Frankly, Susi didn’t understand, but no matter the awkwardness of the situation—alone now in the house with her boss—she was determined to see it out. She thought of her mother then. Her mother would be worried and she really should telephone her, but then she couldn’t get past the further awkwardness of asking permission—and whom was she going to ask? The wife wasn’t home yet—the wife was on the train from Lucerne, half-mad with worry, no doubt—and Herr Hofmann was in no condition to respond. In fact, for the next hour he just lay there on the sofa without moving except to blink open his eyes now and again and exclaim, “The light! The light!”

She was sitting in the chair across from him, trying to read a book she’d slipped from the shelf—Hesse’s Narziss und Goldmund, which she found heavy going, especially with the way her mind was wandering—when she heard a quick tattoo of footsteps on the porch and the click of a key in the lock. In the next moment Frau Hofmann burst into the room, her face burnished and eyes wild, shrugging out of her coat and dropping her purse to the floor in a single motion, and then she was on her knees in front of the sofa, clutching her husband to her and repeating his name over and over as if in prayer.

Susi didn’t know what to do. She started to get up, then thought better of it. She wanted to explain, officially, to give Frau Hofmann an account of all that had happened, what the doctor had said, Frau Rüdiger, the milk, the bicycle ride, everything, but it was as if she’d been bound in place like Werner Forssmann’s nurse. Everything was so odd. She was here in this house she’d pictured endlessly in her imagination, here among all the things it contained, the family pictures, the ancestral china, the carpet he walked on in his slippered feet, but this wasn’t where she belonged and it was dark beyond the windows, and her boss, the most proper man in the world, the man she esteemed more than any other, was responding to his wife’s embrace with mounting passion, his arms clutched to her shoulders and his mouth pressed tight to hers in a deep erotic kiss . . .

“Albert, Albert,” the wife murmured, coming up for air, “what have you done to yourself? What were you thinking?”

He didn’t say a word, just tightened his grip on her and tried to kiss her again, but she pulled away and for the first time seemed aware that they weren’t alone in the room, throwing a quizzical glance in Susi’s direction before turning back to him—to his kiss. “You gave us such a fright,” she whispered, and then she was repeating his name again, over and over, as if to take possession of it.

“The children—?” he began, but couldn’t finish the question.