It is by no means certain that the Fojchtmajers could have avoided the cataclysm that was hanging over their home and threatening to shatter their emotional and physical wellbeing. After all, they had played an uncompromising and dangerous game, tied as they were to the course of a story of betrayal pinned on a three-sided frame. Fojchtmajer chose not to bring matters to a head, his wife could not restrain herself, and John Maybe sailed his own course without regard for anyone else. And so it was unclear what fate these three people were actually spared or what they lost when they were forced to abandon a life that had seemed to them entirely comfortable and safe, vulnerable only to the destructive jolts of the outer world. On the dressing table, amid tins of powder and flasks of perfume, the narrator finds a photograph stuck into a thick gild-edged card folded in two. Against a background of flowerbeds in a park Fojchtmajer’s wife rests her right hand on his shoulder as he stands smiling in a pale linen suit; long shadows extend at their feet. A third shadow belongs to John Maybe, who, as can be seen from the picture, is black; he stands next to them, the whites of his eyes gleaming, a shiny trumpet in his hands. On his shoulder Fojchtmajer’s wife has laid her left hand. The narrator at first is a little taken aback, though he has of course heard of dark characters. The trumpet appears here as a prop in the manner of those emblems by which characters are recognized. The picture was probably taken with Fojchtmajer’s camera. By whom? Naturally, by a young woman who does not appear in it. The very person the narrator had in mind when at some point he expressed the opinion that four characters is at least one too many. And indeed it is too many for a well-proportioned triangular frame neatly matching a card of hand made paper folded in two and still smelling of fresh printer’s ink from Fojchtmajer’s printing press. Its trademark appears at the bottom on the reverse side. Did Fojchtmajer have to start printing invitations in order to stay in business? He did not; this was rather a favor for a friend and a small gift. So then, Yvonne Touseulement and John Maybe invite you to their wedding, to take place. . And one need only glance at the wall calendar to see that the wedding has not yet taken place. And since this is the case, it will never come about, because John Maybe will not return. He has hopped on a train with a sudden premonition that it was his last chance to save himself before everything there goes to pieces. At the present time he’s already falling asleep in his compartment. The wheels are clacking regularly, and his head is drooping and nodding in time; his body is ever further from the place he left in such haste. He is, it should be understood, safe. None of his former wives would be in any doubt of this if they were to wonder what’s going on with him these days. It’s easy to figure out that his former wives were black like him, gifted with slightly hoarse alto voices and an infallible sense of rhythm, though this is not enough to make relationships last. Before the date indicated on the invitation, the apartment building in which John Maybe was living will fall apart like a house of cards, leveled by the force of explosions unleashed by a Luftwaffe air raid. Every day the trumpeter will have to wake up in the early afternoon in some fictitious Amsterdam, with a dull headache, a belly full of rotting slime, and dark, stagnant blood poisoned by the relentless ease of the solutions with which life has presented him. He will swallow an aspirin, spilling cold water on his white T-shirt, and amid the chaos of radio static will listen intently to the BBC news, which however will at no point bring him consolation. For the BBC will never announce the one news item that truly concerns him. It’s not important enough; it would be appropriate at most for a local evening tabloid of the kind despised by Fojchtmajer and his wife. But this news item, which would be meaningful primarily to John Maybe, doesn’t appear even there, because the air raid eclipsed all other local sensations. The narrator should note, then, with the policelike scrupulousness proper to newspaper reports of accidents and scandals, that at dusk John Maybe’s girlfriend found his door locked, opened it with her own key, perhaps found and read some letter that the trumpeter had left for her on a side table or the chest of drawers, certainly no more than a few lines and a signature. Then she went down to the floor below. She must have noticed earlier the absence of the golden thread spun from the trumpet and strung between the floors, in its lower registers woven into a sturdy safety net. What now will become of her, devoid of the net above which her fate was suspended? Before making any decisions, she rang the Fojchtmajers’ doorbell. But no one answered. She started knocking louder and louder at their massive door with its gold nameplate, mahogany veneer, and immaculate varnish. For a moment the knocking turned into a deafening pounding. The narrator was able to observe her through the round spyhole. He could see her shining eyes and a damp lock of hair falling over her forehead. The principles of rising tension that govern scenes of this kind require that the young woman be pregnant, though the pregnancy is in its early stages and not yet visible. It goes without saying that the birth of a black child in an occupied city in which the most important document will be the German Kennkarte bearing swastikas on its stamps, is improbable in a very obvious way, and the narrator himself realizes that it should not be insisted upon. Hammering at the door ought to have tired her out. But even when she was thoroughly exhausted, the tension in the scene did not let up enough for her to return downstairs and leave on a tram. She had no choice: She went back upstairs, flung the window open, looked down into the street, and then climbed up to the attic where the sheets bearing the letter F were drying. From there she clambered through the opening of the trapdoor onto the steep roof, tearing her stockings in the process. She must have been there once before, naturally not alone. It must have been John Maybe’s style to gaze at the lights of the city from high above, beneath the great firmament of the sky, just the two of them. Is that how it was on her first visit? A little giddy, they even harmonized a little, then kissed like crazy, as happens in American musicals just before the final credits. They went down to his apartment only when the evening chill made her shiver. The young woman would have preferred to stick with a nice role in a musical comedy: Drama she found off-putting and a little frightening. She always thought that if life ever became truly unpleasant, she would slip away without good-byes, as though she were leaving a dull party. But after the trumpeter’s departure she did not wait for an opportunity to creep discreetly out. With no regard for anything else, she jumped off the roof, her heart thumping wildly, with the key to his apartment clenched in her fist. And she fell several stories into the void, with nothing but air beneath her feet and the wind whistling in her ears. That is more or less how it must have looked, since she was found lying on the cobblestones where previously a coal cart had stood. She had died instantly, and only a tiny stream of blood ran from the corner of her mouth toward her forehead, crossing the base of her nose.