The young man who arrived with the bucket produces an unspeakably greasy rag—

“—Where’d you get that thing, in the garage? Well, dear friend, by all that’s right and fair, Wittewash is too top-shelf to clean off lubricating oil—”

—while Frau Busse from the outer office helps to fill the bucket and get the laundry powder ready (“Didja remember t’get out another bottle too, Bussekins?”), they go searching for an acceptable object to launder (Carlotta: “Perhaps one of the younger employees would lend us an undergarment . . . !”).

Meanwhile a waiter, obviously summoned from a nearby restaurant, is standing at the door with a tray of sandwiches, causing some confusion. Witte gives instructions to the secretary. “See to it he’s paid, Bussekins. Yep, from the postage money. Book it ‘For food and drink’ as usual.” Then he turns—at last!—to the bucket: “ ’Course, we gotta put some water in first.”

A. doesn’t dare look at Carlotta. He can sense the danger that a look between them might trigger an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

Frau Busse, who’d gone looking for something washable, reappears with something balled up in her fist: “It’s a hankie from a temp in bookkeeping who just had a nosebleed—” She unrolls the little piece of reddish brown, leopard-spotted cloth and offers it between thumb and forefinger to Carlotta, who waves it off in disgust. Witte gallantly takes it from her. “Outstanding. Blood is especially hard to wash out.” Frau Busse nods in agreement: “Hopefully it’s really from her nose.”

That has an effect. A.’s laughter dies in his throat and hatred bubbles up—

Cousin Wolfgang shared it with me—that hatred. He never admitted it. Unlike mine, his hatred was not directed at a class, at a particular kind of person shaped by society, at the type of person represented by this philistine Witte. When Wolfgang’s hatred broke out, it was always against Uncle Helmuth, his father; he loved his mother, Aunt Hertha, with an angry idolatry and suffered because she was “in thrall” to Uncle Helmuth. (“That bovine look! I can’t stand how she looks at him: as if nothing else in the world is happening in her field of vision except him. As if nothing is as desirable as suckling at the warm, comfortable udder of their togetherness . . .”)

But he courted her, continually gave her signs of his love: all sorts of attentions, little presents, proofs of his devotion. And yet she was the essence of everything I hated and he hated too, but without extending it to her class: soulful stupidity, the certainty that she and her kind were the omphalos, the navel of the world, contempt for everyone who wasn’t her kind, innate suspicion, envy, malice . . .

The characteristics of the middle class. Aunt Selma had none of them except anger, gnawing anger directed against herself, the anger of someone fallen in social status, which drove her to work like a indentured servant, “slave away,” deny herself—and to dream in secret: the nixie from the millpond bewitched into a cart horse—