couldn’t have committed the murder, a third party or several third parties must have committed the murder, but of course the jurors had already reached their verdict and the trial was never reopened, I thought, in my life few things have actually absorbed me with greater intensity than the criminal-justice aspect of our world. When we follow this criminal-justice aspect of our world, and that means of our society, we experience miracles, as they say, on a daily basis. When the innkeeper came out of the kitchen and sat down at my table, more or less exhausted, she had been washing clothes and reeked of kitchen odors, I asked her what had become of her uncle, the Dichtel-keeper, putting the question not in a blunt but in an extremely cautious way. Her uncle had moved in with his brother in Hirschbach, she said, Hirschbach was a small town on the Czech border, she herself had been there only once, but that was years ago, her son was just three years old at the time. She’d been planning to show her son to her uncle in the hope that he, who she assumed was still quite rich, would help her through her difficulty, that is give her money, that’s the only reason she and her son had undertaken such a grueling trip, to Hirschbach on the Czech border, six months after the death of her husband, the father of her son, who despite all adverse circumstances had turned out so well. But her uncle wouldn’t see them, had his brother deny he was there, hadn’t shown himself at all until she finally gave up waiting for him with her son and they took the train back to Wankham, empty-handed. How can a person have such a heart of stone, she said, on the other hand, however, she could understand her uncle. He didn’t want to hear anything about the Dichtel Mill and Wankham, she said. Prisoners, once they’re released, never go back to the place where they were before going to prison, I said. The innkeeper had hoped to get financial help from her uncle or at least from her second uncle, the so-called Hirschbach uncle, but hadn’t received this help from precisely the two persons who were her only relatives and today still are and about whom she knew that they, although still living in the meager circumstances she had noted in Hirschbach, disposed of a rather large fortune. The innkeeper also made an allusion to the amount of her two uncles’ fortune, without mentioning a definite sum, a pitifully small sum, I thought, but one that must have struck her, the innkeeper, as so enormous that she could see in it the key to her salvation, I thought. Old people, even when they no longer need anything, are stingy, the older they get the stingier they get, won’t part with anything, their offspring can starve to death before their eyes and it won’t bother them in the slightest. Then the innkeeper described her Hirschbach trip, how tiring it is to go from Wankham to Hirschbach, she’d had to change trains three times with her sick child and her Hirschbach visit not only didn’t bring her any money but also gave her a throat infection, a nasty throat infection that lasted for months, as she said. After her visit in Hirschbach she thought she would take down the photograph of her uncle, but then she didn’t remove it from the wall because of her customers, who surely would’ve asked why she’d taken the photograph off the wall, she didn’t want to explain the whole story again to everybody, she said. Then they suddenly would’ve wanted to know everything about the trial, she said, she wouldn’t let herself get into that. The fact is she loved her uncle in the photograph before the Hirschbach trip, whereas after her return from Hirschbach she could only hate him. She had the greatest compassion for him, he not the least for her. Finally she started running the Dichtel Mill again as an inn, she said, under the most unfavorable circumstances, she hadn’t let the building get run down, hadn’t sold it either, although she’d had more than a few offers. Her husband didn’t care about the inn business, she explained, she met him at a carnival party in Regau, where she’d gone to buy a few old chairs for her inn that an inn in Regau had thrown out. She saw right away that a good-natured man was sitting there completely alone, without companions. She sat down at his table and took him back to Wankham, where he then stayed. But he never was an innkeeper, she said. Here all married women, she actually used the words married women, have to count on their husbands falling into the paper mill, or at least on their having one of their hands or several fingers ripped off by the paper mill, she said, basically it’s an everyday event when they injure themselves at the paper mills, and the whole area is filled with men like that who’ve been crippled by the paper mills. Ninety percent of the men in this town work in the paper factory, she said. No one here has any other plan for their children than to send them right back to the factory, she said, for generations the same mechanism, I thought. And if the paper factory goes broke, she said, they’ll all be left high and dry. It was only a matter of the shortest time before the paper factory would close, she explained, everything points that way, since the paper factory has been nationalized it would soon have to close, because like all other nationalized companies it was up to its ears in debt. Here everything revolves around the paper factory, and when it closes everything’s over. She herself would be washed up, for ninety percent of her customers worked in the factory, she said, paper workers at least spend their money, she explained, woodsmen on the other hand not at all, and farmers would turn up in her inn once or twice a year, they also had stayed clear of the Dichtel Mill since the days of the trial, wouldn’t come in without asking unpleasant questions, so she said. She had long since stopped worrying about this hopeless future, it didn’t matter what would happen to her, after all her son was twelve now and at fourteen the kids around here can already stand on their own two feet. I’m not the least bit interested in my future, she said. That Herr Wertheimer, as she put it, had always been