The clock struck twelve as she stepped softly out on to the landing. Frau Laue was asleep. She met no one on the stairs, and unseen walked into the street.
Since her flight to Konrad that memorable night she had not been out alone in the streets so late. Everything looked as if she saw it for the first time: the long rows of houses bathed in crude light, the trolleys of the electric trams in between, and the gliding figures of night-revellers.
A numbing terror seized her. Her legs felt wooden, as if stilts were screwed on to them, propelling her forward whether she would or not, without rest; and her heels tapped ceaselessly on the pavement, carrying her nearer and nearer her goal. Whenever she met anyone she felt an impulse to hide herself, fancying that it would be noticed where she was going. For this reason she dived into dark back-streets, which were unevenly paved and where fading lime-trees scattered their drops of rain. She passed straggling brick buildings inhospitably shut in behind high back-garden walls; slaughter-houses and factories; and all the time her heels went tap-tap-tap, as if she had a pedometer attached to them, registering every inch which shortened her road.
She tried to remember other short-cuts to her bridge, but couldn't find them, and gave up the attempt.
"What thou doest, let it be done quickly," she had read somewhere. So she pressed forward with clenched teeth.
The Engelbecken was dark and deserted; yellow lights were reflected dimly in its unfathomable waters. "Here it would be easier," she thought, breathless from the oppression at her heart. But, shuddering, she retreated from the grass slopes. The bridge must be somewhere over there to the north-west. Fate had ordained that she should go to the bridge.
It was still a long way off, quite an hour's walk. She came into more frequented ways. The rows of lights in front of the dancing saloons, where prostitutes caroused, cast their garish beams like finger-posts into the night. Cabs were waiting there, and sounds of revelry came from within. Forwards, forwards--always forwards! Hot, garlic-laden fumes were wafted to her nostrils from a cellar-café that kept its doors open. When had she smelt something like that before? Why, of course, when Frau Redlich was cooking the sausages for her son's farewell dinner.
In front of her a hose as thick as her wrist sent a cleansing shower-bath over the street. What did that hissing, gurgling sound remind her of? Why, of course, of old Haberland watering the lawn with the old-fashioned sprinkler. And then all at once the thought shot through her brain: "None of this is really happening. I am lying in bed between the bookcases, and behind me the hanging lamp that I took down is smoking ... and this is all in an old novel that I am reading, while Frau Asmussen has luckily gone to sleep after taking her medicine."
A growing tumult called her back to actual life. She had reached the heart of the city, the spot where the whirl of Berlin's never-flagging nightly dissipations reaches its height. She came to the Spittelmarkt, and onwards the huge Leipziger Strasse unrolled its chain of lights like a pearl necklace. Buried in a mist of silver, dotted with the glimmering red lanterns of night cafés and cabarets, it was like a brilliant picture toned down with sepia.