For a while Gurdweill stood and watched the tram receding into the distance with Dr Astel and Lotte, and then he turned away. Since he had plenty of time to spare, he decided to walk home. ‘The bedbugs can wait!’ he joked to himself. Suddenly he felt liberated, as if some weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and he strolled at his ease. A delicate sweetness flooded his heart as he remembered his conversation with the little girl in the park. When Martin was her age — and it wasn’t so far away — what a source of happiness he would be! The years would fly past before he could turn around. And in the meantime he would look after him himself, cherish him as the apple of his eye! And Lotte would be fine too … Everything would come right in the end — her nerves, that is … Deliberately Gurdweill forced his thoughts in this less dangerous direction, for he felt his previous terror beginning to well up in him again like a dark shapeless lump, and he preferred to blame everything on the state of her nerves, the treatment of which would surely restore her to health and happiness.

The Kai was deserted. An abandoned newspaper lay crumpled on one of the benches. Here and there a dilatory couple sat on a bench in the shadows. Two people joined together, who looked from a distance like one. From time to time a policeman popped out of the dark and cast his eye over the boulevard — the guardian of public morality. Ah yes, making love on a dark bench in Franz-Josefs-Kai was against the law, and whenever a policeman appeared the couple would separate instantly into two, two people who had sat down to rest on the same bench by chance. Resting was not against the law. Every now and then some poor creature, one of the homeless people who made the city itself their home, loomed up out of the dark as if emerging from the bowels of the earth, and stumbled slowly, in uncertain zigzags, in the light. Sometimes something hidden and nocturnal stirred in the bushes at the sides of the boulevard. Once in a great while, a car drove down the deserted street.