‘I’ve already told you not to interfere in things that are no concern of yours! If I feel like it I’ll go, and if not I won’t!’

She was lying on her back on the couch, both hands under her head, and Gurdweill was sitting next to her.

‘Go and fetch my cigarettes!’

When he sat down beside her again, she suddenly said, ‘What would you say if you knew that today, only an hour ago, or even less, I was with someone else? Only an hour before you?’

There was a cruel expression on her face, and her eyes were fixed on her husband’s face, to see how he reacted. But he was used to it. ‘She wants to make me angry again,’ he thought. ‘A piece of gratuitous cruelty!’

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said firmly.

‘Is that so? You don’t believe it! And the man I went to the cinema with, I suppose you think I played tiddlywinks with him, do you? Ha-ha-ha! I can tell you the details if you like.’

‘It isn’t true!’ He stood his ground. ‘And anyway, I’m not in the least interested. I don’t want to know.’

He wanted to get up, but Thea grabbed his arm. ‘Sit still, my little man! So, you don’t believe it? Very well …’

And she began to tell him, in cynical detail, everything that had happened between herself and the strange man, holding Gurdweill’s arm so that he couldn’t escape. From time to time she interrupted her account with a short, spiteful laugh, and then she continued again with evident enjoyment. He listened unwillingly, in an agony of revulsion, breathing heavily and bathed in sweat. But at the same time, and without his being clearly aware of it, the story also gave him a curious, painful pleasure — the perverse pleasure that is inherent in suffering — and it was no longer possible to say with certainty that he was listening only because he was being forced to …

When Thea concluded, he said nothing for a while. In the end he stood up, as if shaking off a bad dream. He went up to the table and sat down next to it.

‘It still isn’t true!’ he suddenly blurted out, as if to himself. ‘A lie from beginning to end …’

‘Idiot!’ exclaimed his wife.

That evening no more was said.