it. Yet I was also overcome, once I’d hung up, by a strange feeling of discomfort.

What do you mean by discomfort? asked Veronika, who was sitting opposite me on our sofa in the hallway, in the alcove below the window, when I told her about our telephone conversation. I don’t know, I said. At that moment, although it felt exaggerated, I couldn’t help thinking of the last words of the ivory dealer Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; I saw the scene on the Congo River before my mind’s eye. I saw Kurtz wasting away in his cabin, stricken by insanity, long since lost for the life of normal people, as he emerges for instants from crazed nightmares and, his gaze now focused on another sphere, repeats over and over the same words: the horror.

You’re exaggerating, Veronika said.

Presumably, I said.

•

Cake

The architect lived in a part of Schöneberg dominated by bourgeois residential blocks. The flats behind the windows, as I could see through some of the panes while walking past their bay fronts, had high ceilings with stucco mouldings. Here, the Arab-

34