Still, odd points of difference between us got in the way of the friendly relationship with the teacher that I had expected to result. There was on his side almost a kind of hostility. He remained modest and humble with me, but that made it all the easier to sense his true feelings. He seemed to think I had damaged both him and his cause, and that my belief that I had helped him, or might have helped him, was at best foolishness and more likely arrogance or duplicity. Above all, he would often point out that his opponents thus far had either not shown their opposition, or else done so only in person, or verbally, whereas I had deemed it necessary to have my objections committed to print. Moreover, the few opponents who had delved into the subject, however superficially, had all paid regard to his, the teacher’s, point of view, before going on to express their own, whereas I had drawn conclusions from unsystematically collected and partly misunderstood results, which, even if they were broadly correct, were still bound to come over as unconvincing, both to the general public and to experts. And this when the least shimmer of implausibility was the very worst thing that could happen.

It would have been an easy matter for me to dismiss these veiled critiques – after all, his own work represented the height of implausibility – less easy to oppose his continuing distrust, and this constituted the reason I exercised such restraint in my dealings with him. It was his secret conviction that my aim was to cheat him of the renown of being the first person to go public on the mole. Now there was no renown for him personally, just an element of ridicule, and among an ever smaller circle of people at that, for which I certainly had no intention of challenging him. Moreover, in the Foreword to my piece, I had explicitly stated that the teacher was to be accounted for all time the first discoverer of the mole – which wasn’t true, he hadn’t really ‘discovered’ the mole at all – and the only thing that had prompted me to write at all was feeling for what had happened to him. ‘The single raison d’être of this work’ – oh, the pathos, but such was my mood at the time – ‘is to help the teacher’s monograph find the audience it deserves. If it succeeds, then let my name, which is only involved here fortuitously and fleetingly, disappear from ken now and for all time.’ I was positively refusing any larger role in the matter; it was almost as though I had sensed the teacher’s incredible reproachfulness in advance.

And even so, it was here that he found his point of entry against me, nor do I deny that there was an apparent sense of justification in what he said, or rather hinted, as indeed it was to strike me a few times that he showed greater acuity in his dealings with me than in his work. He claimed my Foreword was duplicitous. If my sole intention was truly to help circulate his writing, then why did I not busy myself with him and his writing to the exclusion of everything else, why did I not show its advantages, its cogency, why did I not limit myself to stressing the importance of the discovery, why on the contrary did I insist on inserting myself into the discovery, all the while completely ignoring his work? Hadn’t it been written and published, after all? What was there left to do? If I really thought I had to repeat the discovery, why then did I so solemnly forswear any claims to doing so in my Foreword? It might have been mere false modesty, but in actual fact it was something worse. I was devaluing his discovery; I was drawing attention to it purely in order to devalue it. I had looked into it and then set it aside; things might indeed have grown rather quiet around the discovery, then I came along and started making some noise, but that had the effect of making the teacher’s position more difficult than ever. What did the teacher care about the defence of his honour? It was the matter, the matter itself that exercised him. And I was betraying the cause, because I didn’t understand it, because I didn’t see it straight, because I had no feeling for it. It towered over my tiny comprehension.

He sat in front of me, staring at me with his old rumpled face, and yet this was just his opinion. It wasn’t quite right, by the way, that he was only interested in the facts of the case. He was actually quite ambitious and hoped to make some money, which in view of his large family was easy to understand, and yet my interest in the thing seemed comparatively so slight that he thought he could put himself across as perfectly selfless without deviating too far from the truth. And it wasn’t even enough for my own inner satisfaction if I told myself that the man’s reproaches were basically due to the fact that he was, so to speak, holding onto his mole with two hands, and anyone who approached him with so much as a single upraised finger was bound to strike him as a traitor. That wasn’t the case, his behaviour was not caused by greed, or at least not greed alone; it was more the irritation that his great efforts and their total lack of success had caused in him. But then his irritability alone didn’t explain everything either. Perhaps my interest in the affair really was too slight. A lack of interest on the part of strangers had long since ceased to surprise the teacher: he suffered from it in general, but no longer in particular, whereas here someone had turned up at last who was willing to go into the whole thing in an unusual way – and then even he didn’t understand it. Once the argument was couched in those terms, I couldn’t find it in myself to deny it. It’s true, I am no zoologist, perhaps if I had discovered the creature then I might have been stirred to the bottom of my heart, but the fact was I hadn’t discovered it either. Such an enormous mole is surely a singular creature, but it’s wrong to claim the ongoing attention of the whole world for it, especially when the existence of the mole cannot be incontrovertibly established, and it’s not possible to produce the creature as evidence. I had to admit, too, that even if I had been the discoverer of the mole, I would probably not have devoted myself to it to the degree the teacher so freely and willingly did.

Now the rift between the teacher and myself would have quickly been smoothed over if my publication had enjoyed success.