Gregorius looked ahead at the pointed towers of the Historical Museum of the city of Bern, up to the Gurten and down to the Aare with its glacier-green water. A gusty wind drove low-lying clouds over him, turned his umbrella inside out and whipped the rain in his face. It was then that he noticed the woman standing in the middle of the bridge. She had leaned her elbows on the railing and was reading – in the pouring rain – what looked like a letter. She must have been holding the sheet with both hands. As Gregorius came closer, she suddenly crumpled the paper, kneaded it into a ball and threw the ball into space with a violent movement. Instinctively, Gregorius had walked faster and was now only a few steps away from her. He saw the rage in her pale, rain-wet face. It wasn’t a rage that could be expressed in words and then blow over. It was a grim rage turned inward that must have been smouldering in her for a long time. Now the woman leaned on the railing with outstretched arms, and slipped her heels out of her shoes. Now she jumps. Gregorius abandoned the umbrella to a gust of wind that drove it over the railing, threw his briefcase full of school notebooks to the ground and uttered a string of curses that weren’t part of his usual vocabulary. The briefcase opened and the notebooks slid on to the wet pavement. The woman turned around. For a few moments, she watched unmoving as the notebooks darkened with the water. Then she pulled a felt-tipped pen from her coat pocket, took two steps, leaned down to Gregorius and wrote a line of numbers on his forehead.

‘Forgive me,’ she said in French, breathless and with a foreign accent. ‘But I mustn’t forget this phone number and I don’t have any paper with me.’

Now she looked at her hands as if she were seeing them for the first time.

‘Naturally, I could have …’ And now, looking back and forth between Gregorius’s forehead and her hand, she wrote the numbers on the back of the hand. ‘I … I didn’t want to keep it, I wanted to forget everything, but when I saw the letter fall … I had to hold on to it.’

The rain on his thick glasses muddied Gregorius’s sight and he groped awkwardly for the wet notebooks. The tip of the felt pen seemed to slide over his forehead again. But then he realized it was the fingers of the woman, who was trying to wipe away the numbers with a handkerchief.

‘It is out of line, I know …’ And now she started helping Gregorius gather up the notebooks. He touched her hand and brushed against her knee, and when the two of them reached for the last notebook, they bumped heads.

‘Thank you very much,’ he said when they stood facing each other. He pointed to her head. ‘Does it hurt?’

Absently, looking down, she shook her head. The rain beat down on her hair and ran over her face.

‘Can I walk a few steps with you?’

‘Ah … yes, of course,’ Gregorius stammered.

Silently they walked together to the end of the bridge and on towards the school. His sense of time told Gregorius that it was after eight and the first class had already begun. How far was ‘a few steps’? The woman had adjusted to his pace and plodded along beside him as if she might follow him all day. She had pulled the wide collar of her coat so high that, from the side, Gregorius could only see her forehead.

‘I have to go in here, into the Gymnasium,’ he said, stopping. ‘I’m a teacher.’

‘Can I come along?’ she asked softly.

Gregorius hesitated and ran his sleeve over his wet glasses. ‘Well … it’s dry there,’ he said at last.

She went up the stairs, Gregorius held the door open for her, and then they stood in the hall, which seemed especially empty and quiet now that classes had started. Her coat was dripping.

‘Wait here,’ said Gregorius and went to the cloakroom to get a towel.

At the mirror, he dried his glasses and wiped his face. The numbers could still be seen on his forehead. He held a corner of the towel under the warm water and was about to start rubbing them out when he suddenly stopped. That was the moment that decided everything, he thought when he recalled the event hours later. That is, he realized that he really didn’t want to wipe away the trace of his encounter with the enigmatic woman.

He imagined appearing before the class with a phone number on his face, he, Mundus, the most reliable and predictable person in this building and probably in the whole history of the school, having worked here for more than thirty years, impeccable in his profession, a pillar of the institution, a little dull perhaps, but respected and even feared in the university for his astounding knowledge of ancient languages. He was affectionately teased by his students who put him to the test every year by calling him in the middle of the night and asking about some remote passage in an ancient text, only to receive information that was both dry and exhaustive, including a critical commentary with other possible meanings, all of it presented without a trace of anger at the disturbance. Mundus, a man with an impossibly old-fashioned, even archaic first name that you simply had to shorten, and couldn’t shorten any other way. It was a name that perfectly suited the character of this man, for what he carried around in him as a philologist was in fact no less than a whole world, or rather several whole worlds, since along with those Latin and Greek passages, his head also held the Hebrew that had amazed several Old Testament scholars. If you want to see a true scholar, the Rector would say when he introduced him to a new class, here he is.

