Inside, I want to be on my own.”

“All right.”

Then the card is carefully pushed inside a book, the writing things put away, the gloves slipped into his tunic.

They eat their supper, barely speaking. They hardly notice how quiet they both are—even Anna. They are both tired, as though they have done an immense labor or been on a long journey.

As he gets up from the table, he says, “I’m going to go and lie down.”

And she, “I’ll just tidy up in the kitchen. Then I’ll come, too. I feel so tired, and we haven’t done anything!”

He looks at her with a glimmer of a smile on his face, and then he goes to the bedroom and starts to get undressed.

But later, when they are both lying in bed in the dark, they can’t get to sleep. They toss and turn, each listens to the other’s breathing, and in the end they start to talk. It’s easier to talk in the dark.

“What do you think will happen to our cards?” asks Anna.

“People will feel alarmed when they see them lying there and read the first few words. Everyone’s frightened nowadays.”

“That’s true,” she says, “Everybody is…”

But she exempts the two of them, the two Quangels. Almost everybody’s frightened, but not us.

“The people who find them,” he says, saying aloud things he’s thought through a hundred times, “will be afraid of being seen on the stairs. They will quickly pocket the cards and run off. Or they may lay them down again and disappear, and then the next person will come along…”

“That’s right,” says Anna, and she can see the staircase before her eyes, a typical Berlin staircase, badly lit, and anyone with a card in his hand will suddenly feel like a criminal. Because in fact everyone thinks the way the writer of the cards thinks, but they can’t let it show, because it’s a capital crime…

“Some,” Quangel resumes, “will hand the card in right away, to the block warden or the police—anything to be rid of it!* But even that doesn’t matter: whether it’s shown to the Party or not, whether to an official or a policeman, they all will read the card, and it will have some effect on them. Even if the only effect is to remind them that there is still resistance out there, that not everyone thinks like the Führer…”

“No,” she says. “Not everyone. Not us.”

“And there will be more of us, Anna. We will make more. We will inspire other people to write their own postcards. In the end, scores of people, hundreds, will be sitting down and writing cards like us. We will inundate Berlin with postcards, we will slow the machines, we will depose the Führer, end the war…”

He stops, alarmed by his own words, these dreams that so late in life have come to haunt his heart.

But Anna Quangel is fired by this vision: “And we will have been the first! No one will know, but we will know.”

Suddenly sober, he says, “Perhaps already there are many thinking as we do. Thousands of men must have fallen. Maybe there are already writers like us. But that doesn’t matter, Anna! What do we care? It’s we who must do it!”

“Yes,” she says.

And he, once again carried away by their prospects: “And we will keep the police busy, the Gestapo, the SS, the SA. Everywhere people will be talking about the mysterious postcards, they will inquire, suspect, observe, conduct house to house searches—in vain! We will go on writing, on and on!”

And she: “Maybe they’ll even show the Führer himself cards like ours—he will read our accusations! He will go wild! It’s said he always goes wild when something doesn’t happen according to his will. He will order his men to find us, and they won’t find us! He will have to go on reading our accusations!”

They are both silent, dazzled by their prospects. What were they, previously? Obscure characters, extras. And now to see them alone, exalted, separate from the others, not to be confused with any of them. They feel a shiver; that’s how alone they are.

Quangel can imagine himself at work, in front of the same machinery, driving and driven, alert, looking round from machine to machine. For them he will always be idiotic old Quangel, obsessed by work and his squalid avarice. But in his head he carries thoughts like none of them. They would die of fright if they carried such thoughts.