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gone back to her book. I remain silent but despite this Wolfi continues.
    You know, it was on the bus. There’s something desperate about waiting for a bus, don’t you think? This is addressed less to me than to Andrea who has looked up and is now staring at Wolfi impassively. He explains to her how he hates catching empty buses, especially late at night.
    I’d rather walk, he says. But last night I got on the bus, you know, to come home. I sat next to an old woman who was sitting towards the back. There were only the two of us, her and me. I had been glad she was there, wisst Ihr. Suddenly, for no reason, she starts yelling, screaming that I’m trying to rape her. I stood up to get away from her but she got up too and began following me down the aisle, hitting me with her umbrella. For no reason at all, she just starts hitting me. Then the driver sees what’s happening in the rear-vision mirror and stops the bus so suddenly that we both nearly topple over into one of the seats in front of us while a car travelling close behind runs into the back of the bus. The bus driver gets up out of his seat and hurries down to find out what is going on and this mad woman, you know, is still hitting me. Well he tries to intervene, but whether accidentally or not I don’t know, she ends up striking him on the forehead. Immediately blood starts issuing from the wound [die Wunde fängt an zu bluten] and this, thank God, brings her to her senses. A few minutes later, with their sirens sounding and their lights flashing, the police arrive. And you know, they end up taking me in for questioning. Me, who had nothing to do with it!
    As Wolfi is telling his story I become more and more uneasy. When he finishes Andrea gets up without comment. She puts her book in her bag and slips the strap over her shoulder. She picks up the tray with her now empty plates. Before she leaves she turns to me and says: Thank you for last night.
    Nothing in the tone of what she says allows me to gauge whether this is meant positively or negatively. It is, in fact, goodbye.
    I fail to see the connection between these two incidents.
    Forster’s exhortation to the novelist was that he must ‘connect’. ‘Only connect’ he said. Forster did not say ‘he or she’. This is significant. It tells us a lot about Forster, the fact that he used the word ‘he’.
    ‘Only connect’.
    In my effort to find the connection between Wolfi’s retelling of the incident on the bus and Andrea’s enigmatic farewell, I missed, at least initially, the connection between Andrea’s presence and the conversation with Wolfi that followed.
    Retrospectively then, it is not Andrea’s disappearance which is significant but the fact that she was there in the first place. And yet I’m sure the two events, Andrea’s presence and Wolfi’s subsequent conversation are, in reality, totally disconnected . Their connection is only illusory, due to something Wolfi calls ‘die Elision proximatischer Zufälligkeit’ [the elision of proximate coincidence].
    But I resent the fact that for apparent reasons of narrative logic a real person seems to have been dropped out of my life, has, as it were, been dispensed with now that she has fulfilled the fictional role assigned to her. The thing is, I still miss her. I try to imagine her at some stage walking into a bookstore, browsing through the books on the shelves, selecting one, this one. She buys it, takes it home. As she reads it she comes to the section which begins: ‘I am sitting in the university dining room with a friend. Her name is Andrea Staiger.’
    Komisch, she says, ich heisse Andrea Staiger. That’s my name.
    At first she is prepared to accept it as pure coincidence. But what if she had read ‘Unterestrasse’, what then?
    [Ich glaub’ das nicht.] I don’t believe it, she says. That was my address. I see her racking her brains, trying to remember what may have been one of many chance encounters in her past. She rereads the