And this scholar, Gregorius thought now, this dry man who seemed to some to consist only of dead words, and who was spitefully called The Papyrus by some colleagues who envied him his popularity – this scholar would shortly enter the classroom with a telephone number written on his forehead by a desperate woman apparently torn between rage and love, a woman in a red leather coat with a soft, southern voice that sounded like an endless hesitant drawl that drew you in merely by hearing it.

When Gregorius had brought her the towel, the woman had used it to rub her long black hair, which she had then combed back so that it spread over her coat collar like a fan. The janitor entered the hall and, when he saw Gregorius, cast an amazed look at the clock over the exit and then at his watch. Gregorius nodded to him, as he always did. A student hurried past, looked back in surprise and went on his way.

‘I teach up there,’ Gregorius said to the woman and pointed up through a window to another part of the building. Seconds passed. He felt his heart beat. ‘Do you want to come along?’

Later, Gregorius couldn’t believe he had really said that; but he must have done, for he recalled the screech of his rubber soles on the linoleum and the clack of the woman’s boots as they walked together to the classroom.

‘What’s your mother tongue?’ he had asked her.

‘Português,’ she had answered.

The o she pronounced surprisingly as a u; the rising, strangely constrained lightness of the é and the soft sh at the end came together in a melody that sounded much longer than it really was, and that he could have listened to all day long.

‘Wait,’ he said, took his notebook out of his jacket pocket and ripped out a page: ‘For the number.’

His hand was on the doorknob when he asked her to say Português once more. She repeated it, and for the first time he saw her smile.

The chatter broke off abruptly when they entered the classroom. Instead, an amazed silence filled the room. Later, Gregorius remembered the moment precisely: he had enjoyed this surprised silence, the look of incredulity on the faces of his students as they gazed at the bedraggled couple in the doorway. He had also enjoyed his delight at being able to feel in a way he would never have believed possible.

‘Perhaps there?’ said Gregorius to the woman and pointed to an empty seat at the back of the room. Then he advanced, greeted the class as usual, and sat down behind the desk. He had no idea how he could explain the woman’s presence and so he simply had them translate the text they were working on. The translations were halting, and he caught some bewildered looks among the students for he – he, Mundus, who recognized every mistake, even in his sleep – was now overlooking dozens of errors.

He tried not to look at the woman. Yet, every time he did so, he was struck by the damp strands of hair that framed her face, the white clenched hands, the absent, lost look as she gazed out of the window. Once she took out the pen and wrote the phone number on the page from his notebook. Then she leaned back in her seat and hardly seemed to know where she was.

It was an impossible situation and Gregorius glanced at the clock: ten more minutes until break. Then the woman got up and walked softly to the door. When she reached it, she turned round to him and put a finger to her lips. He nodded and she repeated the gesture with a smile. Then the door closed behind her with a soft click.

From this moment on, Gregorius no longer heard anything the students said. It was as if he was completely alone and enclosed in a numbing silence. He found himself standing at the window and watching the woman in the red coat until she had disappeared from view. He felt the effort not to run after her reverberate through him. He kept seeing the finger on her lips that could mean so many things: I don’t want to disturb you, and It’s our secret, but also, Let me go now, this can’t go on.

When the bell rang for the break, he was still standing at the window. Behind him, the students left more quietly than usual. Later he went out too, left the building through the back door and went across the street to the public library where nobody would look for him.

For the second part of the double class, he was on time as always. By then he had rubbed the numbers off his forehead, after writing them down in his notebook, and the narrow fringe of grey hair had dried. Only the damp patches on his jacket and trousers revealed that something unusual had happened. Now he took the stack of soaked notebooks out of his briefcase.

