“What are you doing, Otto?” she asked, now thoroughly flummoxed.

“Wanted to see if I still knew how to work wood,” he retorted.

She was a little irked. Otto might not have the deepest insight into human character, but he must have some sense of what she felt like, as she waited with bated breath for his communication. And now he had got out his wood-carving tools from the early years of their marriage, and was whittling, just as he had done then, reducing her to despair with his endless silence. In those days, she wasn’t as used to his taciturnity as she was now, but today, of all days, even though she was used to it, it seemed to her quite unbearable. Whittling, my God, if that was all it occurred to the man to do, in the wake of such events! If through hours of silent carving he planned to repeat now his jealously guarded silences of then—no, that would be a bad disappointment for her. She had often been badly disappointed in him, but this time she wasn’t going to take it lying down.

While she was thinking all this anxiously, almost despairingly, she was looking half curiously at the longish, thick chunk of wood he was turning thoughtfully in his big hands, now and again chipping off a piece with one of his big knives. Well, it wasn’t a washing-trough this time, that was for sure.

“What are you making there, Otto?” she asked, half unwillingly. She had had the odd idea that he was carving some tool or other, perhaps something for a bomb detonator. But even to think like that was absurd—what did Otto have to do with bombs? Anyway, wood probably wasn’t the right material. “What are you making, Otto?” she asked.

At first, he seemed to want to grunt by way of reply, but maybe he felt he had been too curt with her today already, or maybe he was just ready to give her some information. “A bowl,” he said. “Want to see if I can carve a bowl. Used to carve lots of pipe bowls, in my time.”

And he continued to turn the thing in his hands, and to whittle away at it.

Pipe bowls! Anna almost spat with indignation. Then, with great irritation, she said it: “Pipe bowls! Otto, please! The world’s falling apart, and you’re thinking of pipe bowls! When I hear you talk like that…!”

He seemed to respond neither to her annoyance nor to her words. He said: “Of course this isn’t going to be a pipe bowl. I want to see if I can carve a likeness of our Ottochen, the way he used to look.”

Immediately, her mood swung. So he was thinking of Ottochen, and if he was thinking of Ottochen and trying to carve a likeness of his head, then he was thinking also of her, and wanting to please her in some way. She got up from her chair, hurriedly setting down the dish of potatoes, and said, “Wait, Otto, I’ll bring the photographs, so you can remember what he looked like.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to see any pictures,” he said. “I want to carve Ottochen the way he is inside of me.” He tapped his brow. And after a while he added, “If I can!”

She was moved again. So Ottochen was inside him, he had a firm sense of what the boy looked like. Now she was curious to see the finished head. “I’m sure you can, Otto!” she said.

“Well,” he said, but it didn’t sound doubtful—more like agreement.

With that, conversation between the two of them was at an end for the moment. Anna had to go back into the kitchen to see to dinner, and she left him at the table, turning the lump of linden wood between his fingers and, with a quiet, painstaking patience, trimming little curls and shavings off it.

She was very surprised, then, when she came in to lay the table for dinner, to find the table already cleared and the tablecloth replaced. Otto was standing by the window, looking down at Jablonski Strasse, where the children were playing noisily.

“Well, Otto?” she asked. “Are you already done with your carving?”

“For today,” he replied, and at the same moment she knew that their conversation was now imminent, that he was planning something, this strangely persistent man who always waited for the right moment, who could never be induced to do something except in his own sweet time.

They ate their dinner in silence. Then she went back to the kitchen to tidy up, leaving him sitting on a corner of the sofa, staring into space.

When she emerged half an hour later, he was still sitting there. But now she felt she could no longer wait for him to decide: his patience, and her own impatience, made her restless. What if he were still sitting there like that at four o’clock, and after supper? She couldn’t wait any longer! “Well, Otto,” she asked, “what’s it to be? No afterdinner nap, like every other Sunday?”

“Today’s not every other Sunday.