The Baroness glanced at her wristwatch. She suggested going for a little walk. They paid and left. Outside, Ulrich left them immediately. He was tired, to his regret, and he had to get up early.

When they were alone the Baroness asked Gurdweill where he lived. She herself lived in the opposite direction, in Währing, on the other side of the Gürtel.

In the mild spring air a pure, gentle stillness seemed to drop from the darkening sky. The deserted streets looked as if they had just been swept. The city was sinking into sleep in the orange glow of the streetlamps. From time to time, at increasing intervals, a tram split the silence like a nightmarish awakening. A distant train emitted a long, muffled hoot. And for a moment the imagination was captured by long journeys through the soundlessly breathing night, strange cities populated by millions of human beings.

Gurdweill, who was short and thin, walked beside the woman, who was a head taller than he was. From time to time, as they walked down Währinger Strasse, he glanced at his companion and thought to himself: ‘A tall, handsome woman, but obviously hard. She’ll probably give a lot of pain to anyone close to her.’ Gurdweill felt a wonderfully pleasant sensation together with a terrifying uneasiness. The girl gave off a vague but definite sense of menace. It was a strange new mood for Gurdweill, but at the same time it was clear to him that he had experienced it before, perhaps in his infancy. Certain events connected with this mood also trembled at the threshold of his memory. Gurdweill almost touched them, but then they sank back into the depths of his mind, like a fish leaping out of the water and disappearing into it again before you could do more than glimpse it.

He took off his hat and bared an untidy fringe of hair and a white, domed forehead.

‘When I was a small child,’ he said as if to himself, ‘I imagined the world as a big, bottomless sack full of holes … People struggled inside it, trampling one another and getting entangled with one another like crabs, and falling out of the holes into God knows where … This scene would often come before my eyes, with nightmarish clarity. It terrified me. And strangely enough, precisely at night, and especially on dark nights, I would feel reassured. I could hide in the darkness and feel safe and hidden … Even now I prefer dark, moonless nights.’

‘Who knows, perhaps you’re a lunatic,’ said the Baroness, and for some reason she laughed loudly.

Her laughter sounded hollow, as if it came from inside an empty barrel, and Gurdweill felt a little hurt.

‘No,’ he answered simply, ‘I’m not a lunatic.’