When it was installed in his room, and he played a few notes on it, he was seized with such a crazy joy that instead of continuing to play he leaped up and gazed at it from a distance, standing with his hands on his hips. The acoustics of the room were excellent, and that helped to take away his initial unease at living in an iron house. In fact, though the building might look very iron from outside, inside it one had not the slightest sense of its iron construction, and no one could have pointed to any features of the decor that were anything other than completely cosy. In the early days, Karl had high hopes of his piano playing, and while lying in bed, at any rate, he thought it might have a direct effect upon his American environment. But it did sound very peculiar when, with the windows letting in the noisy air from outside, he played an old ballad from his homeland, which the soldiers sing to each other in the evenings as they lean out through the barrack windows gazing at the dark square outside – but then, when he looked out on to the street, it was just the same, a tiny piece, no more, of a gigantic circulatory system that couldn’t be arrested without understanding all the forces operating on its totality. The uncle put up with his piano playing and made no objection to it, especially as, quite unprompted, Karl only rarely allowed himself the pleasure of it. Yes, he even brought Karl the scores of American marches and of course of the national anthem, too, but it couldn’t just have been love of music that made him one day ask Karl perfectly seriously if he wouldn’t care to learn the violin or the French horn as well.

But naturally Karl’s first and most important task was learning English. A young teacher from a trade school would appear in Karl’s room at seven in the morning, to find him already seated at his desk, among his notebooks, or else walking up and down the room, committing something to memory. Karl understood that he couldn’t learn English quickly enough, and that his rapid progress at it was also his best way of pleasing his uncle. At first the English content of his early conversations with his uncle had been confined to hello and goodbye, but he was soon able to increase the English portion of their conversations, and also to move on to more personal subjects. The first time Karl recited an American poem to his uncle one evening – the subject of it was a conflagration – it made him quite sombre with satisfaction. They both stood by a window in Karl’s room, the uncle looked out into the darkened sky, and in sympathy with the verse, he slowly and rhythmically clapped his hands, while Karl stood beside him with expressionless eyes and struggled with the difficult poem.

The more Karl’s English improved, the more inclined the uncle was to introduce him to his circle of acquaintances, decreeing that his English teacher should always accompany Karl. The very first acquaintance to whom Karl was introduced was a slim young man of astounding suppleness, whom the uncle ushered into Karl’s room with a whole shower of compliments. He was obviously one of those millionaire’s sons who from their parents’ point of view have gone wrong, and whose life was such that no normal person could have followed so much as a single day of it without pain. As though in recognition of this, there was about his lips and eyes a continual smile for the good fortune that seemed to have been granted to him, to those he met and indeed to the whole world.

The young man, one Mr Mak, suggested, with the uncle’s express approval, that they go out riding together at half past five in the morning, either in a riding school, or in the open air. Karl was a little loath to agree to this as he had never in his life sat on a horse, and wanted to learn to ride a little first, but in the face of the urgings of his uncle and Mack, both of whom said it was just for pleasure and a healthy form of exercise, nothing artistic, he finally agreed. It meant, unfortunately, that he had to get out of bed by half past four, and he often regretted that, because he seemed to be afflicted by a veritable sleeping sickness here, probably a consequence of having to be on his toes all day – but once in his bathroom, he quickly got over his regret. The sieve of a shower extended over the whole length and breadth of the bathtub – which of his former schoolmates, however rich, had anything like that, still less all to himself – and Karl would lie stretched out, he could even spread his arms in the tub, and let streams of warm, hot, warm and finally ice-cold water descend on him, all or part, just as he liked. As he lay there in a kind of half-sleep, what he liked best was to feel the last few drops falling on his closed eyelids, and then open them, and let the water run down his face.

Waiting for him at the riding school, where the lofty automobile of his uncle dropped him, would be his English teacher, while Mak invariably only turned up later. He could afford to, because the truly animated riding would only begin once he was there. Didn’t the horses leap out of their doze on his entry, didn’t the whip crack more percussively through the arena, while the surrounding gallery was suddenly populated by various spectators, grooms, riding pupils, or whoever they were? Karl used the time before Mack’s arrival for some very basic riding exercises. There was a long tall man who could reach the highest horseback almost without raising his arm, and he always gave Karl that fifteen-minute preparation. Karl was not overly successful with him, a pretext for learning English lamentations, which he kept uttering in a breathless way during this tuition to his English teacher, who was always leaning on the same doorpost, generally dog-tired. But almost all his frustration with riding would disappear when Mak arrived. The tall man was dismissed, and soon nothing would be heard in the still half-dark hall except the sound of galloping horses, and little was seen except Mak’s raised arm as he gave Karl some order. After a delightful half an hour of this had passed almost like sleep they called a halt, Mak was in a tearing rush, he said goodbye to Karl patting him on the cheek if he were particularly pleased with his performance, and disappeared, in too much of a hurry even to go out through the door with Karl. Karl then took the teacher in his car, and they drove to their English lesson, usually by some roundabout way, because the big street, which actually led straight from the uncle’s house to the riding school, was so choked with traffic that they would have lost too much time. He didn’t have the company of the English teacher for very much longer, because Karl reproached himself for dragging the tired man along to riding school to no purpose, as the English communication with Mak was on a very simple level, and so he asked his uncle to relieve the teacher of this duty. After some thought, the uncle agreed.

It took rather a long time before his uncle decided to give Karl any insight at all into the nature of his business, though Karl often asked him about it. It was a sort of commissioning and forwarding business, of a kind that Karl thought probably didn’t even exist in Europe.