You have always had to hide your age. For two reasons, as far as I am aware. First, you have always appeared much younger than your age, not unlike one of your cousins, who appeared thirty when he was fifty. Except for your eyes, I must add. The discrepancy could embarrass others, you have always thought. Furthermore, you could be embarrassed yourself. You remember one occasion like that, in a train that just pulled out of Munich, when it turned out that a gästarbeiter, full of wrinkles and scars, was almost ten years younger. Anybody would think it was the other way around. You deceived that boy, telling him that you just started your undergraduate studies, in order to protect both of you from the truth. And second, you have always felt old, aged, almost dead already. Sometimes your eyes, your dead eyes, make that obvious. Your eyes sometimes appear beyond age, beyond time. The coldness of your eyes scares people. But you have learned how to make your eyes appear congruent with your baby face. Not always, but most of the time. After a glimpse at your real age, your agelessness, the spectators deserve a joyful performance, you have always thought, a bit of the frivolous horsing around of a mere boy. And yes, you have always obliged. When you are alone, however, you avoid seeing yourself in the mirror, for your eyes tell you something about eternity, something about the indestructible nature of people like you… Precisely this is unbearable to you. And this scares you, you must admit.