The brawny gatekeeper, with his terrifying moustache bristling like a pair of horns, pointed to the white administration building opposite the gate, where the visitors had to obtain entrance passes. With the pass in his hand, Gurdweill postponed entering the block a little longer, and wandered about the neat, criss-crossing gravel paths, alongside which ran narrow rails for transporting the food from the kitchen to the blocks dotted around the grounds. Among the many trees, lawns, and flowerbeds loomed handsome white stucco buildings, two or three storeys high, set rather far apart and surrounded by high wire fences. Autumn was very evident here. The trees were already quite bare, and the fallen leaves lay in crumpled yellow piles next to the paths. The air was sharper, colder. Here and there he encountered nurses in their grey uniforms and caps, hefty guards, and inmates walking arm in arm with their visitors. They all wore the dull, stupefied expression that seemed peculiar to the place. ‘Here’s the other side of the coin,’ said Gurdweill to himself. ‘Only three-quarters of an hour by tram, and here you have the true face of life — life in all its nakedness!’ He felt as if he were in another world, with different laws of life and death, a place in which the preoccupations and concerns of the ordinary world below had no meaning. But a clock struck three with a heavy sound, and he remembered that he had to go in before it was too late.

A passing nurse showed him the way and he pressed the bell. A hefty nurse with a coarse, red face opened the door and locked it behind him. He followed her up to the first floor. The nurse opened a door to a long, bright corridor and then locked it, too, behind them.

‘Wait here!’ She pointed to a door on his right. ‘I’ll call her.’ And she called loudly into the echoing corridor: ‘Frau Mitteldorfer! A visitor! Get dressed!’

Gurdweill waited next to the door of the visitors’ room. His heart pounded. All the doors on the left were locked. From time to time a nurse walked down the corridor. A female patient, evidently one of the less severe cases, wandered about eating a large apple. She gave Gurdweill a sidelong glance and smiled foolishly. Afterwards, when there was no one else in the corridor, she approached him and offered him the half-eaten apple.