My wife is dead and already buried.
I am alone at home, alone with the two girls. So I am free again; but what is the use of freedom to me? I am within reach of what I have wanted for the last twenty years - I am thirty-five -, but at present I dare not to take it, and I would anyhow no longer enjoy it that much.
I am too frightened of every agitation, too frightened of a glass of wine, too frightened of music, too frightened of women, because only in my sober mornig mood I am in control of myself and sure that I will keep silence about my deed.
Yet, this morning mood is unbearable. To feel no interest in any person, any work, not even a book, aimless and without a will to roam through an empty house, in which only the timid whisper of two girls wanders around like the far-off talk of guards around the cell of a sequestered lunatic, still to be able to think with that last bit of desire in an extinct nervous life and to tremble before that one thing, like a little squirrel in the hyponotic gaze of a snake... How can I persist such a terrible life, day in, day out, to the end?
Whenever I look in the mirror - still a habit of mine - I am surprised that such a pale, delicate, trivial little man with dull gaze, slack mouth - many will say that rotter - was able to murder his wife ... the wife whom after all, in his own way, he had loved.