Her eyes were closed, she was asleep. Perhaps irreversible darkness dwelt in the depths of those eyes. Dreadful as blindness was, however, there were even worse things. What did this stillness mean? Why this frozen sleep? What did it mean when her mother drew breath with unspeakable difficulty from the depths of her breast, dragging herself laboriously through the twilight hour by hour? But then her breath came more and more easily, faster and faster—the three sisters sighed with relief—it was gliding along, like someone racing in haste down wide paths, up flowering mountains, his eyes shining, and then pressing his hand to his sweetly trembling heart, as if he stood radiant in the embrace of the sudden blaze of the noonday sun, delighted to reach his journey’s end, holding his breath in amazement.

The sisters had hurried to the sick woman as she sat up, hands rigidly thrust out as if to ward something off, her blind eyes seeming to see some supernatural sight. Then she sank back again, and faint breath came back into the mother’s breast, as if from much too far away. Another soul was running its race with death in the darkness of the night.

Around three in the morning Franziska hurried off to fetch the doctor for the second time, but now he was not at home. The weather was harsh, and there had never been so many sick people as now. His pony-trap was just bowling down the road. So Franziska ran to the priest, who knew the old woman and had already given her Extreme Unction during a sudden illness two years ago. His mild demeanour calmed them all. The heady scent of incense made the sisters sleepy, the unconscious woman seemed to smile when he anointed the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet with his holy oil. Her frozen gaze turned human again in the light of the consecrated candles. And with the priest came the nurse, unasked-for but welcome, for she stayed.

The dreadful silence imposed by that savage fist was gone, and so was the terror of running a relentless race, for other people now knew what was going on. Everything would pass, nothing ever happened for the very first time, and so it became an everyday act of death, the ordinary end of the story of an ordinary life.

II

HENRIETTE AND MINNA were weeping: Minna passionately, like a child crying her whole heart and soul out; Henriette like a weary, depressed woman with many years of toil behind her, a woman with few hopes, a great burden of work, and no friends.

Franziska stood at the window and felt her heart beating stormily. She couldn’t weep, not just now, not in this mercilessly grey daylight, with only the wall between her and the woman who might perhaps still be able to hear her.

The nurse quietly opened the door. Her smile conveyed sympathy, understanding, and a wish to give comfort. Her grave gaze made all pain an everyday event, bounded by the four white walls of the room where a simple woman had died an unassuming death.

Beside the deathbed, two large candles rose from tall brass bowls filled with sand. The other lamps had been extinguished and stood at the open window, looking insubstantial and unobtrusive.

Franziska folded down the music-rest on which her Beethoven sonata from the previous evening still stood open. The old piano sighed. Minna had placed a little bunch of cowslips gathered in the woods yesterday on her mother’s bedspread.

Franzi saw that she was still crying.

At that moment she fervently wished she could shed such tears herself. She would have liked to founder silently in them, dissolving for ever in that pain which resembled the pain of the whole world; she longed to forget herself entirely, if only for a second, and for that one second at least to belong to the dead woman and devote herself wholly to her mother, as she had never been able to do in life.

The nurse had left the sisters alone, and was walking about the kitchen with her heavy tread. She felt at home here now, but the dead woman’s daughters did not. They did not raise their voices and never took their eyes off their mother’s mouth, which wore a stern, almost sardonic smile.

“Oh, to be out of here … just for an hour!”

“Franziska!” said Henriette gravely.

“Can’t you understand? I must go out. I’ll sit with her all day and all night after that.”

“Then I’ll sit with her tomorrow,” said Henriette.

“And I will … for the last time, the last day,” said Minna, in tears.

The table was laid in the kitchen. Frau Reichner the nurse had found the three girls’ sets of cutlery, and held their mother’s old, black-handled knife, fork and spoon in her own hard, bony hands. That took the sisters’ breath away. But the nurse was smiling, although it was a humble and submissive smile. After they had eaten, she went back into their dead mother’s room, pushed the chairs and table against the wall, and asked them to get their mother’s best dress out of the wardrobe. Now it lay there, shimmering with the glow of violet silk, slightly faded and very soft, letting the living noon-day light flicker over its old-fashioned flounces, little glass beads and crumpled bows. When Frau Reichner took it in her hard, greedy fingers, the old dress trembled.

I won’t love anyone ever again, thought Franziska, and then no one’s death can hurt me.

The moorland outside the little town was still grey and stony, covered with undergrowth and dead branches that seemed to be embracing the last of the snow in their thin arms.

Slowly, the sisters climbed to the hill.