Come dawn, he put aside his pumps and returned to his observations. And before long these observations validated the theory he feared, that Katharina and Ludmila, his little sister and his lover, once so different, were now the same, “and the conclusion could not be avoided, Father, that I had made them the same.” On the floor of the Music-Making Room he observed Ina singing to herself amidst his old glockenspiels, singing herself songs he had taught her, and between songs she spoke to herself, words he had taught her, thoughts he had taught her, everything she sang or said was his, and even the motions of her body as she sang and as she spoke “were mine, Father, motions I myself had taught her, even if I’d taught her them tacitly, unintentionally.” He recognized her swaying of her shoulders as his swaying of his shoulders. The subtlest things had imprinted themselves upon her. What she had learned on our walks went well beyond what I’d deliberately taught her. From the Music-Making Room I went to the Stonemason’s Workshop. There I saw the same thing, that is, myself … Though Ludmila spoke not to herself but to another person, and not in German but in Czech, Heinrich said, one nevertheless caught my own cadences, nothing but my own cadences, and my own gestures, or gesticulations, and presumably my own thoughts, and basically my own being, or at least my own behavior, which of course was also Katharina’s being or behavior. Heinrich: “The uncanny sensation of observing oneself, hearing oneself, albeit as a woman, albeit in Czech…” Before their walks she was different, after their walks she was the same; his mind had taken something different, evacuated it somehow of itself, and made it all the same. Heinrich said: “I thought: By collecting them in the same place and subjecting them to the same principles I have made Katharina and Ludmila indistinguishable from each other.”

And since, in nature, no two things are identical, whenever we come upon two indistinguishable things we always suspect them of being unnatural, artificial, “in other words, man-made,” said Prince Heinrich, “which is to say, not organisms but mechanisms, containing neither mind nor soul but gears engaging gears…”

How, thought Heinrich, can we tell an organism apart from a mechanism?

Ludmila had begun to seem profoundly unreal to him, “as unreal, perhaps, as she’s seemed to you the whole time I’ve been telling you this tale, Father. You would not be wrong if you’ve been thinking that Ludmila hardly seems to exist in and of herself (outside my telling) at all.” But her seeming unreal to him was no proof that she was unreal, that she was a mechanism, since after all, Heinrich noted, he might be mad, he might be quite mad and she quite real, organismic—“something seeming some way to me is no proof of anything.”

Her reality or unreality had to be demonstrated out there, he said: “On the outside of my head.”