Suspicious looking men with rubber collars seemed to be policemen. I reached unconciously for my breast pocket where I kept my passport, just as I had reached in my army days for my cap if one of my superiors was about. I was coming home, my papers were in order, I had nothing to fear.

I went up to a policeman and asked directions to the Gibka, where my relations lived, my rich uncle Phöbus Bohlaug. The policeman spoke German, a lot of people hereabouts spoke German; German manufacturers, engineers and merchants dominated society, business and industry in this town.

It was about a ten minute walk and I thought about Phöbus Bohlaug, of whom my father used to speak with envy and hatred on returning tired and depressed from unproductive committee meetings. Every member of the family spoke the name Phöbus with respect, almost as if they were indeed referring to the Sun God. Only my father called him ‘Phöbus, that oaf’ – because he had allegedly done some curious business with my mother’s dowry. My father had always been too cowardly to demand the dowry. All he used to do, and always at the same time of year, was to look in the visitors’ list and see if Phöbus Bohlaug had arrived at the Hotel Imperial. If he had, he would invite his brother-in-law to tea in the Leopoldstadt. My mother would wear a black dress and, by then, rather scanty artificial jewellery. She admired her rich brother as if he were someone very strange and royal, as if the same womb had not borne them both and the same two breasts suckled them. My uncle used to come, bringing a book for me. An aroma of gingerbread would emanate from the kitchen, in which my grandfather lived and from which he only emerged on special occasions, as if newly minted, freshly washed, with a white starched dickey, twinkling through spectacles which were much too weak, leaning forward to look at his son Phöbus, pride of his old age. Phöbus had an expansive laugh, an expansive double chin and red rolls of fat at the back of his neck. He smells of cigars, and sometimes of wine, and kisses everyone on both cheeks. He talks a lot, loudly and cheerfully, but if asked whether business is good his eyes start out of his head, he shrinks into himself and might at any moment begin to tremble like some freezing beggar. His double chins disappear behind his collar. ‘Business is no good these days. When I was small I could buy a poppyseed cake for half a kopeck, and today a loaf of bread costs ten. The children – touch wood – are growing up and cost money, Alexander asks for pocket money every day.’

My father would twitch at his cuffs and put his hands back on the edge of the table, smiling when Phöbus addressed him, but sulky and weak and praying for his brother-in-law to have a heart attack. After two hours

Phöbus would stand up, press a silver coin into my mother’s hand, another into Grandfather’s, and slip one into my pocket. My father would see him down the steps, because it was dark, holding the petrol lamp high in his hands and my mother would call, ‘Nathan, mind the shade!’ Father minded the shade and, since the front door was still open, one could hear the resonant voice of Phöbus.

Two days later Phöbus would be gone and my father would announce that ‘the oaf had already left.’

‘Stop it Nathan,’ my mother would say.

I came to the Bibka, an elegant street on the outskirts of town, with low white houses, new and yet ornamental. I saw lighted windows in the Bohlaugs’ house but the door was closed. I debated for a while whether I should go up at such a late hour — it must have been ten already – and then I heard the sound of a piano and a cello, a woman’s voice, and a rattle of cards being shuffled. I thought that it would not do for me to join that company in the suit I was wearing. Everything depended on my first arrival, so I decided to put off my visit to the next day and returned to the hotel. The journey in vain had put me out of sorts. The porter did not salute me as I entered the hotel. The liftman did not bestir himself when I rang the bell, but came over unhurriedly, studying my face. He was a uniformed man in his fifties, an elderly lift-boy. I was annoyed that in this hotel the lift was not operated by small rosy-cheeked youngsters.

It occurred to me that I had intended to take a look at the seventh floor, and so walked upstairs.