She stretched, lit the cigarette that Gurdweill offered her, and stretched out on her back on the couch, like a satisfied animal. Gurdweill cleared the table, washed the dishes, and put them away under the washstand, which served them instead of a sideboard. Then he returned to his desk. He sat puffing on his pipe and glancing covertly at his wife, whose white, nearly naked body gave off an invisible mist of eroticism, powerful and tormenting. His head grew heavy; he felt drunk. ‘So that woman there,’ he reflected vaguely, ‘is my wife … my wife … my wife …’ when suddenly, in the midst of these reflections, he felt a fierce pain in his heart, as if it had been pierced by a sharp object. And before he could defend himself, he was overwhelmed by a torrent of mixed-up memories, all kinds of different things that he always tried to suppress in his consciousness, things that were no mere product of his fantasies and fears but whose reality, unhappily for him, had been forced upon his notice by circumstances too obvious to ignore — and would not allow him to return to his thoughts of a moment before. Gurdweill suddenly saw a number of his acquaintances, and some strangers too, a whole crowd of men, approaching Thea one by one, his wife, Thea, lying half naked on this very couch next to the wall, and she was smiling at them, showing them her breasts, holding out her arms to them … Gurdweill could not bear the sight, but he was compelled to look, to see everything. And together with the terrible, unendurable pain, the sight gave him a strange, inexplicable pleasure …

His pipe, dropping from his lips and falling onto the table with a clatter, woke him up. Thea was lying down and smoking. Gurdweill stood up. His breath came in heavy pants, and he felt giddy. He went up to his wife and began kissing her and scratching her like a wild beast. His savage excitement and despair brought tears to his eyes. Thea said only: ‘What’s got into you today, rabbit?’

Afterwards he tidied his clothes and went on sitting next to his wife on the edge of the couch. There were still tears in his eyes, and his whole being was suddenly enveloped in a great sadness. All of a sudden he felt so abandoned, so alone in the world, so forlorn. Unconsciously, as if asking for help, his hand stroked his wife’s warm thighs. He looked straight in front of him without seeing anything, and murmured, as if to himself: ‘Ah, if only it were all a little different, just a tiny little bit different, how wonderful everything would be …’

‘What on earth are you mumbling about, rabbit?’

Gurdweill did not reply: perhaps he did not even hear the question. He shrugged his shoulders as if in resignation to his fate. He knew that it never would be different.