‘Everyone is to stay up here till the bell goes. No supper for anyone talking. Sonya! Your hair-ribbon!’ One of the girls went scarlet, took out of her hair a ribbon that had come undone, and tied it again. It was so quiet – you could hear forty little girls breathing. With a glare from her grey-green eyes, Frau Adriani took in the scene, then went out. Behind her back, a two-sided whispering started up: there were those who wanted to talk, very quietly, and the others who tried to stop them by going ‘Sshh!’ The child stood all by herself. Little girls can be very cruel. As no one else had been punished that day, the majority had tacitly decided that the child was to be ignored. The child was called ‘the child’ because once, in answer to Adriani’s question ‘What are you?’ she had replied ‘A child’. No one paid her any attention now.

When will this ever end? thought the child. It will never end. And then her tears flowed; she was crying just because she was crying.

2

The trees rustled outside the window, and they rustled me out of a dream. Even as I woke up, I had already forgotten what it was. I turned over on the pillows; they were still heavy with my dream. Forgetting . . . why had I woken up?

There was a knock.

‘The post! Poppa, it’s the post! Answer the door!’ The Princess, who the instant before had been asleep, was awake – there was no in-between.

I went. Between the bed and the door, I thought about these morning-moments between a man and a woman when love can be pretty dead. Critical moments, but if they pass, everything is all right. From the first croak of ‘What time is it . . .?’ to the ‘Huuargh – there, I’m getting up now!’ the little bedside clock ticks away a lot of time. The day has woken up, the night is asleep, the subterranean hemisphere is asleep . . . a pity, with the majority of women at least . . . I was at the door. A hand was pushing letters into the letter-box.

The Princess had half-sat up in bed, and in her excitement pillows were going everywhere. ‘My letters! Those are my letters! Give me them, you thief! Do I have to . . .’ She got her letter. It was from her replacement at work, and the news was that there was no news. The business with Tichauer had been sorted out all right. In the little inventory book they had reached G. I was most relieved to hear it. The worries of these people! What worries did they have? Their own, remarkably.