V )   O C T O B E R , 1 9 4 4   -   T H E   P E A H E N ,   I N D I G I R K A   R I V E R   D E T L A

From Peter’s diaries: “What lurks within the many-feathered belvedere: hallways with locked doors; arched windows set at the end of long corridors with views out over the immense plain with its many rivers; the shadows of clouds and of winged men moving over its glassy-green surface, sound of an oompah band in the far distance, smell of rancid wig-powder. I hear the clicking of talons on marble, the rustling sound of jibcloth and feathers, so evocative and full of memories (bisburdt strudel on a summers day near a waterfall in the Bremenwelt). It is a heavily corsetted and panniered pea hen! I accompany her to a room with a full canopied four-poster bed, the entirety of it soaked in damask water and urea. The sun, majestically setting over the city’s many fetid canals, sends its last rays through the gauzy flowing curtains into the twilit bedchamber. My attendants sew a pair wings directly into the flesh of my back, sending small runnels of blood down my pantaloons on to the marble floor. A softly plucked lute string reverberates through the room, a little groin-music (the vibration of my bedroom as the 23:01 express to Neukatechismus thunders over the railway viaduct). The Pea-hen waits for me in the bed, she is so heavily powdered that I can hardly grope my way into the gilded palaquin, this mouldering, malignant, world of splendor with its squalid pleasures, the supreme ecstasy of a yellow-toothed, bewigged and powdered pea-hen in a foul-smelling, threadbare gilded palaquin and a pair of wings biting into the flesh! (the screams of burning men as they run from burning houses into burning streets!)”