Violet walks and walks. She reaches the outskirts of the city where the buildings begin to knit with one another and the patches of green to shrink and disappear. The sun burns the crown of her small hat, the perspiration wets her back and chest. She discovers she’s hungry, and stops for a fat bratwurst from a vendor on Hohenstaufenstrasse. Perfectly cooked, the skin crisp beneath her teeth, insides rich and meaty. She washes it down with a bottle of cold lemonade and wipes her fingers on her handkerchief.
Her head remains clear. She is the old Violet, the scientific Violet, without emotions to cloud things over, to make her heart crash and her skin tingle. She searches for clues to Walter’s behavior, for the little signposts that should have warned her. At this point she should have guessed that; with that sentence she might have guessed this; such-and-such action of Walter’s should have instead provoked such-and-such reaction from her. All the myriad instances of her blindness and willful self-delusion: she catalogs them all in her orderly mind.
Her feet guide her to the Tiergarten. She sits on a bench near the Victory column, where the massive white columns of the Reichstag rise imperviously behind her. A restless crowd of Berliners mills about her; discarded newspapers litter the ground. The Balkans situation, she supposes. The little diary in her pocket is of no interest to these people. They are thinking about war, about treaties and mobilization orders, the course of history.
How long she sits there, she can’t say. At one point she grows thirsty and buys another bottle of lemonade, which she drinks quickly and holds in her hand, rolling the smooth glass between her fingers. She is so young, and her fingers look so old. When did that happen?
The sun begins to darken and sink, flashing across the sharp points of Victory’s wings. The crowd thickens, like a sauce does when it begins to bubble.
A shout: Violet, my God, there you are!
Four o’clock. Lionel was going to meet her at the institute at four o’clock. What time is it now?
Before she can pull her gold watch from her pocket, Lionel has reached her. She stands and takes his outstretched hands and looks into his familiar face, made unfamiliar by the hair in black disarray, by the heat in his cheeks and the almost maniacal wildness in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I lost track of time.”
“What the devil, Violet! What happened?” His hands grip hers with extraordinary strength, as if he’s holding himself back from some disastrous display of emotion. “They said you’d left hours ago, just walked out the door. I’ve been like a madman. I tried the flat, I tried the Adlon. I was on my way to the Reichstag to find—”
Violet wriggles her hands free. “I’m quite all right. I went for a walk, that’s all.”
“A walk! But why? What’s the matter?” His empty hands rake his hair and land on his hips. His face is desperate. “Tell me. Second thoughts? You can’t imagine what I’ve—”
She takes Walter’s diary from her pocket and holds it out to him.
His gaze drops. “What’s this?”
“A diary. My husband’s.”
“Hell.”
She nudges it against his chest. “Go ahead. It’s fascinating, really.”
“Violet, I can’t.”
“I’m going to use it as evidence in the divorce petition, so you might as well know what’s inside.” She nudges him again, and this time he takes it, with an air of wary reluctance, and sits down on the bench.
He reads for a minute or two. She watches him closely for signs of surprise, of anger, but his face is already pink from heat and exertion. There is a dustbin not far away. She walks there and drops her lemonade bottle inside, and then she returns to sit on the bench next to Lionel.
He closes the notebook and hands it back to her. “Put it away. I can’t look anymore.”
She slides Walter’s diary into her pocket.
“I’m going to kill him. I should have killed him already.”
“Don’t say that. It’s done, it’s finished. He’s not yours to vanquish.”
“Yes, he is. You’re mine now, and he . . . he . . .”
“It’s just Walter. It’s who he is. I should have known, I shouldn’t have been such a shorn little baa-lamb, bleating for more. It won’t happen again.”
“By God, it won’t.”
She rises from the bench and turns to him. “Really, Lionel? Are you really any different? Listen to you: You’re mine now. Aren’t you all the same, wanting to own a woman, to pretend to love her, while you wander off and . . . and fuck whomever you fancy?”
He leaps to his feet. “No, as a matter of fact. I do love you.”
“Really?” She held up the diary. “Tell me, does any of this surprise you? Shock you at all? Can you honestly say you haven’t done the same?”
“Have I been with other women? Yes, I have. I’ve been with many. Have I visited such houses from time to time, in the bleakness of life? Yes, I have. I admit it. I’ve done it all, God forgive me. But have I done any of these things since I first sat down with you in that laboratory, Violet? Have I?” He snatches the diary and tosses it on the gravel. “Not once, Violet. Not once. Not even once, though I knew you were in Grant’s bed, his wife, taking whatever he gave you. Not once. Do you know why?”