I never wanted to live at the expense of you two. I consider Henriette’s seven hundred gulden sacrosanct. So what am I to do? What’s to become of my piano? I suppose you can chop it up and burn it for firewood in winter. And perhaps someone will employ me as a shop-girl. Only during the day, though. I’ll come home in the evening … and maybe you’ll have some warm corner by the stove for me?”

“Oh, Franzi,” said Minna, “whatever are you thinking of? We wouldn’t let you sleep in a corner.”

“There’s only enough to feed two,” said Henriette.

“Very well, then let me tell you two my plan,” said Minna. “I shall leave. I’ll go to Prague. I’ll go into service with decent people. Small children like me. I can …”

“No,” said Henriette. “I can’t allow that. You—a servant? No, that’s impossible!”

“But I won’t be doing it here. No one will know. I won’t be putting you to shame.”

“That’s not the point. Are you really serious?”

“What have I been here if not your servant? Henriette teaches at the school, you play the piano, what’s left for me?” She smiled. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be no worse off than I am here.”

They had reached the top of the wooded hill. The moorland, far below, shone like grey silk among the tall green trees. The earth smelled of spring, the whole grey February world breathed spring-like scents, and a gentle rain was falling. It caressed the long, greyish needles of the pine trees, suddenly turning them dark green and shiny.

Franziska took Minna’s hand. They said nothing, but walked back to the little town and the old house where their mother lay in the shadow of the church. When they reached it they saw the two big candles for the dead shining at the window in the early spring weather.

“Write to tell me when you get there,” said Franziska quietly, “and then … then I’ll come to see you.”

“Oh, never mind about that,” said Minna. “I’m not doing it for the sake of you two—or for your sake alone, Franzi.”

She began to shed tears as she went up the wooden steps, but no one, not even Minna herself, knew whether it was because her mother was dead, or because she, a girl with a middle-class upbringing, must now work as a servant.

III

AS FRANZISKA WENT TO THE STATION with her sister, she felt, to her own surprise, that she was looking forward to the moment when she would be entirely alone in her own four walls, looking forward to the first night alone in her room, and it seemed to her as if the world would be wider then, as if she would be sleeping in a distant land, inside a tent or under the open sky.

But Minna was crying, and her hands shook as they said goodbye. The train came in. Franziska kissed Minna on the lips. Minna’s arm around her neck felt so heavy, so demanding, was so disconcertingly affectionate that she feared she would never be free of it again. But that was only for a moment; then the wheels of the train squealed and it pulled out. Minna waved a white handkerchief out of the window of her compartment, and from a distance her face, although swollen with tears, seemed to be laughing.

As it happened, Franziska had only ever loved a single person, her father: as a child, as an adolescent girl, and then in her memory. She couldn’t imagine ever leaving someone she loved.

For two sleepless nights at the time of his death, the first sleepless nights of her young life, she had wished him back into existence with all the violence of her tears, back into life beside her, back into the flowering day.