When Professor Hagauer had returned to his home and workplace from his father-in-law’s funeral and a brief visit to the capital, his environment received him exactly as it always did after his short trips, and he in turn, pleasantly conscious of having properly settled a matter and now exchanging his traveling shoes for the house slippers in which a man works twice as well, turned his attention to his surroundings. He betook himself to his school; he was deferentially greeted by the janitor; he felt himself welcomed when he encountered the teachers subordinate to him; in the principal’s office the files and problems no one had dared to tackle in his absence awaited him; as he hastened along the corridors, he was accompanied by a sense that his steps lent wings to the building: Gottlieb Hagauer was a personage and knew it; encouragement and good cheer beamed from his brow throughout the institution of learning he was in charge of, and whenever outside the school someone asked him how his wife was doing or where she was, he would answer with the serenity of a man who knows himself to be respectably married. It is well known that so long as a man is capable of procreation, he experiences brief interruptions of his married life as if a light yoke has been lifted, even when he has no intentions of taking illicit advantage of his freedom, and that after the period of respite has elapsed, he takes up his happiness once more refreshed. That was how Hagauer, too, at first guilelessly accepted Agathe’s absence, for a while not even noticing how long his wife was staying away.

What actually drew his attention to it was the same wall calendar, with the page to be torn off day after day, that had appeared in Agathe’s memory as an appalling symbol of life; it hung in the dining room as a spot that did not belong on the wall—persisting there as a New Year’s gift from a stationery store ever since Hagauer had brought it home from school, and because of its dreariness not only tolerated but maintained by Agathe. Now, it would have been entirely in Hagauer’s nature if after his wife’s departure he had taken over the task of tearing the sheets off this calendar, for it was contrary to his habits to let that part of the wall run wild, as it were. But on the other hand he was a man who knew at all times on what latitude of the week or month he was situated in the ocean of infinity; moreover, he already had a calendar in his office in school anyway; and finally, just as he was about to raise his hand to regulate the measurement of time in his home, he had felt a strange smiling reluctance, one of those impulses through which, as it later turned out, fate announces itself, but which at that moment he merely took for a tender, chivalrous sentiment that took him by surprise and made him pleased with himself: he decided that the page marking the day when Agathe had left the house should remain untouched, as a token of homage and a souvenir, until her return.