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through the open window. Like distant sawing, the snores of Sergeant Major Knopf reach me from next door. There is the steely flash of swallows darting through the arch. Like the office below it, my room has two windows—one opening on the courtyard, the other on the street. For a moment I lean against the rear window and look into the garden. Suddenly a dreadful scream breaks the stillness and is followed by gasping and groaning. It is Heinrich Kroll, who sleeps in the other wing. He is having his nightmare again. In 1918 he was buried by an explosion, and now, five years later, he still occasionally dreams about it.
    I make coffee on my alcohol stove and pour a little kirsch into it. That's something I learned in France, and despite the inflation I always manage to have schnaps. My salary is never enough for a new suit—I simply can't save up the money for that, it loses its value too fast—but it takes care of the small items and, of course, a bottle of brandy now and then for comfort.
    I have margarine and plum preserve with my bread. The preserve is good; it comes from Mother Kroll's larder. The margarine is rancid, but that doesn't matter; during the war we all ate much worse. I survey my wardrobe. I have two uniforms remodeled into suits. One has been dyed blue, the other black—there wasn't much else to do with the gray-green material. Besides that I still have a suit from the time before I was a soldier. I have outgrown it a little, but it is a genuine civilian garment, not remodeled or adapted, and so I put it on. It goes with the tie that I bought yesterday afternoon, and that I am going to wear today so that Isabelle will see it.
    I walk contentedly through the streets of the city. Werdenbrück is an ancient town of sixty thousand, with wooden buildings and baroque structures interspersed with dreadful new developments. I cross it and go out along an avenue lined with horse chestnuts, then up a little hill to the big park where the insane asylum stands. There it is, in Sabbath peace, with birds twittering in the trees. I go there to play the organ at Sunday mass in the little church attached to the institution. I learned to play it when I was studying to be a teacher, and a year ago I snapped up the post here as a secondary job. I have a number of them. Once a week I give piano lessons to the rowdy children of Karl Brill, the shoe-maker, and in return get my boots resoled and a little money—and twice a week I tutor the idiot son of Bauer, the book-seller, and as a reward I am allowed to read all the new books and am given a discount when I want to make a purchase. Naturally this discount is exploited by the entire membership of the Poets' Club, even by the shameless Eduard Knobloch, who on these occasions suddenly becomes my friend.
    The mass begins at nine o'clock. I sit down at the organ and watch the last inmates coming in. They move forward silently and take their places in the pews. A few attendants and nurses sit between them and on the sides. Everything is done softly, much more silently than in the country churches where I played when I was a schoolmaster. There is no sound except the scuffling of shoes on the stone floor; they scuffle, they do not tramp. These are the footsteps of people whose thoughts are far away.
    In front of the altar the candles have been lit. The radiance from outside falls through the stained-glass window, mixing with the candle glow in a soft red and blue, transfused with gold. In this glow stands the priest in his brocaded vestments, and on the steps of the altar his assistants kneel in their red gowns and white tunics.
    I pull out the stops for flutes and vox humana and begin to play. With a jerk the heads of the inmates in the front rows turn around all at once as though pulled by a string. The pale faces and dark eyes stare expressionlessly upward toward the organ. In the dim golden light they float like bright, flat disks; sometimes in winter when it is dark they look