The Mole’s Writings In The Grey Notebook Iii
i 1894Mangin walked with hunched shoulders in the Torenturmstrasse.
“What wrong with you?” the woman in the w***e-house had asked. Her voice was thick and slurred. He had turned his head away. In his mind, he saw his hands around her windpipe. He didn’t stay long. Mangin turned the corner toward the Blutgasse. A more pompous city than Vienna was hard to imagine. Even the street names sounded like titles of novels.
He blamed the wine for his disastrous choice in the red-light district and tried to get rid of the memory of her belly, flabby from too much alcohol and those abhorrent coffee-house dumplings that Viennese women wolfed down. He reached the Judengasse. In spite of the late hour, the alley was still thronging with movement, light and
