Elyot Standish sat about writing labels on the evening before departure. The ink dried greenish-yellow on his pen. He looked at the bundle of little red tags, at the dust on the luggage, and the fragments of scrapped paper lying in the corners of what had been his room. Silence split the full year in retrospect. It lay there in the still, disordered room, summer outside again, deeper than the first afternoon. At times he felt very thin, almost substanceless, in spite of the moments of positive experience that bring conviction. Even these, strung together, pointed to another person. They did not explain the shadow in the glass. There is that general conspiracy on last evenings to reduce the body. There is the water dripping from the tap. There are the gaping voices behind the wall.

Frau Fiesel had begun to snivel. She wrote his name in a birthday book. She talked about das Leben. It was altogether traurig, she said.

Outside, the steamy scent of limes became the gas flame behind trees, that wavered, he could feel his stomach, like the yellow flickering of gas. His hands hung by his sides, no longer self-assertive, balled in his pockets. He was going soft. He was dissolving in the warm air. He.

Nun, Elyot, said Onkel Rudi, appearing soundless in the passage.

He poked his head in at the door.

Fresh starts, fresh troubles. Schön, said Onkel Rudi. Schön.

Then he laughed and went away.

The voice swelled into the phrase of Bach. You could hear it behind the closed door. It opened out in Onkel Rudi’s room. And you suddenly felt firm again, behind the little picket fence planted by the voice, by the phrase of Bach. There was a purpose, a stability in Bach that translated itself to your hands as you tied pyjama strings, as you opened the bed. There was a purpose, caught from the music, even in the personal mistake. He did not regret these. Lying in bed, there was perhaps even an ultimate pattern, woven partly from mistakes.

Elyot, she said.

He heard the creaking of the door. He lay there, neither surprised nor resisting, but confident, listening to the music.

She had come, even if Mutti heard, and suspected she was immoral, which she wasn’t, she had to, she said. Because he had been unjust, even though she had lied, he might call it that, about Dr Rosenheim.

She came and sat upon the edge of the bed. He could hear her quick breathing. But unconvincingly. And who was Dr Rosenheim, and the scarcely more palpable figure of Hildegard beside him on the bed? Behind the music there were many dim faces peering from the dead year.

She began to resent his silence again.

He was hateful, she said. He was unreal, detestable. He roused emotions that he couldn’t return.

She was very eager, was Hildegard, to pin the blame on someone, perhaps with some truth, he did not know. There was very little he knew, least of all himself.