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Scherping was in America and has returned with plans for countless books, among them a translation of a recently published biography of Sonja Henie. Purely out of spite, Schwab refuses to support the plan, declares absolutely that if Scherping Publishing is moving in the direction of athletes’ biographies, he cannot remain as lead editor. Scherping, who enjoys torturing him, calls Sonja Henie “a genius.” Schwab ironically quotes Robert Musil’s “genius of a racehorse” from The Man without Qualities, which Scherping doesn’t get at first and then—after it’s been explained to him—he takes painful pleasure in his own philistinism. Aristides, bored to tears, stops listening to them. His thoughts stray: Sonja Henie, spinning like a top on the toes of her skates, takes on the shape of Uncle Ferdinand. The scene is the park in Bessarabia in the depths of winter. The pond is frozen, the ice swept clean and smooth as a mirror. Under their load of snow, the weeping willows on its banks are as bent as peddler women. The rowboat with its ornamental cast-iron seat back is stuck in the icy reeds and covered with snow. Uncle Ferdinand in a belted Norfolk jacket, knee britches, and woolen stockings and, like an adolescent, a fur cap on his head and his hands in a muff, has strapped ice skates onto his high lace-up boots. His left leg raised and gracefully bent at the knee, his hands in the muff in front of his chest, he executes a rapid spin on the toe of the other skate. His high cheekbones are burning with frost, the centrifugal force of his rotation combs his mustache in the direction of the spin. The image is so vivid that A. has the impression of a “manifestation” (as Uncle Helmuth described them from his spiritist séances). He clearly hears his mother’s ironical voice: “Isn’t he unspeakably ridiculous? He’s trying to bore his way through the ice to poor me. He always had to come to me through the ice, always on tiptoe . . .”

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A sudden insight whose absurdity strikes his innermost being connects this image of Uncle Ferdinand with Schwab. His mother’s words seem to apply to Schwab and himself. He has to shake himself awake.