Then he went back to rummaging, and Anna leaned back into the sofa, relieved. A load had been taken from her mind. Now she was convinced that Otto had some great plan.

He carried his little bottle of ink, his postcards in their envelope, and the large white gloves to the table. He uncorked the bottle, seared the pen nib with a match, and dipped it in the ink. There was a quiet hiss; he looked attentively at the pen and nodded. Then he awkwardly pulled on the gloves, took a card from the envelope, and laid it down in front of him. He nodded slowly at Anna. She was alertly following every one of these meticulous and long-considered preparations. Then he indicated his gloves and said, “Fingerprints—see!”

Then he picked up the pen, and said softly but clearly, “The first sentence of our first card will read: ‘Mother! The Führer has murdered my son.”

Once again, she shivered. There was something so bleak, so gloomy, so determined in the words Otto had just spoken. At that instant she grasped that this very first sentence was Otto’s absolute and irrevocable declaration of war, and also what that meant: war between, on the one side, the two of them, poor, small, insignificant workers who could be extinguished for just a word or two, and on the other, the Führer, the Party, the whole apparatus in all its power and glory, with three-fourths or even four-fifths of the German people behind it. And the two of them in this little room in Jablonski Strasse!

She looks across at her husband. While she’s been thinking all this, he has just got to the third word of the first sentence. With unbearable patience, he is drawing the capital F of the word Führer. “Why don’t you let me write, Otto!” she begs. “I can do it much more quickly!”

At first he just growls back. But then he does give her an explanation. “Your handwriting,” he says. “They would catch us sooner or later by the handwriting. This here is a sign-writing style, block capitals, like type…”

He stops, and goes on drawing the letters. Yes, he’s planned it all. He doesn’t think he’s forgotten anything. He knows this style from the plans of furniture designers; no one can tell from such a style who’s doing it. Of course, with Otto Quangel’s large hands unused to writing, it looks particularly crude and coarse. But that doesn’t matter, that won’t betray him. If anything, it’s a further advantage: the postcard will have something poster-like about it that will catch the eye. He goes on drawing patiently.

And she, too, has become patient. She is beginning to adjust to the idea that this will be a long war. She is calm now; Otto has considered everything; Otto is dependable, come what may. The thought he has given to everything! The first postcard in the war that was started by the death of their son is rightly about him.