‘How can I eat,’ she said, sobbing quietly, ‘when I want to go home and nobody in the world is willing to help me? I hoped that you would help me, like you did that time in Karlsplatz, but now I can see that you too have hardened your heart like a stone. No one in the whole world! They’ve left me here to suffer all by myself! They beat me and scratch me. Not the nurses!’ she quickly corrected herself with an animal fear, ‘don’t think that I meant them! The nurses aren’t allowed to hit us, even if they want to — I never said that the nurses hit me! But the women hit me and pull my hair. The women here are bad. They’re really sick, insane! They yell and scream all the time and don’t give you a moment’s peace. They have to lock them up in the cage-bed or the padded cell.’

Suddenly she smiled slyly and nodded in the direction of the two women. ‘One of them’s sitting right there.’

Gurdweill gave her another orange segment, and then a second and a third, which she swallowed automatically. She even took up the pieces she had left on the table and ate them.

‘And what for?’ After a moment she began again. ‘Such idiocy! I could slap my face for it! How could I be such an idiot? Don’t think that I don’t know it! Who doesn’t know that it’s forbidden to go outside without your clothes on? Any baby knows that! But I forgot all about it; I didn’t realise what I was doing … Such carelessness! I only wanted to see if it was raining and then go back inside again. So I got up and went out … And I simply forgot that I was naked and that it’s forbidden to go outside without your clothes on …’

Suddenly she got up and, standing facing him with her back to the wall, she began reciting with a strange, tearful pathos, stressing every word and wagging her finger solemnly: ‘You mustn’t go outside without your clothes on! You mustn’t go outside without your clothes on! You mustn’t go outside without your clothes on!’

She repeated this phrase over and over, as if to engrave it indelibly on her memory so that she would never forget it again.