Christmas was approaching. They suffered through four straight days of freezing rain. It occurred to them that they still hadn’t gone on that long voyage they’d promised themselves. They still couldn’t afford to. But in the hope of rededicating themselves to each other, they decided that a weekend trip to the south might do. At one of the society’s gatherings they’d met a young man whose mother ran a ski lodge in Murnau, a spa village in Bavaria. The lodge was near a waterfall and superb hiking trails. It was also of the sort Berliners called storm-free: where your hosts asked no questions and refused to be shocked by anything.

Outwardly they treated the trip as they had any of their other excursions. Inwardly it was as though their hearts were diving-bells, constricting and expanding from the changes in pressure.

Long stretches of the trip made no impression on their memories. A snowy hillside outside Augsburg. A black dog up to his chin in snow. Hans losing a glove in the taxi to the lodge. They barely spoke, and were unable to read. In their room the night they arrived, they ate smoked ham, cheese, black bread with mustard, grapes, and chocolate cake. They warmed Hans’s hand before the fire.

They bathed and sat before the hearth buried under thick rugs. It was puzzling, Hans ventured, that physical pleasures, precarious at best and rare, were regarded with such mistrust by the so-called wise. Could they think of any happier couples, among those they knew? They spent all their time denouncing the dangers of sensual excess instead of fearing its absence or loss, while the energy they put into tyrannizing their senses could be better spent embellishing their souls.

They kissed, each of them shaking.

Hans rose to rummage through his rucksack. Shivering, he returned to their rugs. He had a page marked in his copy of Xenophon. He opened to it and read: “Xenophon had with him an Olynthian called Episthenes, who on this occasion saw a good-looking boy at the most beautiful age, on the point of being put to death; so he ran to Xenophon and begged him to intercede. Xenophon went to Seuthes and asked him not to kill the boy. Seuthes said: And would you, Episthenes, be willing to die for the boy? Episthenes stretched out his neck and said: Strike the blow if the boy tells you to. Seuthes then asked the boy whom he should kill. The boy said: Kill me. And at this Episthenes put his arms around the boy and said: Now you will have to fight me for him. For I shall never give him up.

“And Seuthes laughed, and let the matter rest.”

And still they did nothing! They lay, heads together, watching the fire in a state of such excitement that when fatigue hit, it struck them all at once.