“Oh,” said Johanna, “it doesn’t matter about me. I’ve conquered that. Unless I probe too deeply, even the pain is gone.”
“And how do you live?”
“As best I can.”
“You don’t mind my calling you Johanna still, do you? Won’t you come to see me some day? I’m usually at home in the evening. Then we could sit together and talk.”
“Yes, I’ll come,” said Johanna, who felt her own embarrassment yielding before Christian’s frank and simple tone.
While she was walking beside him and hearing and answering his direct and simple questions, all that had happened in the past seemed a matter of course, and the present seemed harmonious enough. But when she was alone again she was as vexed with herself as ever; the nearest goal seemed as irrational as the farthest, and the world and life shut in by dreariness.
Two days later she went to Christian’s dwelling. The wife of the night watchman Gisevius ushered her into Christian’s room. Shivering and oppressed by the room, in which she could not imagine him, she waited for over an hour. Frau Gisevius advised her to look in at Karen Engelschall’s or the Hofmanns’ flat. To this she could not make up her mind. “I’ll come again,” she said.
When she stepped out into the street she saw Amadeus Voss. He greeted her without words, and his expression seemed to take it for granted that they had agreed to meet here. He walked on at her side.
“I love you, Johanna,” he said.
She did not answer, nor turn her eyes toward him. She walked more swiftly, then more slowly, then more swiftly again.