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look. A car stood waiting. The drive was rattly. Otto stammered out a question, but the memory of a kiss enraptured him.
    Suddenly the maid was standing on the steps of the house, and he broke down as she took his heavy suitcase off him. He hadn’t yet seen his mother, but his father was alive. There he sat by the window, bloated in his armchair … Otto went towards him and gave him his hand. ‘You won’t kiss me anymore, Otto?’ his father asked quietly. The son threw himself at his father, then ran outside and stood on the balcony, yelling into the street. He grew weary from crying and dreamily began to remember his schooling, his practicum years, the passage to America. ‘Mr Martin.’ He composed himself and felt ashamed, knowing his father was alive. As he sobbed once more, the girl put her hand on his shoulder. Looking up mechanically, he saw a healthy, blonde person: the repudiation of the sick man he had touched. He felt himself at home.
    In the liveliest quarter of town lay the library that Otto frequented during his two-week stay. Every morning he worked for three hours on a text that was supposed to earn him a doctorate in political economy. In the afternoons he went back to study the illustrated art journals. He loved art and dedicated much time to it. He was not alone in these rooms. He was on good terms with the dignified clerk who issued and received books. When he looked up from his books with a furrowed brow, his mind blank, he frequently spotted a familiar face from his high-school days.
    The solitude of these days, which was never idle, did him good after the last few weeks on the Riviera, when all his nerves had been enlisted in the service of a passionate woman. At night in bed he sought the details of her body, or took pleasure in sending her his weary sensuality in lovely waves. He rarelythought of her. If he sat opposite a woman on the tram he only raised his eyebrows meaningfully, wearing a blank expression – a gesture with which he hoped to solicit unapproachable solitude for sweet inertia.
    The activities of the household were steadily focussed on the dying man. They did not bother Otto at all. But one morning he was awoken earlier than usual and led before his father’s corpse. It was bright in the room. His mother lay in pieces in front of the bed. The son, however, felt such strength that he took her under the arm and said firmly: ‘Stand up, Mother.’ On this day he went to the library as usual. His gaze, when it passed over the women, was even emptier and more impassive than usual. As he stepped onto the platform of the tram, he held close the folder containing two pages of his work.
    And yet from this day on he worked with less certainty. He noticed deficiencies; fundamental problems, which until then he had regularly passed over, began to preoccupy him. While ordering books, he would suddenly lose all composure and orientation. He was surrounded by stacks of periodicals in which he searched for the most inane data with absurd meticulousness. When he interrupted his reading, he could never shake off the feeling that he was someone whose clothes were too big. As he chucked the clods of soil into his father’s grave, it dawned on him that there was a connection between the eulogy, the endless row of acquaintances and his own thoughtlessness. ‘This has all happened so often. How typical it is.’ And as he passed from the grave through the crowd of mourners, his heartache became like a thing that one is accustomed to carrying around, and his face appeared to have broadened with indifference. He was irritated by the quiet conversations between his mother and brother when the three of them sat at the dinner table. The blonde girl brought the soup.Mindlessly, Otto raised his head and looked into her brown, clueless eyes.
    In this manner Otto sought to brighten the petty anxieties of these days of mourning. Once – in the evening – he