The beginning of love is the beginning of power. Some are in the running, while others are not. Even when they play rubber band games like children once more, they are already aware of their own beauty, thinks the narrator, who sits in his deceased uncle's room writing about a bypass, while outside the bypass is being constructed. And he remembers a walk he took often decades ago, when the stone cross was not in the middle of the village, but still out in the field in the Wetterau region. And when the girls played rubber band games. He recalls his love for Katja Melchior and the first night he spent with the girl.