The day Goldmund could n himself to go to work. As on many other joyless days, he roamed about the city. He saw housewives and servants go to market. He loitered around the fountain at the fish market and watched the fish venders and their burly wives praise their wares, watched them pull the cool silvery fish out of the barrels and offer them for sale, saw the fish open their mouths in pain, their gold eyes rigid with fear as they quietly gave in to death, or resisted it with furious desperation. He was gripped by pity for these animals and by a sad annoyah human beings. Why were people so numb and crude, so unthinkably stupid and iive? How could those fishermen and fishwives, those haggling shoppers not see these mouths, the deathly frightened eyes and wildly flailing tails, the gruesome, useless, desperate battle, this unbearable transformation from mysterious, miraculously beautiful animals—the quiet last shiver that ran across the dying skin before they lay dead and spent—into flattened, miserable slabs of meat for the tables of those jovial pauhese people saw nothing, knew nothing, and notiothing; nothing touched them. A praceful animal could expire uheir very eyes, or a master could express all the hope, nobility, and suffering, all the dark tense anguish of human life, iatue of a saint with shudder-indug tangibility—they saw nothing, nothing moved them! They were gay; they were busy, important, in a hurry; they shouted, laughed, bumped into each other, made old jokes, screamed over two pennies, felt fine, were orderly citizens, highly satisfied with themselves and the world. Pigs, thats what they were, filthier and viler than pigs! Of course he had only too often been one of them, had felt happy among them, had pursued their girls, had gaily eaten baked fish from his plate without being horrified. But sooner or later, as though by magic, joy and calm would suddenly desert him; all fat plump illusions, all his self-satisfa and self-importance, and idle peaind fell away. Something plunged him into solitude and brooding, made him plate suffering ah, the vanity of all uaking, as he stared into the abyss. At other times a sudden joy blossomed from the hopeless depth of uselessness and horror, a violent infatuation, the desire to sing a beautiful song, to draw. He had only to smell a flower or play with a cat, and his childlike agreement with life came ba. This time, too, it would e back. Tomorrow or the day after, the world would be good again, it would be wonderful. At least it was so until the sadness returhe brooding, the remorse for dying fish and wilting flowers, the horror of iive, piglike, staring-but-not-seeing humae was at suents that Viktor always came to his mind. With t curiosity and deep anguish, he would think of the lanky wayfarer whom he had stabbed between the ribs a lying on pine boughs covered with blood. And he wondered what had bee of Viktor. Had the animals eaten him pletely, had anything remained of him? The bones probably, and perhaps a few handfuls of hair. And what would bee of the bones? How long was it, decades or just years, until bones lost their shape and crumbled into the earth?
As he watched the goings-on in the marketplace, feeling pity for the fish and disgust for the people, anguished by the melancholy in his heart and a bitter hatred against the world and himself, he once more thought of Viktor. Perhaps someone had found and buried him? And in that case, had all the flesh fallen from th