...of old news

Two days after the trial, Frau Matzner still had plenty of opportunity to enjoy her sudden celebrity. Still half-stunned by the days she'd spent in the courtroom of the district court, by the questions, by her statement and by her final magnificent and magnanimous appeal to the judge for leniency, she was already beginning to bask in all sorts of confused but soothing notions of what might lie ahead. But it was only those two days after the end of the trial that were given to Frau Matzner to linger in the blissful realm of giddy dreams - just as long as the newspapers cared to run, in ever more abbreviated form, their valedictions to the big story of the autumn. Frau Matzner spared no expense; she bought all the papers. But on the third day, as though by an evil spell, all talk of Brussels lace suddenly vanished, and, no matter how many newspapers Frau Matzner bought on that day too, none of them contained so much as a single word that had any bearing on the trial. To Frau Matzner it felt as though she had entered a zone of appalling silence, the silence of catacombs or cemeteries by night. No! she hadn't entered this macabre silence of her own volition, she had been shoved into it. She felt the cruel and bitter sufferings of the betrayed and the neglected: first bewilderment and disbelief; then an uncomprehending astonishment; the illusory hope that it might all be a dream, and after that the painful understanding that it wasn't; followed by embitterment, impotence and finally vengefulness.

[The String of Pearls, Roth, J.]