Albert wandered back home, a great pain in his head. As he walked past St. Andrew’s church, the pallor of the moon resting upon the Jesuit saints in the shadowy niches, he turned his eyes away with a sense of dread. There was venom in his heart. Somehow he blamed those sculptured saints for his present sufferings. Strange feelings possessed him. Melancholy enveloped his whole being. What if his father should bring back millions from Amsterdam? Every Fritz and every Kunz would still run after him and call: “Al—ber’”. He entered his home stealthily as if he feared his mother might hear his very thoughts, and when he retired he lay in bed, a prey to strange fantasies. Soon, however, his roving thoughts, like twilight merging into night, turned into a web of dreams . . . The world was coming to an end. God was standing in a garden of colorful flowers placed in the midst of waving wheat-fields, the marble bust of the broken Grecian goddess in his grandfather’s garden glistening in the sun. Then God rolled up the nodding flowers and waving grain stalks as one rolls up a carpet and, after placing them in a huge wagon, lifted up a great heap of apple blossoms and honeysuckle and piled them, too, into the van. “Yes, all this goes to Amsterdam,” God was saying to Albert’s father, who was gathering armsful of golden leaves and loading them into the large vehicle. Then Uncle Salomon climbed a high ladder—it was the same ladder the sexton climbed to trim the candles in the great chandelier—and took the sun out of the sky. For a moment he held it in the hollow of his hands, as the sexton often did when filling the large lamp with oil, while Johann Traub, the tailor, who stood nearby, donned a white shroud. It sounded strange to hear Johann speak Hebrew, for Albert knew the tailor was dead and he had only spoken German, and he wondered if all dead people spoke Hebrew. But then Uncle Salomon began to climb down the ladder, with the sun under his arm, and it grew darker and darker—and only a few stars, suspended from the sky by rainbow-colored ribbons, were emitting bits of flashing light, and presently the gorgeous ribbons broke and the stars dropped like live sparks flying out of a chimney on a winter night . . . “Everything packed?” It was the voice of God, who was now seated on the box of the colossal van, and lashing the fiery steeds, the van disappeared in a cloud of silvery dust, leaving Albert behind in darkness and in tears. He peered into space, but could see nothing—nothing but an endless stretch of darkness. Finally he began to move aimlessly and wandered and wandered until he reached a freshly dug grave. Leb, the grave-digger, with spade in hand, was in the grave, digging deeper and deeper and singing merrily: “Everybody is dead—everybody is dead!” he hummed in his Westphalian dialect. Then he turned around and said, “Shove him in.”