The young man, Ludwig, is then asked to reside in the home of the industrialist. Reluctantly, he accepts. Within a short period of time, he falls silently in love with the boss’s wife, and she with him, but before anything desired and unavoidable occurs between them, the young man is asked to move to Mexico for two years to manage a mining concern for the German industrialist. It is on hearing of Ludwig’s impending departure that the wife suddenly lets down her guard and allows her feelings for the young man to erupt. He cannot hide his feelings, either. The physical proximity of the lovers, which might have led to one thing only in Stendhal, finds itself hampered as in any of Racine’s plays by crippling inhibitions and by the perpetual presence of the husband and hired help. “Not now! Not here! I beg you!” she stammers, almost on the point of surrender. That almost, which spells “silent consent” and intimacy before the act, becomes the lodestar of their unconsummated love. They, too, now enter a shadowland of their own invention.

Ludwig leaves, and in Mexico counts down the days, the weeks, the months. They write incessantly and clearly feed off the feverish letters each sends the other. Then the worst happens. In Mexico the young man learns that war has broken out in Europe. It is 1914. He cannot go back and all correspondence between them comes to a sudden halt.

The screen blurs again and it is nine years later. Ludwig lives in Mexico, is married, and has children. Now, for the first time since leaving before the war, he returns to Germany on business. This, by my calculation, must be 1923. It is also the year of Hitler’s attempted coup in Munich.

The almost-lovers finally do meet; she is older, a widow, lives alone. But nothing else has changed. The house is the same, the help is the same, even her telephone number is the same; to his surprise, Ludwig is completely able to resurrect his age-old feelings of inadequacy as a young man when he had first stepped into that house. He thought he’d outgrown the feeling, what with being a married father and a wealthy businessman in his own right now; but if parts of us move on and grow older, others stay frozen still and don’t budge, won’t grow, won’t live, won’t die. We exist on several parallel time lines; sometimes those lines cross, sometimes they don’t touch, and sometimes each withdraws as though shoved by a “ghostly mist.” Nothing has changed—nothing—and yet things couldn’t be more strained between the lovers. “People may grow old,” she finally says in a moment of candor, “but they remain the same.” “Everything is as it used to be,” he will almost concur during an uncomfortable moment between them, only to add, “except for us, except for us!” But an instant afterward, as if to dispel his cruel quip, he will ask: “Do you still remember?” And she will right away reply: “I have not forgotten either.” For all their undiminished love, however, everything seems to have chilled between them. He asks to revisit his old room in the house. She shows him upstairs. This is where they had kissed and hugged and where she promised to offer herself. Now complete discomfort sits between them. With nothing more to add, they say goodbye. The next day, however, he asks to see her for one last time. “People come back,” says the author-Lothario in Letter from an Unknown Woman. “Yes, they do come back, but they’ve forgotten,” replies the woman who has loved him and only him.

Unable to dispel the strain between them, together they decide to take a train to revisit Heidelberg as they had once done years earlier.