He smiled stupidly and looked down at the floor. ‘There, I’ve done it!’ he thought in relief. The answer no longer mattered at all. All that mattered was the question that he now justified to himself as a kind of warning, to alert her to the danger. Nevertheless, her silence began to disturb him. He raised his eyes and saw that she was still sitting as before, with her head slightly averted and her eyes on the window opposite. A nagging doubt crept into his mind: had he asked his question aloud, or only thought it? Alarmed by the latter possibility, he asked again, this time loudly enough for Dr Astel, too, to hear.

‘Are you afraid of death, Lotte?’

She gave him a hostile look and said irritably, ‘Do you have to know right away? Can’t we put it off to some other time?’

‘Gurdweill’s in a philosophical mood,’ Dr Astel said with a smile.

‘Oh, never mind, it’s not important!’ said Gurdweill.

Two stops before Nussdorfer Strasse the woman with the little boy and the rabbit got off. A big, heavy man with a broad, red face, a long, brown Virginia cigar stuck in his mouth and a bowler hat on his head, got in, dragging a skinny little woman behind him. They sat down directly opposite Gurdweill and his friends. The big man blew out puffs of delicate, almost invisible smoke and stared fixedly at Lotte. Suddenly he addressed his wife in a voice loud enough for the whole coach to hear: ‘These Poles, you can’t get away from them!’

The three friends pretended not to hear. Lotte sat there petrified. She felt that something was going to happen and wanted to tell her companions to get off the tram. But she said nothing. The man, seeing that his words had missed their aim, now addressed them directly.

‘Yes, yes, I mean you!’ he said in a Viennese accent and a voice as coarse as a butcher’s. ‘Why are you staring at me? I mean Jews! You’re Jews, aren’t you?’

Dr Astel and Gurdweill jumped up together. The blood rushed to Gurdweill’s head and his face went red and then white.

‘You, you —’ spluttered Dr Astel furiously, waving his fist in the fat man’s face, ‘you shut your mouth! Or else I’ll throw you off the tram!’

‘Who? You’ll throw me off the tram?’ growled the man, jumping to his feet. ‘Me? A Viennese? You go back to Galicia where you came from! Me he wants to throw off the tram!’ He turned to the two workers, who were suddenly wide awake, staring open-eyed at the combatants.

The conductor stuck his head in through the door and called, ‘Gentlemen, stop fighting at once, or I’ll throw the lot of you off!’

‘What? I paid for my ticket! Kick the Jews off!’