For they themselves were lost souls. They suffered themselves to be bribed and they bribed others. They defrauded God and the world and their superiors. But even the superiors in turn defrauded their higher superiors, who dwelt in the larger, more distant towns. In the group of older government officials one defrauded the other at cards; and not so much out of pure lust for gain but for the sheer pleasure of cheating. But Anselm Eibenschütz did not cheat. And what incensed his friends even more against him was not so much that he himself did not cheat but, above all, that he was indifferent to the cheating to which he fell victim. Therefore he appeared to isolate himself from the others in a deliberately hostile manner. And so he felt even more lonely in their midst.

The merchants hated him – with one single exception, of whom we shall speak later. They hated him because they feared him. When they saw him arrive in his golden-yellow gig, the gendarme at his side, they even dared to close their doors. They were well aware that they would be obliged to open their shops as soon as the gendarme had knocked three times. So they closed their doors merely to irritate Inspector Eibenschütz. For he had already reported several shopkeepers and brought them before the court.

When he came home late in the evening, soaked with perspiration in summer, half-frozen in winter, his wife awaited him with a sombre brow. How had he been able to endure living with such a total stranger for so long! It seemed to him as if he had only recently got to know her and always, the moment before he entered the house, he was afraid that she might have changed since yesterday and become another new, but equally sinister, person. Usually she sat knitting under the ring-burner, diligent, spiteful and embittered in her humility. Yet she was pretty to look at, with her smooth black cap of hair and her sulky short upper lip, which feigned a childish petulance. She merely raised her eyes, while her hands continued to knit. ‘Shall we eat now?’ she asked. ‘Yes!’ he said. She laid down her knitting, a dangerous poison-green ball of wool with two menacing needles and a half-begun scrap of stocking which actually resembled a remnant, a product not yet born and already dismembered. Crash, crash, crash! Eibenschütz gazed at it while he heard the distressing noises his wife made in the kitchen and the strident and vulgar voice of the servant girl. Though he was hungry he wished that his wife might stay in the kitchen for as long as possible. Why were there no children in the house?

6