February 23rd.
Past midnight. I said good-night to my mother; the street is silent, and my room is cold.
How often have I, at this table, imagined destinies that existed only in the author’s mind, and while I wrote the story brought the children of my fancy to very life! But now life is harder than the destinies which I ever imagined, and more than once of late my real existence has seemed to me like some fantastic tale, beheld from the outside, as though at a distance....
This morning the newspapers have published a new law just passed by the Government to oppose all attempts at a counter-revolution. It empowers the Government to put ‘out of harm’s way’ any one who is, in their opinion, dangerous to the achievements of the revolution or to the popular republic. This means that anyone of us who is obnoxious in their eyes can be arrested without any further preliminaries.
It was about midday when my telephone, which has been mute for a long time, raised its voice. A cousin of mine was speaking, and her voice, though she was obviously making efforts to appear calm, was excited.
“Knöpfler would like to speak to you. Important—Urgent.”
“Why doesn’t he come here, then?”
“He cannot come now. Mother-in-law keeps an eye on him. Come to us, we will meet in the street.”
She put the receiver down. Among ourselves we always refer to the police as ‘mother-in-law.’