Georg had been sitting at his writing desk with this letter in his hand for a long time, his face turned to the window. With a vacant smile, he had barely acknowledged the greeting of an acquaintance passing in the street below.
He finally tucked the letter into his pocket, left his room, crossed a little passageway, and entered his father’s room, which he had not set foot in for months. Indeed, there was usually no cause for him to do so, since he saw his father regularly at the office; middays they always dined together at a restaurant, and although they fended for themselves in the evening, they usually—unless Georg, as was most often the case, went out with friends or, more recently, visited his fiancée—sat for a while, each with his own newspaper, in their common living room.
Georg was shocked to see how dark his father’s room was even on this sunny morning. The high wall towering on the other side of the narrow courtyard really cast quite a shadow. His father was sitting by the window in a corner elaborately decorated with mementos of Georg’s late mother, reading a newspaper held up at an angle from his eyes to compensate for some deficiency in his vision. The remains of his breakfast, not much of which seemed to have been eaten, stood on the table.
“Ah, Georg!” said his father, and promptly rose to meet him. His heavy dressing gown swung open as he walked and the skirts flapped around him.—”My father is still such a giant,” Georg remarked to himself.
“It’s unbearbly dark in here,” he then said.
“Yes, it certainly is dark,” his father agreed.
“And you’ve shut the window too?”
“I prefer it like this.”
“Well, it’s quite warm outside,” said Georg, almost as an addendum to his previous comment, and sat down.
His father cleared away the breakfast dishes and put them on a chest.
“I only wanted to tell you,” continued Georg, blankly mesmerized by the old man’s movements, “that I’ve written to St. Petersburg of my engagement.” He drew the letter out of his pocket a little, then let it drop back down.
“To St. Petersburg?” the father asked.
“To my friend there,” said Georg, seeking his father’s eye.—”He’s so different at the office,” he thought, “sitting here so expansively with his arms crossed over his chest.”
“Yes. To your friend,” the father emphasized.
“Well, you know, Father, that I didn’t want to tell him about my engagement at first. Out of consideration for him, no other reason. You know yourself he’s a difficult man. I said to myself that, however unlikely, considering his solitary life, he might hear of my engagement some other way. I can’t stop that, but he wasn’t going to hear it from me.”
“And now you’ve reconsidered?” asked his father, placing the huge newspaper on the windowsill and his spectacles on top of it, then covering them with his hand.
“Yes, now I’ve reconsidered. If he is a good friend of mine, I said to myself, then my happy engagement should also make him happy. And so then I didn’t hesitate any longer to tell him. But before I posted it, I did want to let you know.”
“Georg,” said his father, opening wide his toothless mouth, “listen to me! You’ve come to me with this matter to consult me. No doubt that’s to your credit. But it is nothing, less than nothing, if you do not tell me the whole truth. I don’t want to stir up inappropriate matters here. Since the death of our dear mother, certain unpleasant things have occurred. Perhaps the time to speak of them will come too and perhaps it will come sooner than we think. At the office there is much that escapes me, perhaps things aren’t exactly being kept from me—I won’t assume they are being kept from me—but I’m not up to it any longer: My memory’s failing and I can’t keep track of so many things anymore. First of all, that’s the course of nature, and second, I was hit harder than you by the death of our precious mother.—But since we’re just talking about this, this letter, I beg of you, Georg, don’t lie to me. It’s a trivial matter, barely worth one’s breath, so don’t lie to me. Do you really have this friend in St. Petersburg?”