In the middle of April, Hans collects Katharina from a performance at the Volksbühne, The Drunken Ship, a play about Rimbaud. A Castorf production, but he didn’t want to see it with her, only afterwards does he tell her why not. You remember: My heart by the bow must vomit. The Rimbaud quote appears in one of his first letters after the revelation of her deception. My heart by the bow must vomit, he says, and takes her in his arms. And Katharina leans against his shoulder and says perfectly calmly that she doesn’t think he loves her anymore. All at once, that seems more savage than anything she’s ever said to him in the course of their differences. The next day he has an event in Dresden, a reading from an unpublished manuscript, for the first time he has pulled out those pages he wrote in the spring two years ago, in the high-rise cube, when everything was good, with the sleeping Katharina behind him. She didn’t think he loved her anymore, she said last night, and leaned against him and cried until his whole sleeve was sodden. To the Dresden public he reads what he wrote when there was happiness, and line by line he thinks: If Katharina were sitting there, and were proud of him, then it would be something else. She proud of him, he proud of her, that once kept them together. My heart by the bow must vomit. She thought he had no more feelings for her, is what she said. And said it as coolly as he had ever heard her say anything, not as though she were waiting for him to contradict her, but as if from some place beyond their relationship. Following the reading he has to stay in Dresden for another two days, there are recordings of rehearsals at the Semper Opera to be done for the radio. He’s away from Katharina for three days, for three days he can imagine what a life would be like without her.