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like large consecrated wafers waiting for the Holy Ghost to descend upon them. These people never grow accustomed to the organ; they have no past and no memory. Every Sunday the flutes and violins and basses strike their alienated minds as unexpected and new. Then the priest at the altar begins, and they turn toward him.
    Not all the inmates follow the mass. In the rear rows there are many who do not move. They sit there as though shrouded in nameless sorrow and surrounded by an infinite void—but perhaps that is only the way it seems. Perhaps they are in different worlds where there has been no word of the crucified Saviour; perhaps they are absorbed harmlessly and innocently in a music by contrast with which the organ sounds pale and crude. Or maybe they are thinking of nothing at all, as indifferent as the sea or life or death. Only we give meaning to nature. What it may be in itself, perhaps those heads down there know, but they cannot betray the secret. What they see has made them dumb. They could be the last descendants of the builders of the Tower of Babel. Their tongues have been twisted and they cannot communicate what they have seen from the highest terraces.
    I peer toward the front rows. On the right side in a flicker of rose and blue I see Isabelle's dark head. She is kneeling in her pew very straight and slim. She did not look around when the organ began. Often she does look around, but today she seems so drawn into herself that she hears nothing. Her narrow head is inclined to one side like a Gothic statue. She is not praying, she is some place whither no one can follow her. I push back the basses and the vox humana   and pull out the vox caeiestis . That is the softest and most rapturous of the organ registers. We are approaching the divine transformation. Bread and wine are becoming the flesh and blood of God. It is a miracle like that other one, the creation of man out of dust and clay. Riesenfeld maintains that the third is man's failure to do anything with that miracle except to exploit and kill his fellow man in increasingly wholesale fashion and to crowd into the brief interval between death and death as much egoism as possible—although only one fact is really certain from the start: that he must die. That's what Riesenfeld says, Riesenfeld of the Odenwald Granite Works, one of the sharpest, most enterprising manipulators in the business of death. Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi .
    After mass the nurses of the institution give me breakfast of eggs, cold cuts, bouillon, bread, and honey. That's part of my salary. It takes care of the midday meal, for Eduard's coupons are not good on Sunday. In addition, I receive two thousand marks, a sum just sufficient to pay my streetcar fare there and back, if that's what I wanted to use it for. I have never asked for a raise. Why, I do not know; when it comes to Karl Brill and the tutoring lessons for the son of Bauer, the bookseller, I fight for one like a wild goat.
    After breakfast I go for a walk in the asylum park. It is a handsome, spacious estate with trees, flowers, and benches surrounded by a high wall; one might think he was in a rest home if he did not notice the bars at the windows.
    I love the park because it is quiet and I don't have to talk to anyone about war, politics, or the inflation. I can sit in silence and do such old-fashioned things as listen to the wind and the birds and watch the light filtering through the bright green of the treetops.
    Those of the inmates who are allowed out are strolling by. Most are quiet, a few are talking to themselves, one or two carry on lively discussions with one another or with visitors and attendants, and many sit silent and alone, heads bowed and motionless as though turned to stone in the sun—until they are herded back into their cells.
    It took me some time to get used to this sight—and even now there are moments when I stare at the madmen as I did in the beginning, with a mixture of curiosity,