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underneath the pressed flower petals; he binds his beloved brick-red Reclam booklets in brightly colored pasteboard with his own hands and uses a drawing pen with an ultrafine point to simulate printed letters on the spines with microscopic accuracy and remarkable detail. Late at night, when he knows the neighbors are all asleep, he plays a somewhat labored but enthusiastic violin from scores he wrote out himself, mostly Schubert and Mendelssohn, or copies the finest verses and thoughts out of borrowed books onto white textured quarto sheets, which, when he has a hundred of them, he binds into an album with a glossy cover and a brightly colored label. He’s like a Koranic calligrapher who loves the handwriting with its delicate curves and shading for the mute joy of it, its silent expressive flair. For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidized flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicolored rows; he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener’s delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands. He never goes to the village inn: he abhors beer and smoke as the holy do evil. If he’s outside and hears the boorish voices of brawlers or drunks behind a window, he hurries past with quick, outraged steps. The Hoflehners are the only people he’s been seeing since his wife fell ill. Often he drops in after dinner, to chat with them or (they’re fond of this) to read aloud from books, especially the Wildflowers of Austria’s own Adalbert Stifter. His voice is actually somewhat dry, but it soars musically when he’s in the grip of emotion. His timid and somewhat cramped soul always feels subtly more expansive when he looks up from the book and sees the young woman listening, herblond head bowed. She seems so sensitive, so attentive, and that makes him feel she understands him. Christine’s mother has noticed his growing feeling and knows that, once his wife has met her inevitable fate, he’ll look more boldly at her daughter. But Christine is stoic and says nothing: it’s been a long time since she gave any thought to herself.
    The schoolteacher carries the suitcase on one shoulder, the slightly lower one (he ignores the laughing schoolboys). It’s not much of a load, but Christine hurries ahead so nervously and impatiently that he pants to keep up with her; her departure has unexpectedly put her in a dreadful state. Three times, despite the doctor’s express orders, her mother stumbled down the stairs and followed her into the entry, inexplicably anxious to hold on to her; three times the stout old woman had to be led back up sobbing, though time was short. And then it happened, as so often in recent weeks: in the midst of her weeping and carrying on, the old woman suddenly became winded and had to be put to bed, gasping for breath. Christine left her in that condition, and now her worry is becoming a guilty feeling: “My God, I’ve never seen her so upset, what if something happens to her and I’m not there? Or if she needs something at night—my sister isn’t coming from Vienna till Sunday. The bakery girl, she gave me her solemn word she’d stay with her in the evening, but you can’t depend on her; she’ll abandon her own mother if there’s a chance to go dancing. No, I shouldn’t have done it, I shouldn’t have let myself be talked into it. Traveling, that’s something for people who don’t have someone sick at home, not for people like us, especially if it’s so far away you can’t go home whenever you want. And what will I get out of all this gadding about anyway? How am I supposed to enjoy myself if I can’t relax, if I’ve got to be thinking every minute about whether she might need something, and nobody’s there at night, and they don’t hear the bell downstairs, or they don’t want to hear it? They don’t like us in the house, the landlord and the landlady; if they had their way