When he entered his room it was already morning. And from the next door room he could already hear the yells of ‘Aalbert’, the old landlady’s grandson, and his Auntie Siedl, fighting as they always did when the boy spent the night in their house.

6

6

It was now two weeks since Gurdweill had met Thea. There were only ten days left before their wedding, which was to take place on the Jewish festival of Lag B’Omer. The necessary documents were already in the possession of the congregation’s ‘marriage bureau’, and every evening after work the Baroness went to the rabbi for instruction in the Jewish religion. She regarded this as a kind of sport, and after every lesson she would boast of her knowledge, not without a hint of irony.

It was agreed that Ulrich would look for another room and that Thea would move in with Gurdweill after the wedding. Ulrich agreed willingly, despite the housing shortage, which meant that it would not be easy for him to find a new room.

With the exception of Lotte Bondheim, who for some reason had kept away from the café recently, most of Gurdweill’s friends had already made Thea’s acquaintance. Dr Astel, who had pretensions to being a connoisseur, found the Baroness ‘superbe’, as he liked saying in French. Although she came from an ancient race, he said, she showed no symptoms of decadence. She was natural and healthy — ‘a real Brunhilde’. But when Lotte Bondheim heard the news of Gurdweill’s impending marriage she burst into a fit of hysterical laughter. She was in the café with Dr Astel at the time. For ten minutes she laughed loudly and wildly, stopping for breath and beginning all over again, until everyone stopped talking to stare at her.

‘Oh, no,’ she cried, ‘it’s too ridiculous for words! I’ve never heard anything so grotesque in my life! Little Gurdweill is going to marry a baroness; a big, blonde baroness! Ha-ha-ha! A little baron! One day he’ll start a pogrom against us!’

When Dr Astel tried to calm her down — ‘What’s there to laugh about, Lotte? I can’t see anything to laugh at …’ — she retorted, ‘No, of course not, you’re too blind to see how ridiculous it is!’ And three days later, when she met Gurdweill in the street, she was very pale and down at the mouth, and there were blue rings under her big grey eyes, as if she had just been ill. She asked him gravely if the rumours that he was about to get married were true, and when Gurdweill answered in the affirmative she said nothing at all. A moment or two later she parted from him after exchanging a few banalities.