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experience.
    It was the deaf gardener. He was standing beside me, bending over the grass, still working away as if nothing had happened.
    So far as he was concerned, nothing had happened. To him everything was as it had been before. He had not heard the cry or the shots. But now he must have felt my eyes on him, for he stood up and looked at me.
    "You called me, sir," he said.
    I shook my head. No, I hadn't called him.
    He didn't believe me. The muffled, confused noise that reached his deaf ears had given him a vague idea that someone had called his name.
    "But you did call me, sir," he said grumpily, but he was still suspicious of me and kept me under observation, looking at me sideways while he went on with his work.
    And only now was I overcome with the horror I had not felt when faced with Eugen Bischoff's body, but now it was suddenly there, and shock sent ice-cold shivers down my spine.
    No, I had not called him. But the way he stood there and stared at me and swung the sickle as he cut the grass: he was the deaf elderly gardener, but for a moment he looked like the figure of death in an old picture.

FIVE
    It lasted only for a moment, and then I regained control of my nerves and my senses. I shook my head, I could not help smiling at the fact that in a waking dream I had seen in that simple old servant of the household the silent messenger, the ferryman across the everlasting stream. Slowly I walked down the garden until I reached the edge of the slope, and there, at a concealed spot between the fence and the greenhouse I found a table and a bench, and sat down.
    It must have rained, or was it the evening dew? The wet leaves and branches of the elderberry bushes brushed against my face, a drop of water trickled down my hand. There must have been some spruce or pine trees not far away, I could not see them in the dark, but their smell reached me.
    It did me good to sit there. I breathed in the cool, damp garden air, I let the wind stroke my face, and I listened to the breathing of the night. Inside me there was a quietly nagging anxiety, I was afraid they might have missed me and be looking for me, and that they might find me here. No, I must remain alone, there was no-one to whom I could talk at that moment. I was afraid of meeting Dina and her brother — what, at that moment, could I have said to them? Nothing but empty words of pitifully inadequate commiseration, the triviality of which filled me with horror.
    It was clear to me that my disappearance would be taken for what at the deepest level it really was — flight from the gravity of the hour. But I didn't mind. I remembered that I had often done the same thing as a child. On my mother's name day, when I should have recited the carefully inculcated verses and good wishes, I had been afflicted by similar fears, and took refuge somewhere where no-one could find me, and reappeared only when everything was over.
    The sound of a mouth organ floated over to me from the open kitchen window of a neighbouring house. A few bars of a stupid, vacuous waltz I had heard a thousand times before, the Valse bleue or Souvenir de Moscou , I couldn't remember what it was called. How did it come about that it had such a deeply calming effect on me, that all the weight that had been crushing me suddenly lifted? The Valse bleue , an appropriate dirge for the death of a human being. Over on the pavilion floor lay someone who was no longer a fellow human being but belonged to another world, had become incomprehensible and strange. But where was the shudder of awe, the shudder of the tragic, the inconceivable and the unalterable? The Valse bleue. The rhythm of life and death was a banal dance tune. Thus we come and thus we go. What shatters us and casts us down utterly turns out to be an ironic smile on the face of the world spirit, to whom suffering and grief and death are continually recurring phenomena familiar since the beginning of time.
    The music suddenly stopped, and for several