All right. I want to hide behind the girl, she’s my mask, as you know, the mask I wear so that I can run naked across the playing field. So the girl can’t look like me. And she can’t act as I would act. While I turn a smiling face to the world, a face that always makes me look younger than I really am, while people give me friendly advice because they think I need it, while things come easily to me because people aren’t afraid of me — the girl has to be uncouth and unshapely, dirty where I’m clean, timid where I’m confident, uptight where I’m uninhibited, weak where I’m strong, but nevertheless this girl is my mask, nevertheless this girl still has to accept advice when someone thinks she needs it, she can’t make others afraid, she has to be able to be happy. And the reverse is true, too: I also have to be uncouth, unshapely, dirty, timid, uptight, and weak. Because otherwise I wouldn’t know this character well enough to wear her as a mask. The mask has to fit me but nevertheless hide me, the story has to be my story but still someone else’s, if I’m going to be able to tell it at all. That’s why Josef Winkler can write in his book Roppongi: “When my father died, we were staying in Japan . . . , we drove from Tokyo into the mountains of Nagano, past smoking volcanoes, to a literature symposium,” but the Josef Winkler in the book isn’t identical to the writer Josef Winkler; and Thomas Bernhard can write in his book A Child: “At the age of eight I rode my first few yards on a bicycle in the street below our apartment in the Taubenmarkt in Traunstein. It was midday, and the streets of the self-important little provincial town were empty.”1 And the eight-year-old child is not identical with the child that Thomas Bernhard, the author of the book, was, because of course it’s also possible to wear a mask that shows your own face.