There was such a draught at night that we all caught cold. The little boy became ill too. During the day we took refuge in the bar, which was stuffy but bearable. We had full board, but we couldn’t eat the food. It happened on the fifth day, she said. She had gone to sleep, no doubt from exhaustion, about two o’clock in the morning, and did not wake up again until about five, in a state of alarm. It was still quite dark, she said. Since my husband wasn’t in bed — the boy was asleep — I got up and went out on to the balcony. But he wasn’t there either. I went back and lay down on the bed, but got up again at once and went back on to the balcony. I had such a terrible premonition, she said, and looked down from the balcony. On the concrete below the balcony there was a body covered with a blanket. I knew immediately that it was my husband, the young woman said. In the hotel lobby they told her they had found the body at three o’clock. The head was completely smashed. The manager told her that he had not wanted to wake her up and alarm her, but had waited for her to come down into the lobby, as she had now done. If it was her husband — and there was no doubt that it was — and she could identify the body satisfactorily, he would arrange everything else. The young woman was suddenly able to tell her story quite calmly, and I had the impression that she had become calm because I had got her to tell it. This is how it seemed to me now. I could hear her again as though it were yesterday. Without saying a word she had gone back to her child on the eighth floor — as is nearly always the case in cheap hotels the lift was out of order — picked him up and gone down to the lobby again. Meanwhile, she said, so many inquisitive people had gathered, even though it was then about six in the morning. A doctor turned up, and the police, and then they put her husband’s body into a hearse, which had been called from Palma, and drove it away. She then sat in the lobby for half an hour, taking no part in what was going on there, incapable of standing up, simply clinging on to her child. Then she went to her room and did not leave it for two days. When she went down into the lobby at about noon on the second day, she learned that her husband had been buried in the cemetery at Palma, and she was handed a piece of paper giving the number of the burial lot. She took a taxi to the cemetery and found the grave, she said, only after searching desperately for hours. It was terribly hot, and all she wanted to do was to die. But naturally this wish was not granted. To her horror she discovered that her husband had not been buried alone, but that his body had been deposited together with that of one Isabella Fernandez who had died a week earlier, in one of the above-ground seven-tier concrete tombs which are common in Mediterranean countries owing to shortage of space. There she stood with her child. Two days after her husband had fallen to his death — no one knew how or why — from the balcony of his room at the Hotel Paris, she was standing in front of a concrete tomb which was already sealed and did not even bear her husband’s name, only that of a seventy-two-year-old woman, a complete stranger, and her husband’s number, affixed to the yellowish marble plaque. Even this part of her story the young woman told quite calmly, having meanwhile ordered another cup of coffee. Then she suddenly got up, saying that she had actually been about to visit the cemetery, as she did every day. She had been in Palma for seven days, and every day she had been to the cemetery, where she now knew her way around quite well. She would prefer to stay here in Palma, she said: in Germany she was unhappy all the time. In the meantime she had already paid two visits to Palma because of legal matters connected with this sad affair, which it fell to her to settle. She had at first thought that she could rely on the German Consulate, but the Consulate had let her down completely, finding it unreasonable that it should be pestered by Anna Härdtl. She had given up seeking help from the Consulate, but then she had fallen into the hands of a smart Palma lawyer, who had settled everything for her, though at the cost not only of her entire fortune, but of a large credit which she had been obliged to seek from a Munich bank. The most curious feature of the whole case, however, was that Anna Härdtl had not once been questioned about it by the police; she had not spoken to anybody from the police, but had simply been sent the funeral director’s account. Much later the Cañellas girl told me that for a moment she had thought it might be a case of murder, although the idea had seemed absurd and she had put it out of her mind. The fact was, however, that the balconies of the Hotel Paris in Santa Ponsa had railings which were only eighteen inches high and therefore illegal even under Spanish law; it is therefore highly likely that the young Härdtl had stepped out on to the balcony for a moment to get a breath of air, or just to light a cigarette, and that, while still half asleep, he had plunged over the railings directly on to the concrete beneath the balcony. Meanwhile a law suit had been started, the young woman said, as she stood there about to set off to the cemetery, but she had no idea what kind of law suit. She had brought a photograph of her husband with her from Munich, she said, and would like us to see it. She showed us the photograph — he was a dark-haired young man, a mere youth like millions of others, with nothing extraordinary about him, a thin face with sad features, more a Mediterranean type, I thought, not a Bavarian type. At this point the young Cañellas girl, not I, had the idea — the monstrous idea — of asking the young woman whether she would mind our accompanying her to the cemetery. I don’t know what she hoped to achieve; probably she wanted to have evidence, direct sight as it were, of the tragedy, of which we had now heard a good deal, though recounted only in a rather helpless and fragmented manner. We walked up the Jaime III and took a taxi to the cemetery. The Palma cemetery is enormous and looks — at least to central European eyes — extremely strange and hence somewhat eerie, being more reminiscent of North Africa and the desert, and although I have always believed myself indifferent to the question of where I am buried, I thought to myself now: This is one place where I don’t want to be buried. Young Frau Härdtl no longer knew to which entrance the taxi should take us, and it dropped us in fact at quite the wrong place. As a result, the young woman hurried first in one direction, then in another, repeatedly losing us and all the time holding her dead husband’s photograph in her hand, but she was unable to find the burial site. In the end I suggested that she should ask the men who were standing in front of the mortuary cold store, from which there emanated an indescribable smell of decomposition. She was quite incapable of doing so. I therefore took the photograph from her and went up to one of the men in grey plastic coats who were standing around in front of the mortuary and gave him the number of the grave site. He pointed in a certain direction, and all three of us set off in this direction, with Anna Härdtl leading the way. The situation could not have been more embarrassing or more distasteful, but this was what we had wanted; we ourselves had created the situation, less out of sympathy, I think, than out of curiosity, probably even out of a thirst for sensation, and the Cañellas girl had in the end done more than a little to bring it about. At last we found ourselves standing in front of one of the thousands of square marble plaques enclosed in concrete. On it was to be read, freshly incised, the name Isabella Fernandez. Anna Härdtl, with tears in her eyes, tried to fasten her husband’s photograph to the marble plaque, but was at first unable to do so. By chance I had in my pocket the end of a roll of adhesive tape and used this to stick the photograph to the marble. Anna had previously written the name of her husband, Hans Peter Härdtl, in pencil under that of Isabella Fernandez, and though partly obliterated by the rain, it could still be clearly read. Poor people, she said, or those who suddenly became victims of a misfortune such as she had suffered and could not make themselves understood, were buried, when they died, the very same day in an above-ground concrete block like this, which is often meant not just for two, but for three bodies. Everywhere there were bunches of plastic flowers of different sizes hanging from the marble plaques set in concrete. The whole cemetery was pervaded by the smell from the mortuary cold store. At first I thought we ought to leave Anna alone now, but then it struck me that it would be better to take her back to town by taxi. We turned the other way in shame and embarrassment and looked down at the wilderness beyond the cemetery while she wept uncontrollably. After about five minutes she hadn’t the strength to stand there any longer and asked us to take her away from the cemetery. We went out, and since there was no taxi to be seen anywhere we got the porter of the lunatic asylum, which stands next to the cemetery in a large park full of palm trees, to order one for us. We drove back into town, but then, since Anna was looking so despondent, we decided to take her to her hotel. Again, I thought, she’s chosen to stay at the most dreadful hotel, but then I reflected that she couldn’t do anything else: since the only thing she had left in the world was her terrible misfortune, there was no choice for her but to put up at this dreadful hotel, the