Within two months he had left it for Berlin. In the energetic, lively atmosphere of Berlin in 1910, Erwin hoped to forget. He did not, but his terrible experience gradually retreated into the past; it was left behind, whereas every day now was a new one. Erwin stopped brooding and wondering whether some childish remark from him the evening before his father’s death had been the cause of it. He understood the necessity of being alone. Only in his dreams did he feel as if he had to go back to his home town to see his father again, carrying the black briefcase that contained insurance contract forms, and with the pleading, rather helpless smile on his pale lips that had not left him even in death.

In Berlin Erwin went to work in a factory making machinery for wireless telegraphy. As he stood at his metal-topped work bench, which had a sheet of white paper spread over the right-hand corner so that he could draw on it when he leaned over the bench, he was calm enough, and sometimes he told himself that his life was tolerable. He was surrounded by contented people. Most of the workers had wives and children; after nine hours at work they would go home to a small apartment in the north or east of the city, a place that always looked clean, was quietly kept in order, was cool in summer and warm in winter. The only thing wrong with the bed was that it was too soft and comfortable, which made leaving it in the morning difficult. They were provided for in case of sickness or industrial accident, and when their children were old enough to earn money themselves the parents could afford a little allotment garden plot where they grew vegetables, easily cultivated flowers and fruit trees, and made comfortable garden sheds out of old crates. The thin walls of the sheds were adorned with interesting pictures cut from illustrated magazines by their children or grandchildren, to amuse themselves when it was raining outside.

Erwin had more education than most of his colleagues. His father had sent him to secondary school for four years, and then his studies came to a sudden end. That was the deepest grief he had caused his son. Erwin, who otherwise envied no one, did envy the grammar school boys who carried their books under their arms wrapped in waxed black linen; he envied them for being able to sit on the low, uncomfortable school benches, for having all their written work read and thoroughly assessed by educated men in black frock-coats and gold-rimmed glasses, while he himself had to obey a greasy mechanic whose face and jacket were stiff with soot and oil, who could barely read, and whose knowledge went no further than the mechanism of the old-fashioned bicycles and ramshackle old motor cars brought to him for repair.

The technical world was wider in Berlin, and since Erwin could not work in any other field his interest in it grew daily. He did not play any sports, the theatre bored him, he found novels difficult to read, he had no social circle and knew no love. After work he read popular scientific works on physics, took further education courses, and in the evenings went to a lecture hall, newly built and with walls smelling of whitewash, every last corner of it illuminated by the harsh light of bright arc lamps, while at the front, very small and standing in front of a gigantic blackboard, a stout, thick-set lecturer with a thin voice talked about Hertz waves. Later, when Erwin went home along half a dozen wide, bleak streets, soundless and depressing in spite of all the people in them, he saw living figures and measurable dimensions before his mind’s eye, copper wires wound around porcelain insulators, contacts were made. Metal sand was bonded to a mass, selenium lit up in electrical force fields, the side circuits in arc lamps emitted unknown rays, and invisible waves came from small, heavy accumulators, streaming powerfully out in regular rhythms to somewhere far away, a sister wave of some kind in another country—all the way to a foreign part of the world, perhaps even to a star in the air high above the rooftops, a place otherwise as far out of reach as the dead or those still unborn.

Erwin often felt he was close to making a discovery, but next day the thin-voiced lecturer would identify it as a very old one, something that had been known for a long time, and Erwin was both proud and sad. When he wrote down his ideas in a little notebook on his way home people thought he was a debt collector, or if they were younger they took him for a journalist or detective noting down addresses.

Erwin’s one aim was to invent something, not a discovery to make him famous but one that would bring in plenty of money—he wanted to buy second-hand textbooks, drawing instruments, rulers, dictionaries, everything you needed for a good humanist education, and so finish his studies. If there was anything he longed for it was still the grammar school education that he had missed. Even now he felt nostalgia for the thirteen-year-old Erwin who still wore boy’s clothes. He would have given anything to be at his side again, sitting on a low school bench in the light of hissing yellow gaslights and trembling before the old teacher who handed out exercise books.

II

ERWIN HAD DISCOVERED that all the inventions for the improvement of society that he had thought up during his working hours were in fact in the field of wireless telegraphy, and now he no longer drew while he was at work. Instead, when he was home in his room at the back of a building in Chausseestrasse he built a small model of the transmitting apparatus for wireless telegraphy, in line with the latest findings. Then, when he started building a receiver, he found a unique arrangement, one that seemed to him perfectly natural and yet went a little further than the most recent inventions, something that was simple (and therefore good), new, and thus in his eyes beautiful.

His invention made him happy. He began mingling with other people. Suddenly he thought there was something wonderful and surprising about all of them, and the first time he really got to know a girl was a great experience—or even more, a true passion.

But only the great are capable of a great love, and little Hedy was not one of them. She was in love with Erwin; the first intoxicating ardour of love raised both of them above themselves. However, Hedy could not live long at such heights. Erwin’s impassioned feelings impressed her but made her laugh, his lofty attitude seemed to her unjustified, and she tormented him just to show that she was the stronger of them, even though she still loved him.