Watching his friend leave, Silbermann was dismayed to notice he was weaving slightly and bumping into tables, with the same stiffly erect posture he always assumed when seriously drunk.

He’s not well suited to being a partner, thought Silbermann. He should have remained a manager. In that capacity he was reliable, quiet, and respectable, a very good colleague. But his newfound fortune doesn’t become him. If only he doesn’t wind up ruining the business. If only he doesn’t go gambling!

Silbermann wrinkled his forehead. “His good fortune has made him unfit,” he mumbled, annoyed.

The waiter Silbermann had been looking for earlier—without success—finally appeared.

“Are guests meant to wait for service here or for the trains?” asked Silbermann, his sharp tone expressing his disdain for anything that approached slovenliness or exuded an unfriendly air.

“I beg your pardon,” answered the waiter. “A gentleman in second class was complaining because he thought he was sitting across from a Jew. But it wasn’t a Jew at all, the man was from South America, and since I know a little Spanish I was called in to help.”

“I see.”

Silbermann got up. His mouth contracted into a line, and his gray eyes fixed the waiter with a severe look.

The waiter tried to smooth things over. “It really wasn’t a Jew,” he assured Silbermann. Evidently the waiter considered his guest to be a particularly staunch member of the party.

“I’m not interested in that. Has the train for Hamburg already left?”

The waiter glanced at the clock above the exit to the platforms.

“Seven twenty,” he thought out loud. “The train for Magdeburg is just leaving. Hamburg leaves at seven twenty-four. If you hurry you can still make it. I wish that someday I could go running to catch a train, but people like me…”

He brushed a few bread crumbs off the table with a napkin.

“The best would be,” he went on, picking up the previous subject, “if the Jews had to wear yellow bands on their arms. Then at least there wouldn’t be any confusion.”

Silbermann looked at him. “Are they really so terrible?” he asked quietly, regretting his words even as he spoke them.

The waiter looked at Silbermann as though he hadn’t understood him right. He was clearly surprised, but also unsuspecting, since Silbermann had none of the features that marked him as a Jew, according to the tenets of the racial scientists.

“The whole thing has nothing to do with me,” the man said at last, carefully. “Still, it would be good for the others. My brother-in-law for example looks a little Jewish, but of course he’s an Aryan, it’s only that he has to constantly explain and prove everything, over and over. That’s too much to ask of anyone.”

“Yes it is,” Silbermann agreed. Then he paid his tab and left.

Unbelievable, he thought, absolutely unbelievable.