But she was dissatisfied, hungry and thirsty for overwhelming happiness, so why should he be content? She was wayward, putting his love to the test until one day, in exasperation, he almost hit her. He controlled himself, apologizing for something that had not happened. She didn’t understand, despising him because she felt she had deserved a slap but hadn’t had one, and he could not help seeing, from her cold smile, that he himself no longer understood her.

She wouldn’t give way, threatened half-childishly, half-callously to leave him, and he, with an unconscious, boyishly confused sense that his was an immutable affection, thought it his own right to threaten her with a farewell for ever. She said nothing, but she herself retreated. He didn’t understand, but left it at that. In fact this was a good moment. His design for his innovation was lying on the head engineer’s desk for examination, and meanwhile he had the chance to go on an expedition to South America, where a wireless telegraph line across the Andes was being planned.

He fell sick in Buenos Aires six months later, two days before he had planned to come home. His malaria was only half-cured when he returned to Berlin. Then, made doubly sensitive by the undeserved misfortune of his illness, he saw Hedy again, and he was received by a stranger.

Their first evening was more than a disappointment; to him, it was an encounter with real life, and he could not get over it. He felt himself at a disadvantage, felt that he ought to hate her, scorn her, spurn her, and yet he clung to her, pouring all his strength into a pointless love, a bleakly passionate conquest of what could not be conquered. He had never loved her as much as he did that first, lonely evening in his hotel room. He lay awake for hours, and could get to sleep only by promising himself, like a child, that everything would be all right tomorrow.

But next day he still couldn’t think clearly, and once again he clung to words, promises in letters, memories of their first, unthinkingly sweet time together, heard her say “No” with incredulity—and when she told him, with a small gesture of her plainly gloved hand, that she meant what she said, he left her without a word. It was late evening and he hoped, in the weariness of the moment, that it would all be over next day, and he could begin a new life without Hedy.

III

AT THE TIME, Hedy was working as a shorthand typist in an office near Nollendorfplatz. She arrived in the office at the same time and left at the same time every day: one among thousands of people all alike in their attitudes, their tastes, their craving for small pleasures, in their clothes and their attractive but not very animated features. That was what Erwin felt as he waited for Hedy at noon next day. Did it make any difference whether it was Hedy he saw or one of a thousand other girls in a blue dress, with a little black hat above her small, dark-eyed face?

Broad streets reflecting the dull light of arc lamps on their asphalt met at this place, and if you approached from a distance you thought you were coming to a mighty dome, a tall cupola built of glass and iron, shining in the white light like a gigantic lampshade. At close quarters, however, it was only a kind of large rotunda standing on thin iron girders, a dully lit corridor roofed with dark corrugated iron which seemed to be eroded by rain. The overhead railway trains thundered through it, painted gleaming yellow and red and as soulless as newly bought children’s toys.

Only the flower sellers lent a festive note to the place, carrying whole flowerbeds in their wicker baskets: violets, lily of the valley, the first timorous rosebuds. Their perfume was mild, surprising, and nostalgic all at once.

Two palaces stood outside the concourse of the overhead railway station; mighty Doric columns guarded Cyclopean portals, all built in a style thousands of years old, as if dug from the earth of ancient Greece. But the title of a trite operetta was strung out in little electric lights above the heavy cornice. You half-heard popular songs played on a gramophone: merry entertainment was forced on the passers-by. To Erwin, yearning for colour, music and Hedy after his long, lonely voyage of a month on the high seas, all this seemed both enticing and repellent. Bright stained glass windows in shades of verdigris and vermilion adorned the other palace, looking as if they had been taken from the chaste windows of a Gothic church to be brought here to frame posters for films that would appeal to the public.

It was still cool. Slender ladies wore ermine furs with little bunches of violets and large sealskin muffs that shone like dark water. The shiny, lively eyes of a shaggy little lapdog might look out from these muffs. Everything was in movement, the overhead trains rolled on over the iron girders, electric trams rushed by while the rods conducting the current to them slid fast along the overhead cable and wild blue sparks were cast out above the square below, as alarming as lightning. Garish and urgent, the advertisement in lights on the Doric columns wandered over the heavy grey stone, was extinguished and then began to come on again. It kept watch like a policeman at first, then went on its way like a lady of easy virtue with an enticing smile. Motor cars hurled their wheels over the paving of the road, which was always damp; bicycles glittered, wobbling as they passed by; men with large bundles of freshly printed newspapers made their way through the crowd. Yet it all remained bleak, its sounds fading away, in tune only with the traffic.