When they had embraced and kissed enough, they made up games.  Ilka Leipke showed great talent in showing the happily giggling Mechenmal how her friends would behave in corresponding positions.  She bent herself into the most surprising positions.  She grimaced comically.  Mechenmal was able make up fictitious names by the hour, with which he could make reference to certain parts of her body in the presence of other people, without their being able to tell what he meant.  So the evenings and the nights that Ilka Leipke had set aside for her friend went by.  Often Mechenmal did not have the time to go home.  Then she got up, if he was still asleep.  Made coffee.  In her slippers, dressed only in an old evening wrap, she went out and got pastry from a baker.  She placed a white cloth on the table.  She arranged everything in an appetizing manner.  She prepared some sandwiches for him to take with him.  She disappeared again into her bed, where she slept well into the afternoon.  Mechenmal, however, somewhat sleepy and weary, but in a good mood, hurried off to his kiosk.

III

Late evening crept like a spider over the city.  In the light of Kohn’s little lamp the upper torso of Kuno Kohn was a bit bent over the table.  On the sofa, breaking the circle of lamplight and stretching beyond it, lay Max Mechenmal, half in the dark.  Windows glittered in lush, flowing black.  Swollen and blurred objects rose up out of the darkness.  The open bed shone with a whiteness.  Kohn’s hands held papers with writing on them.  His voice sounded gentle, dreamy, singing with feeling.  He often became hoarse, and coughed like someone who had read much.  One could hear:  “The old, splendid stories about God have been slaughtered.  We must no longer believe in them.  But the knowledge of misery drives us to need to believe—­the longing for new, stronger belief.  We are searching.  We find nothing anywhere.  We torment ourselves because

we have been helplessly abandoned.  Why doesn’t someone come, teach us non-believers, who thirst for God.”  Kohn was quiet, full of expectation.  Mechenmal had secretly been amused during the lecture.  Now he broke out.  Then he said:  “Don’t take this wrong, little Kohn.  But you certainly have funny ideas.  This is really crazy.”  Kohn said:  “You have no feeling.  You are a superficial being.  It is also certain that you are a psychopath.”  Max Mechenmal said:  “what do you mean by that?” Kuno Kohn said:  “You’ll find that out soon enough.”  Max Mechenmal said merely, “Ah, so.”  He was angry that Kuno Kohn had called him superficial.  He thought of Ilka Leipke.