No one could have imagined it, but as the situation continued, your father’s heart grew heavier and heavier, more and more anxious, more and more unsettled. At the beginning, you could say that the burden that tormented him was due in large part to the feelings he had for me, and so he spared no effort to protest against this injustice. Later on, however, things changed dramatically. The situation became much more serious, became something almost too embarrassing to talk about. He seemed to feel that he had done something wrong, that he had to make it up to me lest I plunge into depression. He had to disclose the whole story and make it known to everyone. It goes without saying that I objected to his feeling this way; objected to the fact that he wanted to tell everyone. I asked him if he was trying to make a fool of himself. In the end, the situation was completely impossible. He always felt he owed me a debt, and he had convinced himself that sooner or later our superiors would discover they were wrong and everyone would end up looking bad. I tried my hardest … I burned all the records I had made of what he had said in his dreams in front of him (and burning these was the best tactic I could use to bring him to his senses). But it all seemed to do little by way of curing him of his emotional anguish. Of course, destroying the originals didn’t eliminate the possibility that I had taken copies, and no matter how much I swore I hadn’t, how could I make him believe me? This situation didn’t mean that your father had little trust in me. Instead, I believe he felt that this particular situation had tortured both of us to an unimaginable extent. Since he assumed that I was as agonized as he was, he supposed that my emotional state could have fractured at any minute. He thought I might even consider him an enemy, might feel as though I were a fish caught within a net struggling against an inevitable doom. Ever afterwards he had decided to do whatever he could to ‘compensate’ me, to console me, to remind me, to beseech me to swallow ‘this matter’, to bury it deep down, to keep it secret. And so, on his death bed, he had to counsel me on ‘this matter’ once more.