At the moment she caught sight of him in the far corner (not at his desk but at the window, his back to her), she was struck by the aroma of fresh coffee, a rarity in these days of rationing and hardship, and something else too, a lighter fragrance, a whiff of nature in this place where the natural invariably gave way to process, synthesis, titration and extraction. That was when she saw the flowers, the daffodils, a whole bouquet of them, arranged in a beaker on her desk. She was struck dumb. No one ever gave her presents, except for her parents and her brothers, and only then on her birthday and at Christmas, and before she could even think to call out a Guten Morgen to him she was pressing her face to the soft cool petals and breathing in the scent of the outdoors.

“Oh, I see you’ve found the flowers, Fräulein.” He’d turned round now, grinning at her, his hair swept back, the spectacles pinching his nose, his lab coat spotless and his tie perfectly aligned, everything right again, everything the way it should be. “I wanted to do something more for you, to thank you, that is, for yesterday . . . roses, I thought of roses, but the shops weren’t open yet and, well, I picked these for you along Bottmingenstrasse on my way in this morning. I hope you like them.”

Her first emotion was guilt over the resentment she’d fallen prey to on her way in on the tram, but now, as if a switch had been thrown, she felt nothing but warmth for him—he was his old self, and his old self was gentle and giving, and he did care for her, he did. And then, as he crossed the lab to her to take both her hands in his own, she gave way to relief and a kind of amazement at how well he looked, fresher than ever, in fact—if she hadn’t known better she would have thought he’d just returned from a week at a spa, at Montreux or Baden-Baden, his whole body aglow as if he’d been rebuilt, cell by cell, overnight.

“I do,” she said. “I love them. But you didn’t have to—”

He held up a hand to silence her. “Let’s have a cup of coffee—you do enjoy coffee, don’t you, Fräulein?—and sit down a minute to discuss what’s happened here. I have so much to tell you.”

So they sat—at his desk, on company time—and sipped their coffee, with sugar and cream, no less, and he told her everything, from the minute the drug had come on to its gradual dissipation late in the night. “I experienced things, Fräulein, I’d never thought possible—saw things, saw whether my eyes were open or shut, a whole kaleidoscope of swirling images and colors, and that was only the beginning. It was the most”—he hesitated, then laughed—“eye-opening experience I’ve ever had. Susi, I saw the world as it truly is,” he said, his voice so rich and resonant he might have been singing, “—the immaterial world, the spiritual world, Kant’s Ding an sich in every object.”