I was awake, but for minutes I enjoyed this heavy muzziness, the torpor of lying there with senses voluptuously dulled. Suddenly I seemed to hear voices behind me, living human voices speaking words, and you cannot imagine my joy, for it had been months, almost a year since I had heard words other than the harsh, cutting, malignant ones of my questioners. ‘You’re dreaming,’ I said to myself. ‘You’re dreaming! Whatever you do, don’t open your eyes! Let it go on, this dream, or you’ll see that accursed room around you again, the chair and the washstand and the table and the wall-paper with the pattern always the same. You’re dreaming—go on dreaming!’

“But curiosity got the better of me. Slowly and cautiously I opened my eyes. And, incredibly, it was a different room in which I found myself, a room wider and more spacious than my hotel room. An unbarred window let light in freely and looked out onto trees, green trees swaying in the breeze, instead of my unyielding firewall, the walls shone white and smooth, the ceiling above me was white and high—I really was in a new, different bed, and in fact it wasn’t a dream, human voices were whispering softly behind me. I heard footsteps approaching, and I must have given an involuntary start of surprise. A woman glided up, a woman with a white cap over her hair, an attendant, a nurse. A shudder of joy passed over me: I hadn’t seen a woman for a year. I stared at the sweet apparition, and it must have been a wild, ecstatic gaze, for the woman urgently soothed me: ‘Be calm! Keep still!’ But I only listened to her voice—wasn’t that someone speaking? Was there really still someone on earth who wasn’t an interrogator, a tormentor? And on top of that—what an incomprehensible miracle!—the soft, warm, almost tender voice of a woman. I stared greedily at her mouth, for in that year of hell it had come to seem unlikely to me that one person could speak kindly to another. She smiled at me—yes, she was smiling, there were still people who could smile kindly—then raised a finger of admonition to her lips and quietly moved away. But I could not do as she wished. I had not yet had enough of this miracle. I struggled to sit up in my bed in order to gaze after her, this miraculous human being who was kind. But when I tried to prop myself up on the edge of the bed, I couldn’t. Where my right hand, my fingers and wrist, should have been, I felt something foreign, a big, fat, white ball, evidently a massive bandage. At first I gazed uncomprehendingly at this white, fat, foreign object on my hand; then I slowly began to understand where I was and to think about what might have happened to me. I must have been wounded, or I had injured my own hand. I was in a hospital.

“At midday the doctor came, a friendly older man. He knew my family name and spoke of my uncle, the Kaiser’s personal physician, with such respect that I immediately felt he meant me well. As we went on he asked me all sorts of questions, particularly one that astonished me—whether I was a mathematician or a chemist. I said no.

“‘Strange,’ he murmured. ‘While you were feverish you kept shouting out such strange formulas—c3, c4. None of us could make head or tail of it.’

“I asked what had happened to me. He smiled oddly.

“‘Nothing serious. Acute nervous irritation,’ he said, and added in low tones, after first looking around cautiously, ‘Perfectly understandable when you get down to it. Since March 13, isn’t that right?’

“I nodded.

“‘No wonder, with these methods,’ he murmured.