About half an hour later Gurdweill was ready, and he descended the stairs from the third floor with a buoyant step. Outside, he was enveloped in the mild morning air, which had a distinctive, undefinable smell, vaguely calling to mind pretty girls who had not yet reached maturity. Everything seemed renewed. The pavement had already been sprayed, and the tiny puddles between the cracks were invisibly evaporating and adding freshness to the air. The wagons, the cars, the trams, the terrace houses, and the people too — everything shone joyfully in the pristine rays of the sun. Nursemaids in frilly caps and starched white aprons pushed their carriages with a kind of secret pride, as if the bonny, smiling babies were the fruit of their own wombs. Gurdweill walked along Nordbahnstrasse and then turned into Praterstrasse. The shop windows were so seductive that he felt a pressing desire to go into each and every one of them and buy all kinds of things, whether he needed them or not, to get into conversation with all the shop assistants and joke with them light-heartedly. And another desire awoke in him too: to stand in the middle of the street and throw a cascade of gold and silver coins at the street urchins, and to rejoice in their happiness. But all this was beyond his powers; all he had in his pocket was one schilling and a few groschen. And so Gurdweill strolled down the broad, bustling Praterstrasse, looking into the eyes of the passers-by with exaggerated friendliness, as if he had some glad tidings to bring to each and every one of them, until he reached Ferdinand’s Bridge. He approached a crowd of people who were clustering at the railing, pushing forward and looking down.

‘A young girl,’ said a bulky, clean-shaven man, turning to his neighbour. ‘She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. I saw her with my own eyes when they pulled her out.’ He said it with a certain complacency, as if he were boasting that he had seen the Japanese emperor with his own eyes.

‘Alive?’ a reedy voice enquired.

‘Not a chance! Dead as a doornail.’

‘This generation!’ interrupted a middle-aged woman in a faded old hat, carrying a bag in her hand. ‘They’re all teetering on the edge. Nothing means anything to them: either they kill themselves or they kill each other. Yesterday a man killed his wife in our own building. Stabbed her to death in broad daylight! She was gone in a second, the poor thing. She never made a sound.’