What we do know is that these two, like Verlaine’s erstwhile lovers, are locked in their eternal colloquy in a cold park. If they do not move, it is not for fear of spoiling the moment or of being disappointed, it is not even inhibition that holds them back. Rather, it is because time can and does indeed commit terrible crimes. It will kill the very best in us and insist that we are still alive.

—ANDRÉ ACIMAN

JOURNEY INTO THE PAST

There you are!” He went to meet her with arms outstretched, almost flung wide. “There you are,” he repeated, his voice climbing the scale from surprise to delight ever more clearly, while his tender glance lingered on her beloved form. “I was almost afraid you wouldn’t come!”

“Do you really have so little faith in me?” But only her lips playfully uttered this mild reproach, smiling. Her blue eyes lit up, shining with confidence.

“No, not that, I never doubted that—what in this world can be relied on more than your word? But think how foolish I was—suddenly this afternoon, entirely unexpectedly, I can’t think why, I felt a spasm of senseless fear. I was afraid something could have happened to you. I wanted to send you a telegram, I wanted to go to you, and just now, when the hands of the clock moved on and still I didn’t see you, I was horribly afraid we might miss each other yet again. But thank God, you’re here now—”

“Yes, I’m here,” she smiled, and once more a star shone brightly from the depths of those blue eyes. “I’m here and I’m ready. Shall we go?”

“Yes, let’s go,” his lips automatically echoed her. But his motionless body did not move a step, again and again his loving gaze lingered on her incredible presence. Above them, to right and left, the railway tracks of Frankfurt Central Station clanged and clanked with the noise of iron and glass, shrill whistling cut through the tumult in the smoky concourse, twenty boards imperiously displayed different departure and arrival times, complete with the hours and the minutes, while in the maelstrom of the busy crowd he felt that she was the only person really present, removed from time and space in a strange trance of passionate bemusement. In the end she had to remind him, “It’s high time we left, Ludwig, we haven’t bought tickets yet.” Only then did his fixed gaze move away from her, and he took her arm with tender reverence.

The evening express to Heidelberg was unusually full. Disappointed in their expectation that first-class tickets would get them a compartment to themselves, after looking around in vain they finally chose one occupied only by a single grey-haired gentleman leaning back in a corner, half asleep. They were already pleasurably looking forward to an intimate conversation when, shortly before the whistle blew for the train to leave, three more gentlemen strode into the compartment, out of breath and carrying bulging briefcases. The three newcomers were obviously lawyers, in such a state of animation over a trial which had just ended that their lively discussion entirely ruled out the chance of any further conversation, so the couple resigned themselves to sitting opposite one another without saying a word. Only when one of them looked up did he or she see, in the uncertain shade cast like a dark cloud by the lamp, the other’s tender glance lovingly looking that way.

With a slight jolt, the train began to move. The rattling of the wheels drowned out the legal conversation, muting it to mere noise. But then, gradually, the jolting and rattling turned to a rhythmic swaying, like a steel cradle rocking the couple into dreams. And while the rattling wheels invisible below them rolled onward, into a future that each of them imagined differently, the thoughts of both returned in reverie to the past.

They had recently met again after an interval of more than nine years. Separated all that time by unimaginable distance, they now felt this first silent intimacy with redoubled force. Dear God, how long and how far apart they had been—nine years and four thousand days had passed between then and this day, this night! How much time, how much lost time, and yet in the space of a second a single thought took him back to the very beginning. What had it been like? He remembered every detail; he had first entered her house as a young man of twenty-three, the curve of his lips covered by the soft down of a young beard. Struggling free early from a childhood of humiliating poverty, growing up as the recipient of free meals provided by charity, he had made his way by giving private tuition, and was embittered before his time by deprivation and the meagre living that was all he earned. Scraping together pennies during his day’s work to buy books, studying by night with weary, over-strained nerves, he had completed his studies of chemistry with distinction and, equipped with his professor’s special recommendation, he had gone to see the famous industrialist G, distinguished by the honorary title of Privy Councillor and director of the big factory in Frankfurt-am-Main. There he was initially given menial tasks to perform in the laboratory, but soon the Councillor became aware of the serious tenacity of this young man, who immersed himself in his work with all the pent-up force of single-minded determination, and he began taking a particular interest in him. By way of testing his new assistant he gave him increasingly responsible work, and the young man, seeing the possibility of escaping from the dismal prison of poverty, eagerly seized his chance. The more work he was given, the more energetically he tackled it, so that in a very short time he rose from being one of dozens of assistants to becoming his employer’s right-hand man, trusted to conduct secret experiments, his “young friend”, as the Councillor benevolently liked to call him.