mistake for once and therefore go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum again the next day, but surely, I reflected, only for Reger alone to make such a mistake or for me alone to make such a mistake, but surely not for both of us, Reger and me, to make a mistake on this point. Reger had expressly said to me yesterday, Come here tomorrow , Ican still hear Reger saying it. But Irrsigler, of course, had not heard anything about it and did not know anything about it and was, quite naturally, astonished to see Reger and me back at the museum today. If Reger had not said to me yesterday: Come here tomorrow, I should not have come to the Kunsthistorisches Museum today, possibly not until next week, for unlike Reger, who in fact goes to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day, and has moreover done so for decades, I do not go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day but only when I feel like it and when I am in the mood for it. And if I wish to see Reger I do not necessarily have to go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, I only have to go to the Ambassador Hotel, where he always goes after leaving the Kunsthistorisches Museum. At the Ambassador I can see Reger every day if I am so disposed. At the Ambassador he has his corner by the window, that is the table next to the so-called Jewish table, which stands in front of the Hungarian table, which stands behind the Arab table when you look from Reger's table towards the door to the foyer. Of course I much prefer going to the Ambassador rather than to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but when I cannot wait for Reger to come to the Ambassador I go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum a little before eleven in order to meet him, my imaginary father. Until noon he finds the eighteen-degree temperature at the Kunsthistorisches Museum agreeable, in the afternoon he is happier at the warm Ambassador, which always keeps a temperature of twenty-three degrees. In the afternoon I am no longer so fond of thinking nor do I think so intensively, Reger says, so I can afford the Ambassador. The Kunsthistorisches Museum is his mental production shop, he says, while the Ambassador is, in a manner of speaking, his ideas-processing machine. At the Kunsthistorisches Museum I feel exposed, at the Ambassador I feel sheltered, he says. This contrast of Kunsthistorisches Museum and Ambassador is what my thinking needs more than anything else, exposure on the one side and shelter on the other, the atmosphere at the Kunsthistorisches Museum on the one side and the atmosphere at the Ambassador on the other, exposure on the one side and shelter on the other, my dear Atzbacher; the secret of my thinking is based on my spending the morning at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the afternoon at the Ambassador. And what greater opposites could there be than the Kunsthistorisches Museum, that is the picture gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and the Ambassador. I have made the Kunsthistorisches Museum a mental habit for myself just as the Ambassador, he said. The quality of my reviews for The Times, to which, incidentally, I have been a contributor for thirty-four years, he said, in fact depends on my visiting the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Ambassador, the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other morning, the Ambassador every afternoon. This routine alone saved me after the death of my wife. My dear Atzbacher, without this routine I should have died too, Reger said yesterday. Everybody needs such a routine for survival, he said. It may be the craziest of all routines but he needs it. Reger's condition seems to have improved, his way of speaking is once more the same as before the death of his wife. Although he says he has now got over the dead point, he will nevertheless suffer all his life from having been left on his own by his wife. Time and again he says that he had been trapped in the lifelong mistaken belief that he would leave his wife, that he would die before her, and because her death came so suddenly he had