The head nurse rang a bell, and immediately another nurse appeared and led Gurdweill down the corridor, turning right into another corridor, at the end of which she opened a door and took him into a smallish room, the morgue. There were a few little coffins standing on a kind of wooden shelf and a strong smell of carbolic acid in the air. She went up to one of the coffins and took off the lid. Before doing anything else, Gurdweill glanced around the room to see if there was a window in it. Because a window was very important … And he was not satisfied until he discovered a long slit in the wall, rather narrow, to be sure, but nevertheless sufficient to provide the room with as much daylight as necessary. Then he turned abruptly towards the open coffin, as if to take its occupant by surprise. The dead baby was lying there in his swaddling clothes. Gurdweill saw that the coffin was too long, with considerable space left over between the baby’s feet and the end of the coffin, and this, for some reason, disturbed him. Then he fixed his eyes on the baby’s face, which was yellowish, hollow, and much smaller than before. He went on examining it for a while, and suddenly he felt that this little corpse was completely strange to him; there was no relation at all between him and it. True, it had the same features, the same snub nose, the same hair as Martin, but nevertheless it was not he … Martin was different, alive, his own baby — whereas this lifeless corpse had nothing to do with him. He even felt a certain revulsion stirring in him at the sight of the small, dead body, and was obliged to avert his eyes. He couldn’t bear the sight of him. And suddenly a strange thing happened: Gurdweill burst out laughing. He laughed secretly, making a gurgling sound in his throat, but it was clear that he was laughing. The laughter escaped against his will and he was unable to hold it in. The nurse turned grey with fear. She closed the lid, which she had been holding up all this time, with a loud bang, while Gurdweill went on shaking with laughter. Then he stopped abruptly, as if some seizure had suddenly left him, and turned and walked out of the morgue without a backward glance at the coffin or the nurse. He hurried down the corridor, almost running, bumping into another nurse and nearly knocking her down, and fled the hospital.