Agathe stopped; she was done. But there was something that had not happened yet, and after reflecting a little while she said, smiling: “Why don’t we, each of us, write something beautiful on a piece of paper and put it in his pocket?” This time Ulrich immediately knew what she meant, for there were not many such shared memories, and he recalled how at a certain age they had both been very fond of sad poems and stories in which someone died and was forgotten by every­one. Perhaps it was the desolation of their childhood that caused this; and often they made up such stories together. But even then Agathe was already inclined to act the stories out, while Ulrich only took the lead in the more masculine undertakings, which were audacious and heartless. So it was Agathe’s idea that each of them cut off a fingernail in order to bury it in the garden, and then she added to the nails a small bundle of her blond hair. Ulrich declared proudly that in a hundred years someone might come across these relics and wonder who it might have been, a notion influenced by his intention to live on in posterity; but for little Agathe, what mattered was the burial as such, for it gave her the feeling of hiding a part of herself and withdrawing it permanently from the supervision of the world, whose pedagogic demands intimidated her even though she did not think highly of them. And because at that time the cottage for the servants was being built by the edge of the garden, they agreed to do something unusual together. They would write some wonderful poems on two pieces of paper and add who they were, and this was going to be bricked up in the walls; but when they set about writing the verses, which were supposed to be especially beautiful, they couldn’t think of any, day after day, and the walls were already growing out of the foundations. Then at last, with time pressing, Agathe copied a sentence from her math primer and Ulrich wrote, “I am ——,” followed by his name. Nevertheless their hearts were pounding violently when they sneaked up on the two bricklayers who were at work there, and Agathe simply threw her piece of paper into the pit where the workers were standing and ran away. But Ulrich, being bigger and a man, was of course even more afraid of being stopped and questioned by the astonished bricklayers and was so agitated he could move neither arm nor leg. Then Agathe, emboldened by the fact that nothing had happened to her, came back and took his piece of paper from him. Assuming the air of a guileless stroller, she advanced with it, sauntering, to inspect a brick at the far end of a row that had just been laid, lifted it, and pushed Ulrich’s name into the wall before someone could send her away. Ulrich himself followed her hesitantly and at the moment of the deed felt the terrible grip of anxiety turn into a wheel with sharp knives whirling inside his chest so fast that at the next moment it became a spurting sun, like those fireworks that spin around as they burn. It was to this, then, that Agathe had alluded, and for the longest time Ulrich gave no answer and only smiled his demur, for to reenact this game with the dead man struck him as not allowable.