. . . The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her “I want to live” was spun from the threads of a spiderweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything—love, convictions, faith, history—no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.

. . . But this time his gesture had no effect. His own gaze was much weaker than the gaze he felt on him, the dubious gaze of the board of examiners, which knew full well that he was repeating himself and informed him that all repetition was mere imitation and all imitation was worthless. Jan suddenly saw himself through the young woman’s eyes. He saw the pitiful pantomime of his gaze and gesture, that stereotyped gesticulation emptied of all meaning by years of repetition. Having lost its spontaneity, its natural, immediate meaning, his gesture suddenly made him unbearably weary, as if six-kilo weights had been attached to his wrists. The young woman’s gaze created an odd field around him, increasing the weight tenfold.

He had no way of continuing. He let go of the young woman’s head and looked out the window at the gardens passing by. The train reached its destination. As they were leaving the railroad station, she told Jan she lived nearby and invited him over.

He refused.

And then he thought about it for weeks: how could he have turned down a woman he liked?

In his relation to her he was on the other side of the border.