It was the beginning of July. Dry, orange-blue days. The pavements perspired, oozing black asphalt. Golden beer, cold and frothy, was the order of the day. His clothes hung heavily as millstones; his shirt stuck to his chest and back. When he crossed the bridges over the canal, he was drawn to the water below as irresistibly as a suicide. He envied the naked bodies wallowing in the sand next to the bathing-booths on the riverbanks, and sometimes even the half-naked labourers working high on the scaffolding of some new building. It was two months since Gurdweill had stopped working for Dr Kreindel, and for all that time he had been unemployed. It was hard to find another job, especially now, during the summer vacation. He worked on his own writing, and occasionally received small sums from publishers. He filled in the gaps with loans, hoping that in the long run he would be able to make a living from his writing. From the day his son was born he was extremely harassed. The birth had taken him by surprise, and not only because it had taken place before the expected time. He had to get used to the new situation that had come into being with the birth of the child, and although he had thought of scarcely nothing else during Thea’s pregnancy, he was still not really ready for it. He felt like a man come to a foreign country without knowing its customs or language. With the baby a new era had begun in his life. It was a watershed. Now everything else had to take second place to the baby. Even Thea seemed unimportant. When all the old disturbing thoughts connected with her came into his mind, he was able to push them aside easily: the boy made up for everything. And the letter signed ‘a faithful friend’, which he had received the morning before and which had agitated him all day — even that could not distract him for long. Such things meant nothing and did not deserve to have any notice taken of them, said Gurdweill to himself. What value could the words of some benighted troublemaker possibly possess? For this mysterious ‘friend’ was certainly not an honourable man: no decent man wrote anonymous letters. It was nothing but malicious gossip! And how did he know that Dr Ostwald, of all people, was the father? Had he been standing at the foot of the bed? Did he have any proof? Just because she worked for him? If it was true that she was unfaithful to her husband, then it wasn’t only with Dr Ostwald, but with quite a few others as well — so how could the letter-writer possibly know that Dr Ostwald was definitely the father? Perhaps it was because Dr Ostwald had sent her a present in honour of the baby’s birth? But that meant nothing at all! It was a very common custom. She’d been working for him for over three years, after all — so why shouldn’t he send her a present if he could afford it? On the contrary — if he were really guilty, he would never have sent a present, especially not something such as a carriage, to attract suspicion to himself. But this last proof failed to satisfy Gurdweill. ‘No!’ he said to himself. ‘That’s no proof. He might have sent it precisely in order not to attract suspicion to himself.’ But the truth was that it made no difference one way or the other, and he had wasted the whole of yesterday on worrying about it for nothing. In the final analysis the father could just as easily be him, Gurdweill himself … It was him she had lived with, after all. That, at least, nobody could deny! And why should the father be someone else and not him? At any rate, it wasn’t Dr Ostwald — of that he was almost certain. As for what Thea herself had said on more than one occasion, there was no need to take that too seriously. She had only said it to annoy him. Besides, she had never actually mentioned Dr Ostwald by name: never! Only that the baby wasn’t his, Gurdweill’s, and that didn’t mean a thing … ‘And now’ — he interrupted himself — ‘there’s an end to the matter!’ And he decided to put the whole thing out of his mind and never to let it trouble him again.