When the mourners turned back, Gurdweill, for some reason, sprang behind the tombstone and hid until they had all gone past. Then he ran to the fresh grave, looked quickly at the mound of earth covered with flowers and the two spades plastered with chocolate-like mud at its side, and hurried to catch up with the receding mourners. He walked behind them, keeping his distance, his shoulders sagging, his eyes dull, staring fixedly in their sockets like those of a blind man.

Outside the vestibule he found his two friends waiting for him, and as he approached them Dr Astel looked at him blankly for a moment, as if trying to remember something, and suddenly fell round his neck like an axed tree and began howling horribly, his shoulders heaving as the animal-like sounds burst out of him in a series of shuddering sobs that seemed to come straight from the pit of his stomach. His hat slipped off and fell to the ground, but nobody noticed, for Ulrich had averted his eyes from the scene. Gurdweill for some reason found Dr Astel’s sobbing offensive, and he wished that he would stop. But his hand kept patting his friend’s back, with strange, quick pats, as if he were straightening out a crease or brushing the dust from his overcoat. In the end Dr Astel stopped crying. His shoulders heaved once or twice in a final, weak convulsion. He picked up his hat, and the three of them walked together to the number 71 tram stop, without saying a word or looking at one another. After travelling in silence to Schwarzenbergplatz, the last stop, Gurdweill parted from his friends.