But of course, I was merely imagining all this. Nothing of the sort happened in reality. Absolutely nothing happened in reality. Except that the silence, astir with clearings of throats and noses blown into handkerchiefs, began to show signs of overextension. Also, a contraction in the skin on the back of my neck indicated that once again many eyes were glued to my nape. Someone in the front row even bent forward to look into my face.

I felt extremely ill at ease. In front of me, rooted near the lilac bushes, stood the pastor, he too a flower: a white disk of petals on a black stalk, with a human head as a syncarp. His eyes too soaked into me. His throat, wreathed by the furbelow ruff, was then cleared—an unmistakable admonition. Finally, a jolt passed through the robe. With flowing folds, the robe began to move and carried the wondrous blossom of the head close to me, lowering the blossom to my nose as though inviting me to take a sniff.

“Would you like to say a few words,” it murmured—without a sympathetically vibrating question mark—from the furbelow ruff.

I shook my head, frightened and bewildered, aware of my incapacity.

“It is expected of you.”

This was not the time to negotiate by whom it was expected and what right they had to expect anything of me. So I simply murmured, “I can’t!” And feeling that this did not suffice, I stretched my neck and whispered toward the mountebank skull on the furbelow ruff, “I’m too moved.”

“Then your words shall be all the more ardent.”

It was no use. I had known it from the very start, when sneaking in here and hoping to remain unnoticed. Nothing could be done. I had to go along with it.

So I got to my feet and walked to the flower hill (seeing myself just as I had seen Witte and Scherping in my mind’s eye) and stationed myself in Witte’s place (hoping that no one would see me there as ridiculously as I saw myself). And I gazed down at the conquered peak of white blossoms—

and there was nothing. Nothing. No Schwab. No dead friend for me to mourn. No corpse with a waxen face. No deceased after whom I could send a few ardent words into the great void. A heap of tightly wired flowers on a socle, which loomed out of a pit in the floor. That was all.

A rat hunt began in my brain. Schwab had snuck away and left me in the shit. Typical. But just who was he anyway—Schwab? Did I even know who was meant when people talked about a man named Johannes Schwab? Wasn’t he someone else, and wasn’t the one I meant merely a figment, a fiction of mine? When had I last seen him? In Paris. At Orly Airport. He had wept and stuffed my pockets with money. Then he had vanished faster than that money. Had dissolved more swiftly into nothingness. A memory during his lifetime. And certainly a memory when the news of his death had arrived. My brother Schwab.