‘A mishap,’ he said tersely to the reassembled class. ‘I stumbled and they slipped out, in the rain. Nevertheless, the corrections should still be legible; otherwise, you will have to interpret them as best you can.’

An audible sigh of relief went through the room. Now and then, he still caught a curious look or heard the occasional whisper. Otherwise, everything was as before. He wrote the most frequent errors on the board, then he left the students to work on their own.

Could what happened to him in the next quarter of an hour be called a decision? Later, Gregorius was to keep asking himself this question and he could never be sure of the answer. But if it wasn’t decision – what was it?

It began when he suddenly looked at the students bending over their notebooks as if he were seeing them for the first time.

Lucien von Graffenried, who had secretly moved a piece in the annual chess tournament in the school auditorium where Gregorius had played simultaneous matches against a dozen students. Gregorius had noticed it immediately, and after the moves on the other boards, he looked at him calmly. ‘That’s beneath you,’ he said as Lucien’s face flamed red. And then made sure that the game ended in a draw.

Sarah Winter, who had stood outside the door of his flat at two in the morning because she didn’t know what to do about her unwanted pregnancy. He had made her tea and listened, nothing more. ‘I’m so glad I followed your advice,’ she said a week later. ‘It would have been much too early to have a baby.’

Beatrice Lüscher with the regular, precise handwriting who had grown old frighteningly fast under the burden of her always perfect achievements. René Zingg, always at the lowest end of the scale.

And naturally, Natalie Rubin. A girl who was grudging with her favours, a bit like a courtly maiden of the past, reserved, idolized and feared for her sharp tongue. Last week, after the bell rang for the break, she had stood up, stretched like someone at ease in her own body, and taken a colourful sweet out of her shirt pocket. On the way to the door, she had unwrapped it and, as she passed Gregorius, had put it to her mouth. It had just touched her lips when she broke off the movement, turned to him, held the sweet out and asked: ‘Want it?’ Amused at his astonishment, she had laughed her strange light laugh and made sure her hand touched his.

Gregorius went through each one. At first he seemed to be only drawing up an interim balance sheet of his feelings for them. Then, as he reached the middle of the rows of benches, he found himself thinking: How much life they still have before them; how open their future still is; how much can still happen to them; how much they can still experience!

Português. He heard the melody and saw the woman’s face as, with closed eyes, it had emerged from the towel, white as alabaster. One last time, he slid his eyes over the heads of the students. Then he stood up slowly, went to the door, took the still damp coat off the hook and, without saying a word, walked out of the room.

His briefcase, together with the textbooks that had accompanied him for a lifetime, remained behind on the desk. At the top of the stairs, he paused as he remembered how he had taken them to be rebound every couple of years, always to the same shop, where they had laughed at the worn, dog-eared, pages that felt almost like blotting paper. As long as the briefcase lay on the desk, the students would assume that he was coming back. But that wasn’t why he had left the books behind or why he now resisted the temptation to go back for them. If he left now, he also had to take his leave of those books. He felt that very strongly, even if at this moment, on the way out, he had no idea what it really signified.

In the entrance hall, his look fell on the little puddle that had formed when the woman in the dripping coat had waited for him to come out of the cloakroom. It was the trace of a visitor from another, faraway world, and Gregorius regarded it with a devotion usually reserved for archaeological finds. Only when he heard the janitor’s shuffling step did he tear himself away and hurry out of the building.

Without turning round, he walked to the corner, where he could look back at the Gymnasium unseen. With a sudden force he wouldn’t have expected of himself, he felt how much he loved this building and everything it stood for and how much he would miss it. He checked the numbers again: forty-two years ago, as a fifteen-year-old student, Gregorius had entered it for the first time, wavering between anticipation and apprehension. Four years later, he had left the school with his diploma in hand, only to come back again four years later as a substitute for the Greek teacher who had been in an accident, the teacher who had once opened the ancient world to him. The student substitute turned into a permanent substitute, who was thirty-three by the time he finally took his university exams.

He had done that only because Florence, his wife, had urged him to. He had never thought of a doctorate; if anyone asked him about it, he had only laughed. Such things didn’t matter. What did matter was something quite simple: to know the ancient texts down to the last detail, to recognize every grammatical and stylistic d...