vespers and gave a more detailed explanation: “She nodded twice. I shook
m yhead. That meant, ‘You must give me up.’ Then she nodded again, and
I nodded in as friendl ya manner as possible. That meant, ‘You still have m y
love.’ ” Shortl yafterward the ymet on the street. Regine greeted him in a
friendl yand s ympathetic manner, and now Kierkegaard understood abso-
lutel ynothing. He merel ystared at her in amazement and shook his head.
Indirect communication is ambivalent and is therefore risk ybusiness, for
the recipient of the communication can attribute quite a different meaning
to it than the sender intends. Moreover, if the communication is a wordless
gesture, things can go completel yawr y. And that was what happened when
Regine nodded that third time in church and Kierkegaard gave a friendly
nod in return. What he had intended to do was to indicate to Regine that
she could be assured of his love, but instead he convinced Regine that he
had given his blessing to her engagement to Fritz Schlegel. It was in fact
the relationship with Fritz which had occasioned Regine’s repeated signals
and about which Kierkegaard had not had the faintest idea.
In that case, he might have shaken his head instead. Or his face would
have been forced to assume a completel yblank expression.
Berlin Again
This misunderstanding of a signal was repeated three weeks later, on Mon-
day, May 8, 1843, when Kierkegaard traveled to Berlin for the second time.
He sailed (once again) on theKo ̈nigin Elisabeth, traveling via Ystad, Sweden
to Stralsund in Germany, where the passengers spent the night in a hotel.
The next da yhe continued b ycoach to Stettin (now Szezcin, Poland), from
which there was a railroad connection via Angermu ̈nde to Berlin. This
meant that the trip could now be completed in significantl yless time than
it had taken previously: “Thanks to the half-completed railway,” an adver-
tisement inAdresseavisenstated, “the trip from Stettin to Berlin can be made
in nine to ten hours.”
Kierkegaard boarded the train in Stettin and positioned himself comfort-
abl yin an armchair in an empt yfirst-class carriage. But after the train had
passed a couple of stations he heard the conductor—who was sitting on a
bench just over his head—blow his whistle. The train stopped. The conduc-
tor shouted, “Sie haben mit der Gardine gewinckt” [German: “You waved
the curtain”]. For a moment Kierkegaard was embarrassed for having until
then thought of a train trip as a prosaic matter, for it was in fact quite poetic
that a train would stop merel ybecause someone had waved a curtain at a
passerby. He remembered a bit of verse about a lady who stood on the