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me if they really thought about it, but would in fact insist that I go. Actually going was something else again. I don’t know why I did it. But today I can recognize that events back then were part of a lifelong pattern in which thinking and doing have either come together or failed to come together—I think, I reach a conclusion, I turn the conclusion into a decision, and then I discover that acting on the decision is something else entirely, and that doing so may proceed from the decision, but then again it may not. Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do. Something—whatever that may be—goes into action; “it” goes to the woman I don’t want to see anymore, “it” makes the remark to the boss that costs me my head, “it” keeps on smoking although I have decided to quit, and then quits smoking just when I’ve accepted the fact that I’m a smoker and always will be. I don’t mean to say that thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources, and is my behavior, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions.

CHAPTER SIX
    S HE WASN ’ T at home. The front door of the building stood ajar, so I went up the stairs, rang the bell, and waited. Then I rang again. Inside the apartment the doors were open, as I could see through the glass of the front door, and I could also make out the mirror, the wardrobe, and the clock in the hall. I could hear it ticking.
    I sat down on the stairs and waited. I wasn’t relieved, the way you can sometimes be when you feel funny about a certain decision and afraid of the consequences and then relieved that you’ve managed to carry out the former without incurring the latter. Nor was I disappointed. I was determined to see her and to wait until she came.
    The clock in the hall struck the quarter hour, then the half hour, then the hour. I tried to follow its soft ticking and to count the nine hundred seconds between one stroke and the next, but I kept losing track. The yard buzzed with the sound of the carpenter’s saws, the building echoed with voices or music from one of the apartments, and a door opened and closed. Then I heard slow, heavy, regular footsteps coming up the stairs. I hoped that whoever he was, he lived on the second floor. If he saw me—how would I explain what I was doing there? But the footsteps didn’t stop at the second floor. They kept coming. I stood up.
    It was Frau Schmitz. In one hand she was carrying a coal scuttle, in the other a box of briquets. She was wearing a uniform jacket and skirt, and I realized that she was a streetcar conductor. She didn’t notice me until she reached the landing—she didn’t look annoyed, or surprised, or mocking—none of the things I had feared. She looked tired. When she put down the coke and was hunting in her jacket pocket for the key, coins fell out onto the floor. I picked them up and gave them to her.
    “There are two more scuttles down in the cellar. Will you fill them and bring them up? The door’s open.”
    I ran down the stairs. The door to the cellar was open, the light was on, and at the bottom of the long cellar stairs I found a bunker made of boards with the door on the latch and a loose padlock hanging from the open bolt. It was a large space, and the coke was piled all the way up to the ceiling hatch through which it had been poured from the street into the cellar. On one side of the door was a neat stack of briquets; on the other side were the coal scuttles.
    I don’t know what I did wrong. At home I also fetched the coke from the cellar and never had any problems. But then the coke at home wasn’t piled so high. Filling the first scuttle went fine. As I picked up the second scuttle by the handles and tried to shovel the coke up off the floor, the mountain began to move. From the top little pieces