In this way, ever since she had been with her brother, she was becoming aware that a quickening current was flowing into the great split she had suffered between irresponsible living and spectral imaginings, a freeing and at the same time a recombining of what had been released. Now, for instance, in the silence, deepened by books and memories, that reigned between her and her brother, she remembered Ulrich’s description of how, leaving the house for an aimless walk, he had entered into the town and the town had entered into him: it reminded her very precisely of the few weeks of her happiness; and it had been right, too, that she laughed, madly and for no reason, when he told her about it, because she realized that there was something of this inversion of the world, this blissful and comical inside-out gesture even in Hagauer’s thick lips when they puckered for a kiss. That thought made her shudder, admittedly; but there is a shudder, she thought, even in the bright light of noon, and somehow that gave her the feeling that all possibilities were not yet exhausted for her. Some Nothing, a vacancy that had always lain between past and present, had recently flown away. She secretly looked around. The room she was in was one of the rooms in which her destiny had taken shape; this occurred to her now for the first time since she had arrived. For it was here that she had met with her childhood playmate when she knew her father was out, and where they made the great decision to love each other; it was here that she had also sometimes received the one she had called “unworthy,” and had stood by the windows with furtive tears of rage or despair, and where finally, under paternal auspices, Hagauer’s courting had taken place. After having so long served merely as the unnoticed backdrop to human activities, the furniture, the walls, the oddly shut-in light now at this moment of recognition became oddly tangible, and the life that had so strangely come and gone in this setting formed as corporeal and unequivocal a past as if it were ash or charcoal. All that was left was the comically shadowlike sense of things over and done with, the peculiar tingle one feels when coming upon old traces of oneself that have turned to dust, a sensation that, at the moment it comes, is impossible either to grasp or dispel; and that sensation became almost unendurably strong.

Agathe made sure that Ulrich was not paying attention, and carefully opened the top of her dress, where she kept next to her skin the locket with the little picture that she had not ceased to wear through the years. She went to the window and pretended to look out. Cautiously, she snapped open the sharp edge of the tiny golden scallop and furtively gazed at her dead beloved. He had full lips and soft, thick hair, and the brash look in the eyes of the twenty-year-old sprang from a face that had only half emerged from the eggshell. For a long time she did not know what she was thinking, but suddenly she thought: “My God, a twenty-one-year-old!”