As he drank his coffee, his head bent over the table, the vision of a summer’s morning many years ago, on the banks of a river, suddenly interrupted his thoughts. He must have been a very small child. He was not alone on the riverbank, and his mother was not with him — of that he was quite certain. But someone was definitely there with him, because when he tried to reach the water’s edge someone stopped him, someone said: ‘Little boys aren’t allowed to go too close; little boys can only look from a distance!’ No, it wasn’t his mother — the voice was coarser, that of a nanny or a maid. In any case, the voice jarred on his ears: he remembered it clearly. And suddenly there were rafts sailing down the middle of the river, directly underneath the sun, and one of the sailors, his naked torso brown as leather, his legs bare to the knees, beckoned him from his raft, which was sailing so slowly that it seemed to be standing still. He even called out something that Gurdweill did not catch because of the distance. He was seized by a passionate desire to sail on the raft, and he began shouting and crying and jumping up and down, until the person with him dragged him forcibly away from the bank …

The whole scene perplexed Gurdweill profoundly. In the town of his birth, there was no river like the one he had just seen, and no one ever sailed down it on a raft — so where did the memory come from? Perhaps he had read something like it in a book, or heard the story from someone else, and the memory had taken root in him as if it had actually happened to him?

‘If that’s the truth, it’s no good at all!’ he announced out loud, and then, startled by the sound of his own voice, looked around him with baffled eyes.

‘It’s the truth, my friend,’ confirmed Vrubiczek, thinking that Gurdweill was referring to what he had just said, ‘but what’s so bad about it?’

‘What? How can you ask?’ exclaimed Gurdweill uncomprehendingly. ‘When your memory becomes confused and brings up strange scenes as if they had happened to you yourself, completely out of the blue …’

At that moment Johann came in without knocking.

‘Ah, Johann!’

‘Alone?’

‘And where’s Mitzi?’ His parents greeted him.

Johann took off his hat and flung it boyishly onto the sofa. Then he kissed his mother and shook hands with his father and Gurdweill.

‘Mitzi?’ he repeated with some embarrassment. ‘She’s fine … She wanted to go to … to the pictures, and I didn’t feel like it. And how are you, Herr Gurdweill? Everything all right?’

He gave Gurdweill a strange, nervous look, and Gurdweill saw at once that he was annoyed about something.

‘Yes, not too bad. Things could be worse,’ he replied, looking closely at Johann.