To this sally Gurdweill made no reply. He turned to Thea with a conciliatory air. ‘It’s not my fault that I’m late. I was detained.’ As he spoke Gurdweill noticed a sly smile crossing Perczik’s face, which he imagined, for some reason, to be directed at him.

‘Never mind, Rudolfus, you’re not very late,’ said Thea. ‘If you had been, I would have been really angry. But why are you standing? Sit down!’

Gurdweill brought a chair from a nearby table and placed it next to Thea.

‘Oh, hello, Perczik,’ said Gurdweill in a surprised tone of voice, as if he had just noticed his presence. ‘How are things in the avant-garde nowadays? Are you still raking in the dollars?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ retorted the latter angrily, stroking the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger in embarrassment. ‘But you’re apparently in a bad mood today …’

‘I’m in a bad mood? Not at all! On the contrary.’

‘Perczik’s no longer getting paid in dollars, but in African pounds,’ Dr Astel chimed in.

Perczik pulled a sour face but said nothing.

While Gurdweill sipped the piping-hot coffee the waiter brought him, Dr Astel picked up the threads of their interrupted conversation, which was about the role of coincidence in life. Dr Astel was a lawyer and making speeches was his profession. He loved hearing himself talk, and never missed an opportunity to hold forth, especially when women made up part of the company.

‘It all comes down to our own limited understanding, my dear lady,’ pronounced Dr Astel with the self-importance and confidence of an expert. ‘We are able to perceive only the visible, external aspect of things, and that too only in fragments, in incomplete bits and pieces, whereas the inner connection, the unifying thread, is invisible to us. And what follows from this? That those phenomena which we call coincidences are also part of the chain of cause and effect, and that they are absolutely inevitable. It may seem, for example, that coincidence A, which happens to X, and coincidence B, which happens to Y, could change places, so that A would happen to Y, and B to X. Not so! These things follow an iron rule. Just as chemical element A combines with B and not with C, when two things meet and combine in the world there’s nothing coincidental about it, except in terms of our own limited vision.’

Thea asked with a smile: ‘So do you think, for instance, that even the fact that we two met is a result of some inner necessity?’

‘Of course. I’m certain of it.’

A wild, remote possibility, too vague to define, flashed across both their minds at once, and was gone again before they could catch more than a glimpse of it.