WH 3 and Petra's Night of Estrangement at the Zum Goldenen Handschuh

WH 3 and Petra’s night at the Zum Goldenen Handschuh turns a hoped-for final outing into a decisive estrangement. WH 3 reads her return and suggestion of another place as a possible opening, while Petra understands their year of friendship as something he has mistaken for romance. His disappearance into the lavatory becomes the night’s brutal hinge: he is sexually humiliated there, she leaves, and he comes upstairs drenched and alone. The scene sets the collapse of his hope against Petra’s clear rejection and the indifferent routines of a bar where, for a moment, their lives intersect with Karl von Lützow’s.

The invitation and WH 3’s hope

Petra returns, and WH 3’s heart lifts, but joy is immediately shadowed by fear that she might change her mind, vanish, or become involved with someone else. She asks about the bar he had mentioned and suggests they could go there after all. Instead of taking this as a simple proposal, he fixates on the phrase meaning “after all”: perhaps it means one last drink, followed by each of them going their separate way. He is uncertain how to read the phrases and moods exchanged at this hour, and the uncertainty gives an ordinary plan the weight of a possible farewell.

The destination is the Zum Goldenen Handschuh, whose crowd, drunkenness, fights, noise, and bodily squalor make it an uneasy place for him to bring Petra. Yet he cannot think of another option, and feels he has no choice if she wants to go. His anxiety is both emotional and physical. His bladder is painfully full, and he has to leave for the toilet immediately. When Petra asks what people drink there, he answers that she can have whatever she wants. She chooses vodka and asks if he will have one too. He dreads another shot, feeling it may be the one too many, but silently nods rather than refuse.

In the lavatory, the urinal is occupied, so WH 3 waits behind a large, red-haired man. The stench of urine and excrement, the press of bodies, and the man’s loud self-congratulation as he relieves himself make the wait feel interminable. WH 3 is still trying to finish when the room suddenly empties. He reassures himself that only a few minutes have passed and that Petra must still be there. His attempt to steady himself exposes how much the evening has become a test of whether she will stay.

Assault in the lavatory

The reprieve is short. Heavy, clattering footsteps come down the stairs; WH 3 moves aside so as not to obstruct whoever is approaching, following the deference he learned from his parents. When he looks back, he sees one or more men behind him. He tries a frightened smile, hoping to convey that he is weaker and should be left alone. Instead, they mock his appearance and order him to keep facing the wall.

A zipper sounds, and one of the men urinates on him. WH 3 does not turn around or resist. The stream runs down his legs and into his shoes, gathering in a steaming puddle on the floor. The assailant continues to taunt him, ordering him to stand still and keep going while using a slur against him. When finished, the man taps two fingers against WH 3’s temple in a pantomime of a gunshot and leaves. The gesture makes the assault both bodily and openly threatening, while WH 3 remains powerless to prevent it.

He retreats into a filthy stall, strips off his soaked trousers, and tries to wring them out. They are so wet that pulling them back on is difficult. He anticipates that the urine will make his legs red and that the clothes will begin to smell. These are not incidental indignities: when he finally returns upstairs, the assault is still written on him in the wetness he cannot hide. The separation from Petra is therefore not simply a matter of competing expectations. It takes place alongside an attack that leaves him physically degraded and emotionally exposed.

Petra’s interpretation and departure

While WH 3 is gone, Petra grows angry at the length of his absence. She thinks he might as well rot in the toilet and wonders what could have happened, but dismisses the idea that she should go searching for him in a place foul with old urine and excrement. To her, coming to the bar had been a last attempt to avert something she had sensed approaching throughout the evening: the moments when his restraint seemed to be failing. She had noticed his skin growing hot, his breathing quickening, and the pulse in his neck; when this happened, she had gone for drinks, danced, or used the toilet.

Petra now recognizes that she had badly misjudged their friendship. After a year, she had considered it impossible that WH 3 wanted something more, but she believes he has been continually restraining himself and pretending to accept their relationship as it was. She also reinterprets his earlier exaggerated coolness when she greeted him with a friendly embrace: what she had taken as distance was, in her view, an attempt to conceal his feelings. The narration makes the divide stark. What he experiences as devotion, she finds intrusive and needy; she resents the assumption that her friendship might offer him a romantic chance. Petra does not want the exclusivity and dependence she associates with being in love and wants to retain her freedom to choose.

The evening’s physical separation confirms the emotional one. Petra sets down her empty glass, waves to Karl von Lützow, and leaves the bar. She does not go to the lavatory to look for WH 3. Her departure is not presented as a response to the assault, which she has not witnessed; it follows her own impatience and her settled conviction that his attachment has become a burden. Her absence is thus the answer WH 3 feared when he heard her suggestion of a final stop, although he cannot know her full reasoning as he waits below.

Karl’s passing encounter and WH 3’s collapse

Karl von Lützow has entered the bar only moments after WH 3 went downstairs. He arrives exhausted and disillusioned, resolving that the night should be his last attempt to pursue fleeting desires. A woman from the countryside had let him put an arm around her before leaving with people like herself, and he takes the failure as a sign to accept reality. He imagines instead a quiet, comfortable life in his bungalow, taking over the gardening, going on excursions and bicycle rides, and perhaps one day finding a love that is returned. He orders two double Boonekamp drinks because he does not know what else to have.

For an instant, the two men’s stories touch without meeting. Karl and Petra exchange a toast across the bar; each regards the other as normal. Meanwhile, WH 3 is being urinated on below. Petra leaves, Karl finishes his second drink, briefly considers following her, then keeps to his resolve and goes in the opposite direction. Only seconds later, WH 3 stumbles upstairs in soaked clothes. The parallel is pointed: Karl’s decision to abandon pursuit at least gives him a direction to follow, while WH 3’s hope has depended on a person who has already walked out.

WH 3 had known she might be gone, but knowing does not prepare him for finding the bar without her. His insides flutter; tremors pass through him, and he can barely suppress hysteria. His thoughts circle through violent, self-destructive possibilities as he tries to keep moving. The narrative compares him to a headless chicken still running, an image that turns motion into a sign of disorientation rather than escape. He leaves the Zum Goldenen Handschuh and wanders through the surrounding streets, registering fragments such as a man with a walking stick, a battered car, and a half-full beer bottle in the gutter.

His despair hardens into rage against the drunken, battered, impoverished people around him. He blames them for their dependence and imagines a world rid of them, even as he himself is unraveling in public. Beneath the insults, the narration locates the source of the crisis in his unrealizable desires: he recognizes his dreams as hopeless and unrealistic and treats longing as the source of conflict and suffering. The scene ends not with reconciliation, explanation, or a grand gesture, but with him running as fast as he can, making hollow, impaired sounds, while his heart’s capacity to leap and hope is rendered useless. The night’s rejection is therefore both intimate and grotesque: Petra is gone, the assault has left its mark, and WH 3’s movement carries him away without bringing him closer to anything he wants.