Sarah shuts the window and pulls closed the curtains. She hasn’t noticed anything. See you tomorrow, Max, she says, slips back into her high heels and disappears down the hall. Clack-Clack-Clack. Door slams. He spits out the pills into his hand. They look like candies and don’t match at all with his wrinkled palm. A fortuneteller prophesized once, when he was in acting school, that his lifeline was alarmingly short. Well, first of all it seems he’s winning the bet, and second wrinkles grow with age—maybe now she would now predict a longer life? At the thought he has to laugh, then cough, and when the air returns to him, he hides the pills in a hole in the mattress that he secretly bored out with a nail file, yesterday, or the day before. How to drink without swallowing, Heinz Erhardt in Hamburg taught him that, an age-old trick that Heinz himself hardly mastered. The bottles in the bulging laundry bag in his wardrobe contained no water, but something much higher proof, even if he often denied it to his sweetheart, and his orange juice contained only a tiny bit of actual orange juice. He looks at the telephone. He must always take the initiative, Heinz can’t call anymore, but Walter, what is with him? Or Dietrich? Josef! It occurs to him that he’s forgotten what the ringing sounds like. He picks up the receiver, listens to the unfriendly dial tone, hangs up again. Man in bed, it’s too little noise for him. Uproarious applause should roll through! Or at least a few decent boos! Even a door slam for all he cares! The rattling of Irish double decker buses! A quick trick in St. Pauli, experienced from the front row, where one can smell it all! The peal of bells of the Ulm Cathedral! Ladies and Gentlemen, revered audience, you know exactly why you came to us today! His voice sounds muffled, the curtains are to blame for that, those dusty sound absorbers. Andrea! he calls, because that always rings out clear and distinct, he calls: Andrea Völker! Andrea Erwig! Andrea Lola Christine Erwig! Soon he will see her again, that he knows, with that swing in her hips and her heels, his shark, his Andrea, who presses him to the ground, stretches her upper body and presents her lovely breasts to the heavens, like in the forest in Segendorf, like on the rooftop terrace in Binibeca, like at Lake Geneva, like on their honeymoon through County Meath, like always, and he will tell her, Ich liebe dich, Te quiero, he will say, Je t’aime, I love you, I liab di, Andrea, until she kisses him and lays her pointer finger on his lips and will whisper, Shh, my dear, keep still, my Puck, just look at me and speak no words.