At eight Hans Reiter lost interest in school. By then he had twice come close to drowning. The first time was during the summer and he was saved by a young tourist from Berlin who was spending his holidays in the Town of Chattering Girls. The young tourist saw a boy near some rocks, his head bobbing up and down, and after confirming that it was in fact a boy, since the tourist was shortsighted and at first glance thought it was a clump of seaweed, he removed his jacket, in which he was carrying some important papers, climbed down the rocks as far as he could go, and plunged into the water. In four strokes he was beside the boy, and once he’d scanned the shore for the best place to make for land, he began to swim toward a spot some thirty yards from where he’d gone in.

The tourist’s name was Vogel and he was a man of incredible optimism. Though perhaps he wasn’t optimistic so much as mad, and he was on holiday in the Town of Chattering Girls on the orders of his doctor, who, concerned about his health, endeavored to get him out of Berlin on the slightest pretext. If one was on anything like intimate terms with Vogel, his presence soon became unbearable. He believed in the intrinsic goodness of humankind, he claimed that a person who was pure of heart could walk from Moscow to Madrid without being accosted by anyone, whether beast or police officer, to say nothing of a customs official, because the traveler would take the necessary precautions, among them leaving the road from time to time and striking off across country. He was easily smitten and awkward, with the result that he didn’t have a girl. Sometimes he talked, not caring who might be listening, about the healing properties of masturbation (he cited Kant as an example), to be practiced from the earliest years to the most advanced age, which mostly tended to provoke laughter in the girls from the Town of Chattering Girls who happened to hear him, and which exceedingly bored and disgusted his acquaintances in Berlin, who were already overfamiliar with this theory and who thought that Vogel, in explaining it with such stubborn zeal, was really masturbating in front of them or using them as masturbation aids.

But bravery was another thing he held in high esteem, and when he saw that a boy, though at first he mistook him for seaweed, was drowning, he didn’t hesitate a second before throwing himself into the sea, which wasn’t exactly calm near the rocks just there, to rescue him. One further thing must be noted, which is that Vogel’s blunder (mistaking a boy with brown skin and blond hair for a tangle of seaweed) tormented him that night, after it was all over. In bed, in the dark, Vogel relived the day’s occurrences just as he always did, that is, with great satisfaction, until suddenly he saw the drowning boy again and himself watching, not sure whether it was a human being or seaweed. Sleep deserted him. How could he have mistaken a boy for seaweed? he asked himself. And then: in what sense can a boy resemble seaweed? And then: can a boy and seaweed have anything in common?

Before he formulated a fourth question, Vogel thought that possibly his doctor in Berlin was right and he was going mad, or perhaps not mad in the usual sense, but he was approaching the path of madness, so to speak, because a boy, he thought, has nothing in common with seaweed, and an observer from the rocks who mistakes a boy for seaweed is a person with a half-loosened screw, not a madman, exactly, with a screw altogether loose, but a man whose screw is loosening, and who, as a result, must tread more carefully in all matters regarding his mental health.

Then, since he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep all night, he began to think about the boy he had saved. He was very thin, he remembered, very tall for his age, and his speech was confoundedly garbled. When Vogel asked what had happened, the boy answered:

“Nut.”

“What?” asked Vogel. “What did you say?”

“Nut,” repeated the boy. And Vogel understood that nut meant: nothing, nothing happened.

And so it was with the rest of his vocabulary, which struck Vogel as highly picturesque and amusing, so he began to ask all kinds of pointless questions, just for the pleasure of listening to the boy, who answered everything in the most natural manner, for example, what do you call this wood, Vogel asked, and the boy answered Stavs, which meant Gustav’s wood, and: what’s the name of that wood over there, and the boy answered Retas, which meant Greta’s wood, and: what’s the name of that dark wood, to the right of Greta’s wood, and the boy answered annaname, which meant the wood that has no name, until they got to the top of the rocks where Vogel had left his jacket with the important papers in the pocket, and at the urging of Vogel, who wouldn’t let him get back in the water, the boy retrieved his clothes from a cave a little farther down the shore, a kind of resting place for gulls, and then they said goodbye, not without first introducing themselves:

“My name is Heinz Vogel,” Vogel said as if he were addressing an idiot, “what is your name?”

The boy told him it was Hans Reiter, pronouncing the name clearly, and then they shook hands and each went his separate way. All of this Vogel recalled as he tossed and turned in bed, reluctant to turn on the light and unable to sleep. What was it about the boy that made him look like seaweed? he asked himself. Was it his thinness, his sun-bleached hair, his long, placid face? And he wondered: should I return to Berlin, should I take my doctor more seriously, should I embark on a course of self-examination? Finally he grew tired of all the questions and jerked off, and fell asleep. (2666)