‘Every other Sunday’ is gone for good.” He got up abruptly and left the room.

But today she wouldn’t let him run off on one of his mysterious errands. She ran after him. “No, Otto…” she began.

He was standing by the front door of the apartment, having just put the chain across. He raised his hand to call for silence, and listened to what was going on outside. Then he nodded and walked past her, back into the parlor. When she came in after him, he was sitting in his place on the sofa, and she sat down beside him.

“If anyone rings, Anna,” he said, “don’t open until I…”

“Now, come on, Otto, who’s going to ring at such a time?” she said impatiently. “Who’s going to visit us? Tell me whatever it was you were going to tell me!”

“I will tell you, Anna,” he replied with uncharacteristic meekness. “But if you pressure me, you’ll only make it harder for me.”

She brushed his hand, the hand of a man who always found it hard to communicate what was going on inside him. “I won’t pressure you, Otto,” she said soothingly. “Take your time.”

But right after that, he began to speak, and he spoke for almost five minutes, in slow, terse, carefully considered sentences, after each of which—as though it were the last—he closed his thin-lipped mouth tight. And while he spoke, he kept looking off to one side behind Anna.

Anna Quangel kept her eyes on him while he spoke, not taking them off his face, and she was almost grateful to him for not looking at her, so difficult was it for her to conceal the disappointment that came over her. My God, what had this man come up with! She had had great deeds in mind (and been afraid of them at the same time): an attempt to assassinate the Führer, or at the very least some active struggle against the Party and its officials.

And what was he proposing? Nothing at all, something so ridiculously small, something absolutely in his character, something discreet, out of the way, something that wouldn’t interfere with his peace and quiet. Postcards with slogans against the Führer and the Party, against the war, for the information of his fellow men, that was all. And these cards he wasn’t going to send to particular individuals, or stick on walls like placards, no, he wanted to leave them lying in the stairwells of widely visited buildings, leave them to their fate, without any control over who picked them up, where they might be trampled underfoot, torn up… Everything in her rebelled against this obscure and ignoble form of warfare. She wanted to be active, to do something with results she could see!

But Quangel, once he had finished talking, appeared not even to be expecting any form of demurral from his wife, and she sat there struggling with herself in silence in the corner of the sofa. Wasn’t it her duty to say something to him, after all?

He got up and walked over to the door again to listen. When he came back, he took off the tablecloth again, folded it up, and hung it carefully over the back of a chair. Then he went to the old mahogany bureau, took the bunch of keys from his pocket, and unlocked it.

While he was rummaging in there, Anna made up her mind. Hesitantly she said, “Isn’t this thing that you’re wanting to do, isn’t it a bit small, Otto?”

He stopped his rummaging, and still standing there stooped, he turned his head to his wife. “Whether it’s big or small, Anna,” he said, “if they get wind of it, it’ll cost us our lives…”

There was something so terribly persuasive in those words, and in his dark, fathomless bird’s eye, that she shuddered. For an instant she saw quite clearly the gray, stony prison yard and the guillotine standing ready, its steel dull in the early dawn light: a mute threat.

Anna Quangel felt herself trembling. Then she looked over at Otto again. He might be right: whether their act was big or small, no one could risk more than his life. Each according to his strength and abilities, but the main thing was, you fought back.

Still Quangel eyed her silently, as though witnessing the struggle she was having with herself. Then his eye brightened, he took his hands out of the bureau, straightened up, and said, almost with a smile, “But they’re not going to catch us that easily. If they’re canny, we can be canny too! Canny and careful. Careful, Anna, always on guard—the longer we fight them, the longer we’ll be effective. There’s no use in dying early. We want to live, we want to be around when they fall. We want to be able to say, We were there, Anna!”

He said these words lightly, almost jocularly.