He approached the same bench as the night before and sank onto it without thinking. After a moment he realised where he was and jumped up, full of a fear that he himself did not fully understand, and began walking towards the city. He had time, all the time in the world. He could have afforded to donate some of it to quite a few of the people in the city, but none of them wanted to share his time with him. And so he walked on alone, aimlessly and without paying any attention to his surroundings, a prey to troubled thoughts and struggling against the obscure sense of doom trying to invade the frontiers of his consciousness. The sun warmed him. The boughs of the trees projecting over the Augarten fence into the quiet, narrow street were already half bare, crisscrossed with sky; and the leaves scattered over the pavement rustled as they disintegrated under his feet.

For three days the baby lay in the hospital. On the fourth day, when Gurdweill came to visit him, they told him that he had died in the night. Gurdweill heard the news with terrifying equanimity. Just as a serious illness reduces the gravity of death for the patient, filling him little by little with minute doses of its poison, so that he does not feel the inevitable end in all its intensity — so Gurdweill had been prepared, by the distress and inner torment he had suffered during the baby’s illness, for his death. He sank onto a chair in the hospital office and sat there for a long time like a stone. He appeared to see and hear nothing. His eyes were fixed on some point in the remote distance, as if he were looking through the wall and beyond it, and his hands lay limply on his knees. His soft hat was tucked under his arm. It may be that during these moments there was not the shadow of a thought in his mind; it may be that he was afflicted by a kind of general numbing of the senses, which transformed him into something closely resembling an inanimate object. From time to time the head nurse gave him a sidelong glance; she was sorry for him and resolved to let him go on sitting there as long as he wished. After a while Gurdweill recovered and stood up. He approached the desk, apparently wishing to say something. But no words came out of his mouth. The nurse looked at him and concentrated on his slack lips as if she were looking at a dumb man and trying to read his wishes on his mouth. In the end he said in a whisper, as if he had not spoken for many days, that he would like to see him, the baby. For the baby, after all, was his — he found it necessary for some reason to explain — his own flesh and blood.