They passed Tuchlauben, which was quiet at this hour, and turned into Graben as into a spacious, brightly lit drawing room. The street was full of movement. Here, amusement-seekers and party-goers went from pleasure to pleasure. Cars drew up outside brightly lit doorways, while others moved away. The smell of perfumed bodies mingled with the stench of the petrol fumes, dinner jackets and magnificent evening gowns, Negro music and wailing saxophones, stiff-backed doormen at the building entrances like red signposts. But a little further on, at the approach to Kärntner Strasse, everything was dominated by the silent, lofty St Stephen’s Cathedral, transported here directly from the Middle Ages with the dust of the journey still clinging to its ancient limbs. Its Gothic spires, like bony fingers, touched the night itself, the real night in the sky above, undisturbed by the puny city lights. It was a kind of go-between, thought Gurdweill, a mediator between the night above and the night below. A flower-seller and a hawker of oranges and bananas, two old ladies wrapped in layers of shawls, were still sitting behind their wares in front of the cathedral, leaning against the wall as motionless as if they were part of the building itself, like the other statues decorating its façade.

It was five to twelve by the cathedral clock. Perczik changed his mind and said, ‘I’m off to Schottentor. I can still catch the tram if I hurry!’

‘How can you spend an entire evening with that man?’ Gurdweill asked Ulrich when Perczik was some distance away. ‘You need the patience of a saint.’

‘I don’t know what you’ve got against him,’ said Thea. ‘I can’t see that he’s worse than anyone else.’

‘He’s worse! And a small-minded bore into the bargain.’

‘Too true,’ agreed Ulrich. ‘But if he comes and sits down next to you, you can hardly chase him away.’

Next to the canal Ulrich parted from them and set off down the Kai, his slow footsteps thudding hollowly on the pavement. Gurdweill looked lingeringly after him. A feeling of pity suddenly stirred in him for this man, whose life for some reason seemed to him utterly empty and forlorn. He felt a momentary impulse to catch up with his friend, say something kind and consoling to him, and accompany him home, for it was unthinkable to leave him alone in such a state. At that moment Gurdweill saw himself as a happy man in comparison to Ulrich, a lucky man. He was all right — any way you cared to look at it! And if there were one or two little flaws, they were too insignificant to count … Not like Ulrich …