“I hope your migraine is gone,” Ulrich said. “There’s no sign of it that I can see.”

“I had no migraine at all, it was just simpler to say that,” Agathe explained. “I couldn’t very well send you a more intricate message through the butler: I was just lazy. I took a nap. I’ve got into the habit here of sleeping whenever I have a free minute. I’m lazy in general: out of desperation, I think. And when I heard you were coming, I said to myself: Let’s hope this will be the last time I’ll be sleepy, and then I indulged myself in a kind of sleep cure by taking one more nap. After careful consideration, for the butler’s purposes, I called the whole thing a migraine.”

“You don’t go in for sports?”

“Some tennis. But I detest sports.”

As she spoke, Ulrich regarded her face again. He didn’t find it very similar to his own; but maybe he was mistaken, there could be a resemblance like that between a pastel and a woodcut, where the difference of medium could distract the viewer from noticing an accordance of lines and planes. There was something about this face that unsettled him. After a while he realized what it was: he couldn’t make out its expression. It lacked whatever it is that allows one to draw the usual conclusions about a person. It was not an empty face by any means, but nothing in it was emphasized or summed up as a readable character trait.

“How come you dressed the same way?” Ulrich asked.

“I didn’t give it much thought,” she said. “I thought it would be nice.”

“It’s very nice!” Ulrich said, laughing. “But it’s quite a conjuring trick on the part of chance. And Father’s death doesn’t seem to have greatly upset you either.”

Agathe rose slowly on her toes and then just as slowly sank to her heels.

“Is your husband here too?” her brother asked, just to say something.

“Professor Hagauer won’t be coming until the funeral.” She seemed to relish the opportunity to pronounce the name so formally and place it at a distance from herself as something alien.

Ulrich did not know how to respond. “Yes, so I’ve heard,” he said.

They looked at each other again, and then, as moral custom suggests one ought, they went into the little room where the body lay.

This room had been kept artificially dark for the whole day; it was drenched in black. Within it, flowers and lighted candles glowed and exuded odors. The two Pierrots stood tall and erect before the dead man and seemed to be watching him.

“I’m not going back to Hagauer!” Agathe said, just to have it said. One could almost think the dead man was supposed to hear it too.

There he lay on his pedestal, in accordance with his own instructions: in full evening dress, the shroud drawn halfway up to his chest, the stiff shirt showing above it, hands folded without a crucifix, decorations affixed. Small, hard orbital arches, sunken cheeks and lips. Sewn inside a corpse’s ghastly, eyeless skin, which is still a part of the entity and yet already extraneous; life’s traveling bag. Ulrich felt shaken at the root of existence, where there is neither feeling nor thought; but nowhere else. If he had had to put it into words, he would only have been able to say that a tiresome relationship without love had come to an end. Just as a bad marriage corrupts people who cannot get free of it, so does every onerous bond reckoned to last through eternity when the mortal substance shrivels away beneath it.