At night, before he went to work, Reiter checked to make sure Ingeborg had everything she needed so she wouldn't have to go down the stairs to the street with just a candle to light her way, although in his heart he knew that Ingeborg (and he too) lacked so many things that his precautions were pointless from the outset. At first their relations excluded sex. Ingeborg was very weak and all she wanted to do was talk, or read, when she was alone and there were enough candles. Reiter sometimes fucked the girls who worked at the bar. These were hardly very passionate encounters. On the contrary. They made love as if they were talking soccer, sometimes even with a cigarette still in their mouths or chewing American gum, which had begun to be fashionable, and it was good for the nerves, chewing gum and fucking this way impersonally, although the act was far from impersonal but rather objective, as if once the nakedness of the slaughterhouse had been achieved everything else was unacceptable theatricality.