WH 3’s Schoolboy Infatuation with Petra Schulz

WH 3’s Schoolboy Infatuation with Petra Schulz turns a brief act of kindness toward a neglected dog into the beginning of an intense, largely one-sided love. Their encounters become a modest routine of shared walks, kiosk visits, and time together during school breaks. For WH 3, however, these ordinary gestures carry the weight of a hoped-for future: he tries to change himself, imagines intimacy with Petra, and alternates between surrendering to his feelings and trying to be rid of them.

Petra Schulz and the First Encounter

The narration introduces Petra Schulz at seventeen through a deliberately divided portrait: she seems at once refined and vulgar, expensive and cheap, corrupted and innocent. Her ordinary name is described as a kind of feint, while her appearance suggests contradictions WH 3 cannot reconcile. The description also stresses that she has not yet reached the full extent of her potential. Petra arrives in the story with an energy and promise that sharply contrast with WH 3’s sense of himself as awkward and inadequate.

Their meeting is made possible by Flamingo, the grotesquely malodorous dog kept by the school caretaker, Wohlgemuth. When WH 3 finds the exhausted animal covered in flies, he carries it around the schoolyard until much of the swarm has dispersed, then takes it back to its kennel and pours the remains of his water over it. Petra, delayed after being reprimanded for poor school performance, sees this act of solidarity between a struggling boy and a suffering dog. She does not know WH 3, though she recognizes him as someone familiar from sight, and follows him across the yard until she catches up near the kiosk.

For WH 3, her approach is nearly impossible to absorb. He is drenched with sweat, his shirt clings to him, and his eyes hurt in the light; he is also unused to being addressed by a girl. He hopes the encounter is a misunderstanding and that she will leave him alone. Instead, Petra buys two colas and a packet of Lux cigarettes, opens the bottles with a plastic lighter, and offers him a drink and a cigarette. He accepts the cola but declines the cigarette, embarrassed that he does not smoke. Petra smokes, chews gum, and blows bubbles; WH 3 attends to each detail with astonishment, while fretting that he cannot even stand comfortably.

A Small Routine, Enlarged by Hope

Petra asks whether she may smoke another cigarette and whether he needs to leave. WH 3 answers with a nod because he is ashamed of his broken, strained voice. As they drink, he imagines a winter scene in which Petra stands beside him with cold fingers and he warms her hand in his. The fantasy is modest in its imagined demand: he thinks he would want nothing more. Yet it already shows how quickly an ordinary pause together becomes, for him, a private picture of intimacy.

Petra brushes her hair from her face, drops her half-smoked cigarette, and walks on with him. She explains, somewhat awkwardly, that she lives far away and must change buses twice. WH 3 struggles to follow the explanation and wonders why she lives so far from school. When she suddenly runs to catch her bus, she waves and calls something to him as she boards. He waves back, relieved that the meeting has ended without disaster. His relief does not prevent him from turning it into a beginning.

In the new school year, they more often stand together during breaks. They go to the kiosk, and WH 3 sometimes accompanies Petra to the bus stop. He is happy simply to be near her. Once, she briefly brushes her hand over his; the touch is described as accidental, but it becomes part of the closeness he treasures. During the summer he has learned to smoke and bought his first pair of blue jeans, along with other useful things. These changes are not presented as proof that Petra asked him to transform himself. They are his own preparation for an imagined future in which he might eventually be ready for her.

The Love He Builds from Their Encounters

WH 3’s hope grows despite what the narration calls reason. He wants to win even the smallest place in Petra’s heart and longs for the chance to rescue her from a burning house. That imagined rescue gives his yearning a dramatic shape: he does not merely want to be beside her but to become necessary to her. He remains unable to understand why she spends time with him, and the account makes clear that he will never learn the reason.

Other people gossip about why someone like Petra associates with someone like WH 3. The conclusions they reach are described as correct, but the account does not specify them; it does specify that WH 3 reaches a different conclusion. He hopes Petra is waiting for him, however long he takes to become someone worthy of her. He believes he is still a considerable distance from being ready, but not so far away as to be beyond reach. His most immediate fear is that she might meet someone else before then. The gap between what is shown—shared school breaks, walks, and occasional contact—and what he hopes for is central to the relationship: the same encounters that give him happiness also provide material for a story of future reciprocation that the evidence does not confirm.

Surrender and Withdrawal

WH 3 does not experience his love as uncomplicated happiness. In weaker moments he lets himself feel it fully, dwelling on it until he is overwhelmed and believes his heart might break. At other times he prays to be freed from Petra, struggles through long, painful days trying not to think of or love her, and attempts to erase her from his life. The swings are not accompanied by a change in Petra’s conduct; they occur within WH 3, as his longing and his fear of its consequences pull in opposite directions.

The relation therefore remains unresolved in the material presented. Petra’s companionship is real, but her motives and feelings are not disclosed, and WH 3’s conviction that she might wait for him belongs to his hope rather than to any promise she makes. His schoolboy infatuation is significant not because it reaches a mutual declaration or an established romance, but because it reveals how a few ordinary gestures can become enormous when filtered through isolation, self-doubt, and desire. The hand he imagines warming, the brief touch he remembers, and the bus-stop walks mark the distance between shared experience and the future he builds from it.