They were sitting in the three bucket chairs, the store dummy facing the TV, the man beside her and Korin beside him, and all was silent but for the hum of the television with the sound turned off and a washing machine in the bathroom grumbling, bucking and sloshing, none of them saying anything, the man having sat Korin down on his arrival and taking his place beside him but not asking anything for a very long time, just staring in front of him and thinking very hard, then eventually getting up, taking a glass of water and sitting back down again to reassure Korin that they would think of something but that first they had to clean his clothes because he couldn’t move a step dressed like that, and then he helped him strip the clothes off though it was obvious that Korin did not really know what was going on or why it was necessary which meant that it was only with the greatest difficulty the man succeeded in unbuttoning him, but eventually his garments lay in a heap at his feet, and the man gave him a bathrobe, then removed anything that remained in the clothes before taking them into the bathroom and putting the lot — coat, underwear and all — into the washing machine, starting it up, then returning to the armchair to sit there and think even harder; and so they sat there a whole hour until the washing machine in the bathroom, with one final gasp, came to the end of its cycle, and the man said he had better know, roughly at least, what had happened otherwise he couldn’t help to which Korin only answered that he had noticed the hiding place in the toilet before, but had believed one of the occupants downstairs to be responsible for it, since anyone could use the toilet on their floor, at which point the other interrupted him to ask what he meant by hiding place, and Korin simply repeated that it was a hiding place and that one day he found that the white packets in it had been replaced by money, and though the other tried to stop him asking what packet? which day? Korin went on saying he didn’t think it had anything to do with them, that it was so far from his mind in fact that he forgot to say anything about it, because suddenly there was all this chaos, a lot of people arriving at the apartment, taking everything away then returning the next day bringing things back, and this so confused the young lady that he felt he had to look after her, and he had no idea that it was the hidden stuff that was the cause of everything, and once again began to cry in the armchair, and was quite unable to answer another question the man put to him, so that he had to do everything himself, to look through his belongings, find his passport, examine it to check that it was valid at all, then spread the clothes out in the bathroom to dry and count to see how much money there was, finally working out what to do next, then sitting down beside him again, to tell him quite quietly there was only one solution, and that was that he should get out of the country as soon as possible, but Korin did not answer and just sat beside the dummy and cried.
There was just the one bed in the bedroom, a store dummy propped by the window as if looking out and in the kitchen nothing but a bare table and four chairs, one of the chairs occupied by another store dummy raising its right hand and pointing at something on the ceiling or beyond it; which left the sitting room with its TV, three armchairs, one dummy and the man, now replaced by Korin, the rest bare, practically empty, the walls alone being covered with photographs, or rather several copies of the same photograph, as was the whole apartment, one photograph in various sizes, large, middling and vast, but everywhere the same, each of them showing the same thing, a hemispherical structure clad in broken glass, and when the man, hearing a faint rustling, opened his eyes he saw Korin, fully dressed now in his overcoat, waiting, it seemed, to go, looking at the wall, examining the photographs, bowing a little to examine each of them, deeply absorbed in their contents, whereupon Korin, having noticed that the man had woken up, quickly sat down in the armchair again, next to the store dummy and fixed his eyes on the TV, not answering when the man got out of bed and asked him through the door if he wanted a cup of coffee, but kept staring at the silent TV, so the man made coffee for just one, filled himself a cup, added sugar, stirred it and sat down with it next to Korin in the vacant armchair, surprised to find that Korin was after all addressing him, asking where the woman he loved had gone, to which he replied after a long silence simply that she had gone away; and what about her? and the one in the kitchen? and the one at the bus stop? asked Korin nodding toward the various dummies, to which he answered that they all looked like her, slurped once at his coffee, stood up and took the cup out into the kitchen, and by the time he returned Korin seemed not to have noticed his absence and was absorbed in telling his story, describing the two children’s faces as they peered down at him threatening to call the ambulance, and how he had managed to slip away and took shelter in the subway for a while, though every part of him was aching, he said, especially his stomach, his chest and his neck, and his whole head buzzing so that he hardly had the strength to stand, but kept going somehow and got to another subway station, then to another and another, and so forth … but the man stopped him at this point to say, I don’t understand, what are you talking about, but rather than explain Korin stopped altogether and for a while all three of them were simply watching TV, cartoons and advertisements following close on each other’s heels, rapid, jerky, silent images, as if everything was under water, until the man repeated his advice that Korin should leave immediately because it was a tough city and you couldn’t hang around thinking that either someone would kill Korin or the cops would get him, which would be more or less the same thing, he said, and since he seemed to have vast amounts of money he should decide where to go and he, the man, would take care of it, but he needed to pull himself together now, he said, though he could see that Korin was still out of it and that nothing he said had got through, that he was simply frowning at the television, watching it for a long time as though it required all his concentration to keep track of the flickering images on the screen before eventually rising from the armchair, going over to the pictures on the wall, pointing to one of them and asking, and this? where is this?
A temporary bed had been made up for him behind the armchairs in the living room, but though he lay down and pulled the covers over him Korin did not sleep, waiting instead for the man in the bedroom to breathe evenly and start snoring, then he got up, went to the bathroom, touched all the clothes drying there and gazed at the pictures on the wall again, leaning very close since they were just a faint glow in the murk, but by leaning so close he succeeded in examining every one, moving from one to the other, giving each one careful thought before moving on, and that is all he did that night, working his way through the apartment, moving from the bathroom through to the bedroom, then into the living room, returning frequently to the bathroom to check how dry the clothes were, touching them, adjusting them on the radiator, but then, quick as a shot out to examine the photographs again, admiring the strange, airy dome with its arches made of simple steel tubes bent to define a large hemisphere in space, staring at the large uneven glass panes — roughly half a meter or a meter in size — with which the hemisphere was covered, studying the fixing of the joints and trying to make out some text written in bright neon tubes, pressing his head ever closer to the pictures, straining his eyes, concentrating ever more intensely on them, until, it seemed, he had solved something and was in any case finding it easier to make out details that showed a completely empty space surrounded by white walls, and inside it a remarkably light-looking, delicate contraption, a bubble of air, possibly a dwelling of some sort, he said to himself as he moved from one image on to the next, a version of a prehistoric structure, the man later explained to him, yes, a dwelling, the skeleton made of aluminum tubes filled in with broken, irregular panes of glass, something like an igloo; and where was it? asked Korin, the man replying that it was in Schafhausen, and where was Schafhausen? in Switzerland, came the answer, near Zürich, at the point where the Rhine divides the Jura mountains, and is that far? asked Korin, is it far, this Schaffhausen, and if so, how far?