“Why are you screaming like that?” the clerk then asked in a surly voice, after he’d concluded that the customer might well be mad but wasn’t actually dangerous.

“I drank a bit too much,” Silbermann explained haltingly, now that he realized what a dangerous situation he’d put himself in.

“That’s no reason to scream at someone. Don’t you have anything smaller?”

Yes he did.

As he walked away from the counter and headed to the platform, Silbermann took pains to sway a little as long as he was in sight of the clerk. This is all so stupid, he thought, so incredibly stupid. Disappointment and rage began to well up inside him once again.

They’re all backstabbers and sellouts, he thought, every single one of them. No one resists. They all cringe and say: we have no choice, but the truth is they’re happy to go along because there’s something in it for them. The “opportunities” everyone keeps talking about—what would they be without people willing to take advantage of them? Why is Elfriede staying at her brother’s? Doesn’t she realize I’m putting him in jeopardy? Did she not think to bring up the idea that he should also take me in for the time being? Or does she agree with his position? No, that’s impossible!—What’s impossible?

I’m on the run, and there’s her brother, with all his reasonable arguments. Perhaps she regrets having married a Jew. The times have definitely changed! We’ve become a business opportunity for our enemies, and a danger for our friends. And in the end we’re blamed for our own bad luck. What else do I have to offer except my misfortune?

A ticket for the express train, that’s all.

There may have been times when I didn’t behave as people might have wished. Incidents I thought were completely forgotten are now coming back. Did I not hesitate before agreeing to be his guarantor? But in the end I agreed. Now he’s forgotten about that, but not about the fact that I hesitated and he had to wait! And I can be reproached for a lot of other things as well, mostly trifles, but taken together they inevitably add up to a Jewish character trait. Because the truth is I don’t have the right to be an ordinary human being. More is demanded of me.

He angrily tossed away the cigarette he’d just lit. Whatever I’ve done in the past, he thought, looks different today than it did back then, because now my humanity is called into question, because I am a Jew.

He climbed aboard the train that had just pulled in.

Is it going to go on like this forever? The traveling, the waiting, the running away? Why does nothing happen? Why don’t they detain me, arrest me, beat me? They drive a person to the brink of despair and leave him standing there.

Through the window he saw a clean, charming little farm village go flying by.