IT WAS still early when Ulrich woke from dreamless sleep as smoothly as a fish leaping from water. All traces of the previous day’s fatigue were gone. He set out in search of breakfast and walked through the house. The mourning rituals were not quite in motion yet; there was merely an aura of sorrow hovering in all the rooms, reminding him of shops that open their shutters at dawn when the street is still empty of people. Then he took the scientific papers he had been working on from his suitcase and went to his father’s study. The room, now with its stove lit, looked more human than it had on the previous evening. Even though a pedantic mind had designed it with an obsessive view to weighing this on the one hand against that on the other, all the way to the plaster busts lined up in parallel rows on top of the bookshelves, still, the many small, personal things that had been left behind—pencils, monocle, thermometer, an open book, boxes of pen nibs, and the like—gave it the touching vacancy of a lifelong abode that had been abandoned by its tenant just a moment ago. Ulrich sat in the midst of it—not far from the window, actually, yet near the room’s center of gravity, the desk—and felt a peculiar listlessness. Portraits of his forebears hung on the walls, and some of the furniture dated from their time; the man who had lived here had formed the egg of his life from the shells of theirs; now he was dead, and his furnishings still stood there as clean-cut as if they had been carved out of space with a file, but already the order of things was about to crumble away to adapt itself to his successor, and one felt the longevity of these inanimate objects almost imperceptibly burgeoning with renewed life behind their rigid air of mourning.