He loves jokes. I can sit by his bed now, he doesn’t get cross with me any more.’

And suddenly, getting up, between the two men (Wenk follows after, holding the neck of the cognac bottle disdainfully between finger and thumb), suddenly she seems to be listening to something far away. ‘No more jokes please, Herr Stuff. I know my Herbert’s dead. But I want to be lying on your sofa with the phone ringing, and the radio reports coming in, and the newspapers coming hot off the presses. That feels a bit like proper life to me.’

There’s a sheepish and chaotic return to work in the machinists’ room. No one looks up.

‘Don’t forget my cognac!’ the woman suddenly shouts.

On the sofa she gets one more glass, and then she’s asleep, mouth open, jaws relaxed, passed out.

‘Who’s going to stay with her?’ asks Stuff. ‘Someone has to stay with her.’

‘Are you going to see the proprietor now?’

‘If you need to ask like that, you stay. Come on, Tredup.’

They go. Wenk watches them go. Looks down at the sleeping woman, listens to the deputation set off, grips the bottle of cognac, and takes a deep pull on it.

IV

The lab is no modern laboratory of glass, bright and clean and airy, it’s the grotto of an eccentric inventor drowning in gear, ideas, rubble and filth.

At a table covered with half-eroded linoleum sits a sort of gnome with white stubble, a fat, spherical creature, a red-lacquered dwarf. He has raised his weak, bulbous blue eyes to his visitors. ‘You can’t talk to me now. Do your stuff by yourselves.’

Stuff says: ‘I’m just wanting to piss all over someone, Herr Schabbelt—with your permission.’

The dwarf holds a zinc plate up against the light, checks it anxiously. ‘The autotype isn’t coming out.’

‘Perhaps the grid is too fine, Herr Schabbelt?’

‘What do you know about it? Clear off, I said! What’s Tredup doing, filthying up the air? Get out!—Maybe it is too fine. You’re not stupid, you know, Stuff. You could be right.—Who do you want to piss on?’

‘The Socialists.’

‘No. Fifty-five per cent of our readers are workers and junior officials. Socialists? No. Even if we are on the Right ourselves.’

‘It’s a good story, Herr Schabbelt.’

‘Well, tell it to me, then, Stuff. Wherever you can find room. But, Tredup, you’ve got to go, you reek of acquisition.’

‘I’m happy to do something else, if that’s all right by you,’ grumbles Tredup.

‘Rubbish! You enjoy your work. Get out!’

‘We need him here. Later on, with the story.’

‘All right, go and stand in the dark somewhere I can’t see you. On you go, Stuff.’

‘Do you know Police Superintendent Kallene? Of course you do. After the Revolution he was a Red. Social Democrat, Independent Socialist, whatever—anyway, he got his reward. The stupidest junior policeman got to be superintendent.’

‘I know.’

‘When he got the job, he left the Party, returned his Party book, became what he had been before, a fervent Nationalist.’

‘And . . .