She was late for work the next morning. Her mother had awakened her at the usual hour but she’d fallen back asleep, never more exhausted in her life. She’d got home very late and her mother had greeted her at the door with a stony face, but she explained herself patiently till gradually her mother seemed to relent and heated a pan of barley soup over the stove for her, all the while complaining You couldn’t have telephoned even? and she reiterating how desperate the situation had been—and she didn’t have to exaggerate, that was for certain. When finally she did get to bed, she couldn’t sleep, her mind replaying the day’s events in a continuous loop, coming around again and again to the way he’d cried out her name—Help me, Susi, help me!—and then the image of him holding fast to his wife, of their lips, their tongues, the way he moved against her and she against him as if there were no constraints, as if she herself wasn’t sitting right there in the corner of the room. And she wasn’t in that room as an interloper either, she was there as a Good Samaritan, a friend, a savior—and what did that get her? A lonely ride home in the dark and not a word of thanks.

The first thing she saw on opening the closet—his jacket, hanging on its hook like the most ordinary thing in the world—flooded her with relief. He was there. He was all right. He hadn’t died in the night or lost his mind or succumbed to delirium. She fought down the flickering memory of his vacant eyes, his reddened face, his mussed hair that stood straight up on his head like the hackles of an animal and the way he’d shouted at her when she asked, in all innocence, if she should call the doctor, then she hung her scarf and jacket on the hook beside his, slipped on her lab coat and stepped into the laboratory.

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.