Leda

Leda is Stephan Labude’s fiancée, whose relationship with him is strained by the distance between Hamburg and Berlin. Seen almost entirely through Labude’s account, she becomes the absent partner at the center of his suspicion, surveillance, and eventual departure: their scheduled reunions have become a performance, and his discovery of her with another man turns that suspicion into a rupture.

Identity and Circumstances

Labude reports that he has been to Hamburg and that Leda sends her greetings. When Fabian asks about his fiancée, Labude postpones the subject. He later explains that Leda did not know he was in Hamburg: he had gone there intending to surprise her and watch her secretly, having grown distrustful of the relationship.

The arrangement he describes allows them only two days and one night together each month, a pattern sustained over years. Their homes in different cities make ordinary shared life difficult: each misses the other’s worries, acquaintances, and gradual changes. Labude argues that this separation has weakened their relationship independently of either partner’s qualities.

The Relationship’s Performance

Labude recalls that Leda had begun to seem changed and, in his view, to be acting a part. He interprets the greeting at the station, their tender conversation, and their passion in bed as theatrical rather than spontaneous. His account frames the meetings as repetitions: a kiss, a visit to the theater, an exchange of news, a night together, and then another separation until the next month.

The calendar-bound intimacy troubles him. He says he had begun to dread each reunion and describes the encounter as emotional closeness followed by sex governed by the calendar and the clock. His formulation, “die Liebe krepiert an der Geographie,” makes geography more than a logistical obstacle: it is the explanation he gives for a love that has lost the conditions for everyday knowledge of the other.

The Night of the Discovery

After leaving the gathering where the student initiative group had been founded, Labude went to the house where Leda lived. The windows were dark, but he stayed rather than returning to reason or going away. Across the wide street, on a bench opposite the house, he smoked and waited from midnight until three in the morning, imagining angry conversations and hostile scenes as passersby approached.

Shortly after three, a taxi stopped outside. A tall, slender man got out and paid the driver; a woman hurried from the car to the door, unlocked it, held it until the man had followed her inside, and shut it from within. The taxi returned to the city. Labude identified the woman as Leda. He watched shadows move behind the curtains, saw the living room go dark and the bedroom light up, and heard her laugh. The long vigil makes the discovery a scene assembled from distance and fragments rather than conversation: a cab, a doorway, shadows, and a sound he recognizes.

Confrontation and Separation

Labude later recounts asking Leda who the man was who had slept at her place that night. She answered that he was imagining things and called his jealousy foolish. Labude says he then slapped her and left. Leda ran after him down the stairs and out to the door, wearing only a fluttering dressing gown, and called for him to stay. He ran away and went to the railway station.

Afterward, Labude tells Fabian that he expects to get over the experience but is wounded by what he regards as Leda’s lie. The account establishes his conviction and the consequence—a violent confrontation followed by separation—but does not independently establish the other man’s identity or Leda’s explanation. Because Leda is presented through Labude’s recollection, her motives and understanding of the relationship remain outside the narrative’s evidence.