“I assure you, incomes are down by twenty percent and life is twenty percent more expensive: that amounts to forty percent!” “And I can assure you, a six-day bicycle race creates bonds of friendship between nations!” These voices were coming out of his ear; coupé voices.^* Then he heard someone say, very distinctly: “Nevertheless, opera means more to me than anything!” “I suppose it’s a sport for you.” “No, it’s a passion!” He tilted his head as if to shake water out of his ear: the train had been crowded, the journey long. Drops of the general conversation that had seeped into him during the trip were now draining away. Ulrich had waited for the cheerfulness and bustle of arrival to pour out into the stillness of the square through the station gate, as if through the mouth of a duct, until its flow was reduced to small trickles; now he stood in the suction chamber of silence that follows upon noise. And along with the auditory disquiet induced by the sudden shift, he noticed an unfamiliar calm before his eyes. Everything visible was more pronounced than usual, and as he looked across the square, the cross-shaped frames of perfectly ordinary windows stood as black against the pale sheen of glass in the evening light as if they were the crosses of Golgotha. And all things in motion detached themselves from the stillness of the street in a way that does not happen in very large cities. Whether drifting or stagnant, everything here evidently had room to enlarge its importance. He detected this with some curiosity of reacquaintance as he regarded the large provincial town where he had spent some brief but not very pleasant parts of his life. It had, as he very well knew, a quality of rootless dislocation, like a colonial outpost. An ancient core of German burgher stock, transplanted centuries ago to Slavic soil, had worn away so thoroughly that, aside from a few churches and family names, hardly anything was left to remind one of them. Nor was there any evidence, except for a handsome palace that had survived, of the town’s having become the old seat of the provincial diet later on. But in the era of absolute government, this past had been covered over by a sprawling vice-regency, with its district headquarters, schools and universities, barracks, courthouses, prisons, episcopal residence, assembly rooms, and theater, along with their attendant staffs and the merchants and craftsmen they attracted, until eventually an industry of immigrant entrepreneurs filled the suburbs with one factory after another, exerting a stronger influence on the fate of this piece of earth in recent generations than anything else had. This town had a history, and it also had a face, but the eyes did not go with the mouth or the chin with the hair, and over everything lay the traces of a life roiled by much change and motion, but inwardly empty. It could be that under special personal circumstances this might favor some great departures from the ordinary.