Chap­ter 24 opens with an emo­tion­al­ly charged and intense con­ver­sa­tion between the pro­tag­o­nist and Resi, a woman who has just shared a deeply per­son­al truth about her feel­ings and her iden­ti­ty. They are seat­ed in a bustling cafe­te­ria where the harsh over­head light­ing and over­whelm­ing noise of their sur­round­ings only seem to ampli­fy the emo­tion­al chaos of their sit­u­a­tion. As Resi bold­ly declares her love for him, the pro­tag­o­nist is thrown into a state of con­fu­sion, unable to com­pre­hend the depth of her emo­tions or the true nature of their rela­tion­ship. The dec­la­ra­tion trig­gers a wave of guilt, self-doubt, and uncer­tain­ty in him, lead­ing him to ques­tion whether he has unknow­ing­ly com­mit­ted some sort of “strange crime” that he feels he can’t ful­ly grasp, but that weighs heav­i­ly on his con­science.

Resi’s con­fes­sion comes as a sur­prise, and as the con­ver­sa­tion unfolds, she reveals that her love for the pro­tag­o­nist has been a con­stant through­out her life, trac­ing back to her child­hood. As they talk, Resi opens up about her past, explain­ing that much of her story—particularly her escape to West Berlin and the fab­ri­cat­ed tales she told about her life in Dresden—was sim­ply a fic­tion, a mask she wore to pro­tect her­self. How­ev­er, she admits that the one truth in all of this was her time spent work­ing in a cig­a­rette fac­to­ry, a job that, though sim­ple, was a defin­ing moment in her life. Dur­ing this time, Resi har­bored a secret long­ing to be some­one else—someone more glam­orous, some­one more complete—someone like her sis­ter, Hel­ga, whom she had always looked up to and admired. It’s revealed that, in her mind, her dreams of becom­ing Hel­ga were the escape from a life that nev­er quite felt her own. Resi express­es deep guilt over these fab­ri­ca­tions, lament­ing that her desire to become her sis­ter over­shad­owed her abil­i­ty to accept her own iden­ti­ty.

The pro­tag­o­nist, still reel­ing from Resi’s rev­e­la­tion, wres­tles with whether she can tru­ly embody the essence of Hel­ga, the woman he once loved. He is unsure if his per­cep­tion of love and iden­ti­ty has become so cloud­ed by the past that it hin­ders his abil­i­ty to accept Resi for who she is now. He acknowl­edges that his emo­tions may be skew­ing his judg­ment, and in doing so, he makes room for Resi’s asser­tion that her love for him is just as pow­er­ful and gen­uine as Helga’s once was. This shift in the protagonist’s under­stand­ing is piv­otal in the chap­ter, as it forces him to con­front the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Resi is not just a sub­sti­tute for his lost love, but a per­son in her own right, capa­ble of giv­ing and receiv­ing love on her own terms. The con­ver­sa­tion takes a deep­er turn when Resi asks him a seem­ing­ly sim­ple ques­tion that becomes a metaphor for her inter­nal strug­gle: Should she con­tin­ue to bleach her hair white, in an attempt to resem­ble Hel­ga, or should she embrace her nat­ur­al col­or and, in doing so, embrace her true self? The ques­tion becomes a pow­er­ful sym­bol of her strug­gle with iden­ti­ty, self-accep­tance, and the desire to shed the skin of some­one she is not in order to ful­ly become who she tru­ly is.

As the dia­logue comes to a close, they leave the noisy cafe­te­ria behind and step out onto the street, where Resi’s char­ac­ter begins to take shape more clear­ly. Her laugh­ter, which fills the air with life and joy, con­trasts stark­ly with the mem­o­ries of Hel­ga, mark­ing a turn­ing point in Resi’s jour­ney toward self-real­iza­tion. This moment sig­nals a depar­ture from the past, where Resi had been liv­ing in the shad­ow of Hel­ga, to the present, where she is begin­ning to carve out her own iden­ti­ty, sep­a­rate from the expec­ta­tions of those around her. The pro­tag­o­nist, too, begins to see her in a new light, one that reflects her unique­ness rather than as a mere echo of some­one else. As they pass by a store win­dow, they stop to observe a bed on dis­play, one that seems eeri­ly famil­iar to the one the pro­tag­o­nist once shared with Hel­ga. This sight—an innocu­ous object in itself—serves as a poignant reminder of the past, a sym­bol of the love that once was, now replaced by a grow­ing, ten­ta­tive con­nec­tion between the pro­tag­o­nist and Resi. Their reflec­tions in the glass, fleet­ing and dis­tort­ed, seem to cap­ture the essence of this tran­si­tion: lost love and new pos­si­bil­i­ties inter­twined. The chap­ter cul­mi­nates in this moment of qui­et reflec­tion, sym­bol­iz­ing the com­plex inter­play between mem­o­ry, iden­ti­ty, and the painful yet nec­es­sary process of mov­ing for­ward. As the pro­tag­o­nist looks at Resi, he is forced to face not only the ghosts of his past but also the pos­si­bil­i­ties of a new future, one that may be shaped by her pres­ence and the love she offers.