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How amiable and harmless this street had seemed only yesterday. Must not think. On, on!
    We were very close to Haager’s house. During those few minutes I had several hundred times lived through in advance the scene that awaited me. Now we were there. Now it was coming.
    But it was impossible to endure. I stood still.
    â€œWell? What’s the matter?” Father asked.
    â€œI’m not going in,” I muttered.
    He looked down at me. He had known from the start, of course. Why had he pretended all this and gone to so much trouble. There was no point to it.
    â€œThen you didn’t buy the figs at Haager’s?” he asked.
    I shook my head.
    â€œI see,” he said with seeming calm. “Then we might as well go back home.”
    He behaved decently. He spared me on the street, in front of people. There were many people out walking; someone greeted my father every minute. What playacting! What stupid, senseless torment! I could not be grateful to him for sparing me.
    He knew everything, of course! And he let me dance, let me perform my useless capers the way you let a captive mouse dance in its wire trap before you drown it. If only he had hit me over the head with his cane right at the start, without asking me any questions at all! I would have preferred that to the calm and righteousness with which he caught me in my idiotic net of lies and slowly strangled me. Maybe it was better to have a coarse father than such a refined and just one. When the kind of father I read about in stories gave his children a terrible beating in rage or drunkenness, then the father was in the wrong, and although the blows hurt, the child could shrug his shoulders inwardly and despise him. With my father, that wouldn’t do. He was too refined, too good, never in the wrong. He always made me feel small and wretched.
    With clenched teeth I preceded him into the house and returned to my room. He was still quiet and cool, or rather pretending to be so, for in reality he was very angry, as I clearly felt. Now he began to talk in his usual way.
    â€œI would like to know what the purpose of this farce is? Can’t you tell me that? I knew at once that your whole pretty story was a lie. So why were you trying to make a fool of me? You don’t seriously think me so stupid as to believe you?”
    I continued to clench my teeth. I swallowed. If only he would stop. As if I myself had any idea why I had told him the story! As if I myself had any idea why I could not confess my crime and ask for forgiveness. As if I even had any idea why I had stolen those wretched figs. Had I wanted to? Had I done it on reflection and with reasons, knowing what I was doing? Wasn’t I sorry I had done it? Wasn’t I suffering because of it more than he?
    He waited, his face nervous, tense with the effort of patience. For just a moment, in my unconscious, I fully understood the situation, but I could not have put it into words as I can today. It was this: I had stolen because I had gone into Father’s room in need of comfort and because to my disappointment I had found it empty. I had not wanted to steal. When I found Father not there I had only wanted to spy, to poke among his things, to penetrate his secrets, to find out something about him. That was it. Then the figs lay there and I stole them. And I immediately regretted the act and all day yesterday I had suffered torment and despair, had wanted to die, had condemned myself, had conceived new, good resolutions. But today—today everything was different. I had tasted the repentance and all the rest to the full; I was less emotional now and felt inexplicable but enormous resistances toward my father and toward everything he expected and demanded of me.
    If I had been able to tell him that, he would have understood me. But even children, though they are far ahead of adults in cleverness, are perplexed and alone when they confront fate.
    Stiff with defiance and determined