THE TWENTY-NINTH
Drops of rain began to fall on the window ledge. The drops were falling on Monika, too, who had left Martin’s flat. It was now time for her to change into her white smock and trousers in the hospital dressing room, pull her hair into a bun, grab a notepad and rush off to the ward to practice social medicine.
Martin was sitting at the window with a coffee watching the turbid dawn slit through the clouds over the tarry roofs of the warehouses and old factories. There, at the railway line, the city ought to end. The brick hovels and the ramps, the approaches and the bridges and past all that there should be a pier, a strip of dirty harbour water and there, where the blinking red warning lights on the roofs of the prefab blocks emerge from the mist, there, the horizon, and o
