But her husband had summoned up all his energy and actually managed to complete his course six months earlier than was required — with extraordinary success, she said. To please her he had at last agreed to open the business in Trudering, which had been her idea, since she was afraid her husband would go to seed in an office, and believed it would be better for the whole family if he were to run his own business rather than go into an office. Above all she had been fascinated by the word independence more than by any other, but she had fallen prey to the word. Her husband had not felt it degrading to be a small businessman from now on, rather than a civil servant, which is always a respected profession in the suburbs, possibly in a public office, where he would be guaranteed an income for life. On the contrary he had at once acceded to his young wife’s wishes and thought he would be able, through industry and intelligence, to work his way up from being a small, insignificant businessman to becoming one day a big and important one, provided that he had luck and was able to rely on his wife. After they had made their decision they were able to rent the premises in Trudering, do them up, and finally open the shop. But these events, which I have recorded so rapidly and which passed before me equally rapidly as I sat on the Borne on that warm evening with my eyes closed, took more than a year. According to the young woman it was a desperate year, for on top of all the terrible problems with the authorities came the birth of their son and then, no doubt as a result of all this, a strange progressive illness, not dangerous, but unpleasant, which produced small brown blotches all over her body, of a kind which the doctors said they had never seen before. But in the end the couple had managed to open their business with the help of her parents, who contributed a fairly large sum of money, the precise amount of which she did not specify. But it was only after they had opened the business that the difficulties really began, the young woman said. As I sat now in my chair on the Borne I could hear it all again quite clearly, her tone of voice, everything. The suppliers would not supply goods on credit, yet the stock had to be as large as possible and when they did supply them, they sent either the wrong goods or faulty goods, she said. Often a number of crates would arrive containing appliances which were half broken because the delivery men were so careless, and nobody today took any responsibility for anything. On the one hand she was fully occupied with the child all day, on the other she also had to help her husband all day in the shop, since he was so inept in business matters that his ineptitude almost verged on the irresponsible, unlike her, for she had at one time attended a commercial college, curiously enough in Erlangen, probably because she had relatives there. But she could not reproach her husband, since she had virtually forced him to start the business and give up his real profession, that of an electrical engineer. Perhaps it was wrong of me, perhaps it was the biggest possible mistake, she said, to persuade my husband to leave the career he was destined for and force him to go into business. They had naturally not foreseen the real difficulties that actually presented themselves, even though they had been prepared for the worst, and in any case they had plenty of good will at the time, as well as the brave hope that they would be able to cope with any difficulties they met, however great they turned out to be. But her husband, as she only discovered when it was too late, was utterly unsuited to any kind of independence. She had not known this, though she ought to have seen it, for they had been together long enough before they decided to open the business in Trudering. But perhaps, she said, I did see it all and didn’t want to see it. She had pictured it as such a pleasant life, being in business in Trudering; she demanded nothing more and would have been quite simply happy with her husband and children. Her calculations did not work out. She had deflected her husband from his proper career, and her own commitment to the business deprived the child of the care and attention necessary for its upbringing. The child sensed how we had got ourselves stuck, she said. The Cañellas girl, who had at first wanted to leave but whom I had asked to stay, now suddenly began to take an interest after all in what the young Anna Härdtl was saying. Naturally she showed no emotion, which would have been too much to expect, but she seemed at least to show some understanding. And the shop, the young woman said, was in one of the best streets in Trudering. She had great difficulty in not bursting into tears. I, however, was not going to divert her from her misfortune, the full extent of which she had not yet revealed, for I now wanted to hear what had happened next. The young woman was naturally not able to recount the events in exact chronological order, and the account I give here is far more ordered than the one she was able to give. My parents were too far away to be able to look after our child, she said. My mother didn’t get on well with my husband; like all mothers with married daughters she imagined that my husband had stolen her daughter, torn her out of her hands quite unlawfully. We were in fact abandoned by everyone. All we had were our difficulties with the business. Then, when they were at the end of their tether, as she put it, she had had the idea of flying to Mallorca for a few weeks with her husband and child. She did not book the very cheapest holiday, but almost the cheapest. Her only stipulation was that the room should have a balcony and a sea view. At the end of August, that is eighteen months earlier, they had flown from Munich to Mallorca. You know, she said, I’m only twenty-one. And then she was unable to continue for a while. It was the Hotel Paris where we stayed, she said. I’d pictured it all differently. She couldn’t say how differently, not even when I asked her how differently. She just couldn’t. When she went into the sea with the child the morning after they had arrived, she felt sick. So did the child. They hired a couple of deckchairs and sat in them in silence for several hours, directly underneath the walls of the hotel, among a thousand or two thousand other people. They were unable to talk to each other because there was a building site next to the hotel, which made any conversation impossible. They tried to get out of the hotel, but that wasn’t possible, as they couldn’t get any other accommodation. Finally, when they’d been there only two days, they thought of returning to Munich, but they couldn’t do that either, because there were no seats to be had on the plane. Day and night we had to plug our ears, she said, and we never went near the water again out of sheer disgust. We tried going inland, but we nearly died of the heat and the stench. And they couldn’t for one moment escape the noise. They could only go to sleep out of sheer exhaustion in a room whose walls were so thin that they could hear whenever somebody turned over in bed in the next room. When I opened the wardrobe door, she said, I could see daylight, because the back of the wardrobe was simply a concrete wall, not more than four inches thick, which had been cracked by the weather.