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34

The next morning — it was a Saturday — he carried out his wife’s orders like a sleepwalker, without a word and without looking at her, in a stupor so extreme that no spark of light could penetrate it. When Thea left, he got undressed again and lay down for some reason in her bed, which still preserved the warmth of her body. He fell asleep and did not wake up until three o’clock in the afternoon, his body tingling numbly with the exhaustion of a sick, excessive sleep, and his feet feeling as if they were made of cotton wool. After washing and dressing, he was overcome with the boredom of enforced inactivity. He had nothing to do and nowhere to go, like a traveller obliged to wait for hours for a train, in some remote village to which he was completely indifferent. The sharpness of the pain that had flared up suddenly and devastatingly from time to time during the past two days had somewhat dulled, to be replaced by total indifference to and lack of interest in everything. Lotte was no longer among the living: this was quite clear to him now. And this certainty had settled into his soul like a heavy lump of rock, pressing him to the ground. He sensed that something very important was about to be decided, without knowing what it was about or what the nature of the decision would be. At the same time he was haunted by a feeling of guilt, which did not leave him for a moment, and he hoped unconsciously that this guilt would be expiated by the decision about to take place.