Now her legs were giving her trouble. She wasn’t cut out to be a working woman was what it came down to—she should have been a housewife. But when her husband suddenly stopped working, she had been forced to go out and earn money. Back then, the two boys were only little. It was she who had brought them up, she who had kept this little home going: two rooms, kitchen and bedroom. And, on the side, as it were, she had pulled a man along as well, whenever he wasn’t staying over with one of his fancy women.

Of course, she could have divorced him long ago; he wasn’t exactly discreet about his adulteries. But divorce wouldn’t have changed anything. Divorced or not, Enno would have gone on clinging to her. He didn’t care—there really wasn’t a speck of pride in him anywhere.

She hadn’t thrown him out of the house until the boys had gone off to war. Till that time, she’d always believed she had to maintain some semblance of family life, even though the boys had a pretty shrewd idea what was going on. She was reluctant to let others in on her struggles. If someone asked after her husband, she would say he was off on some installation job. Even now, she paid the odd visit to Enno’s parents, took them something to eat or a few marks, to pay them back, so to speak, for the money that Enno filched from their pathetic pension.

But inwardly, she was long done with the man. Even if he had changed and started working again, and become what he was in the first years of their marriage, even then she wouldn’t have taken him back. She didn’t hate him—he was such a nonentity you couldn’t hate him—he was simply repulsive to her, like a spider or snake. He should have just left her in peace—all she wanted for her contentment was not to see him again!

While Eva Kluge was thinking of these things, she put her dinner on the hob and tidied up the kitchen—she did the bedroom in the morning before going to work. As she listened to the soup bubbling, and the good smell of it spread through the kitchen, she got out her darning basket—stockings were always such a bother; she ripped more of them in a day than she could mend. But for all that she didn’t resent the work, she loved those quiet half hours before supper, when she could sit snugly in the wicker chair in her felt slippers, her aching feet stretched out and crossed—that was how they seemed to rest most comfortably.

After dinner, she wanted to write to her favorite, older boy, Karlemann, who was in Poland. She had rather fallen out with him of late, especially since he had joined the SS. A lot of bad rumors were flying around about the SS. They were supposed to be terribly mean to the Jews, even raping and shooting Jewish girls. But she didn’t think he was like that, not the boy she had carried in her womb. Karlemann wouldn’t do that sort of thing! Where would he have got it from? She had never been rough or brutal in her life, and Enno was just a dishrag. But she would try to put some hint in her letter to him to remain decent. Of course it would have to be very subtly expressed, so that only Karlemann understood it. Otherwise, the letter would wind up with the censor, and he’d get in trouble. Well, she would come up with something—maybe she would remind him of something from his childhood, like the time he stole two marks from her and spent them on sweets, or, better yet, when he was thirteen and went out with that little floozie, Walli. The trouble there had been then, to get him out of her clutches—he was capable of such rages, her Karlemann!

But she smiled as she thought of it. Everything to do with the boys’ childhood seemed lovely to her. Back then, she still had the strength, she would have defended her boys against the whole world, she worked day and night so that they didn’t have to go without what other children got from their fathers.