‘At first I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. But I saw it with my own eyes. With my own eyes. Is it possible that they would walk down the street arm in arm, and go into the cinema like that, if there was nothing between them? She told me she was going to the pictures with her sister. Her sister lives not far from us. It was a few days ago. Maybe a week. I made a scene, but she only laughed and called me a jealous fool. She used to know him before we got married, she said, when they lived in the same neighbourhood. An old acquaintance and nothing more. He met her in the street and invited her to go to the pictures with him. Wasn’t she allowed to go to the pictures with an old acquaintance? And besides, she said, he was a married man with a child, and what was there to be afraid of? Maybe she wasn’t lying. But what if she was? And last night, after supper, she went out again. To her sister’s, she said. I let her go, but I followed her. She went into number 55, where her sister lives. I waited outside for a quarter of an hour, or half an hour; I don’t know how long. Mitzi didn’t come out. Then I went up to the second floor and knocked on the door. Nobody answered. I knocked again and again and nobody answered. Evidently there was nobody at home. So where had Mitzi disappeared to? I hadn’t seen her leave the house. I went downstairs and waited outside for another half an hour, an hour, and she never came out. Then I hurried home. Mitzi had just come in. She hadn’t even had time to take off her coat. Her face was all flushed, as if she’d been running. I asked her how her sister was. On purpose I asked her. She said that her sister was fine. They had gone out for a walk. Soon after she arrived. “On such a lovely evening,” she said, “who wants to stay inside?” And then her sister had walked her home. She kept laughing and she seemed all excited. But I hadn’t seen them coming out. And I was standing there all the time. In a place with a good view, right opposite the front door. They couldn’t possibly have come out without my seeing them. But I didn’t see anything. I saw her when she went in, of that I’m positive. It was her, Mitzi. I saw her clearly. Besides, I was walking behind her and I couldn’t have been mistaken. But how and when had she left the building? I don’t recall seeing two women coming out of number 55 in all the time that I was standing there. It’s a small street and you can see everything. And another thing: if her sister really had seen her home, as she claimed, I would have met her close to the house, because I arrived right after them, by the route she would have had to take home. The shortest way from her house to ours. And besides, I kept on looking around me because I was watching out for Mitzi.’