People call it the “Café Cuddle”.’

‘A young girl wants a little life and Fraulein Köller’s bought a gramophone. Eva only goes there because of the music.’

‘I don’t like it,’ emphasized the old sergeant-major. ‘You keep the girls in order and I’ll look after the boys, Erich included.’

‘But …’

Hackendahl had gone, however. He had said what he had to say and in this house his will was law.

The woman let herself sink back into the pillow with a sigh. Oh, yes, dear God. What a man! Stiff as a poker, and wants the children to have a life like his! He can talk – but I’ll see to it that the children get their share of pleasure in life – Eva as well, and Erich too. Especially Erich.

And she was already asleep.

§ III

The father stood hesitantly for a moment in the gloomy hallway. From the stable below, he could hear the grey reproachfully clinking her chain, but he withstood the temptation to give his favourite an extra ration on the sly, and instead softly opened the door to his daughters’ bedroom.

The two girls slept on, accustomed to their father making his rounds by day and by night, exactly as he had done in the barracks when inspecting the dormitories to see that everything was in order. When Hackendahl had turned civilian and taken over his dead father-in-law’s hackney carriage business, he had given up none of his military habits; drivers, horses and children had to toe the line as strictly as if they had been soldiers. The children were not allowed to have any life of their own, nor the kind of secrets that children love so much. Everything in the chests of drawers and cupboards had to be in its place, for Father was merciless about what he called order and cleanliness. ‘Father’ – that was the sword that hung over the family Hackendahl. ‘Father’ meant discipline, criticism, the sternest justice.

‘Iron Gustav’ they called him in the Frankfurter Allee, a man as unyielding and stubborn as he was upright and irreproachable. Entering late in life a civilian world which seemed to him too soft, he had tried to inoculate his children with the principles by which (as he thought) he had attained success – and these were industry, the sense of duty, and obedience to the will of a superior, whether that superior be called God, Kaiser or the Law.

Old Hackendahl scrutinized the room. Over Sophie’s chair hung a nurse’s uniform, carefully folded; the starched hood with its Red Cross badge lay on the bedside table. Hackendahl sighed. His daughter, having come of age, had insisted on taking up nursing, although in his view this somewhat pious and anaemic child would have been better suited as a teacher. But Sophie knew how to get her own way.

‘If you positively won’t give your consent, Father,’ she had said in that quiet way of hers, ‘I’ll have to do without.’

‘But I’m your father,’ he had stormed, taken aback by such disobedience. ‘You’re breaking the fifth commandment.’

‘Pastor Rienäcker,’ she had replied, ‘tells me I have a call.’

‘God’s call’ – she hadn’t been ashamed to talk like that to her father! And since when did one talk of God, the Omnipotent, as if one were personally acquainted with Him? One was too small to do that. Old Hackendahl regarded this earth as having distinctions of rank that were, so to speak, spatial; that is, the Lord sat on the very top and, far below, sat Hackendahl; everyone in between, whether colonel, judge of the supreme court or emperor, had his appointed place.

‘I only want what is best for you, Sophie,’ he had said. ‘You’re not strong enough for nursing.’

‘God will give me strength,’ she had replied.

All right, all right! Mechanically old Hackendahl adjusted the ribbons of her hood so that they lay at right angles, although tidiness was more probably to seek in the clothes of his second daughter, the eighteen-year-old Eva, who slept on her side, her face hidden by an arm and her long, fair hair. Sophie, quite properly, had done up her hair for the night in two plaits, but Eva would say, ‘At night at least I want my hair free from the silly old bun!’

She was taking a liberty, but her father didn’t say so. She looked so pretty without it, with her blonde ringlets framing her pale face. It somehow lit up his heart to see her lying there like that – a life in bloom, a mature girl, but still a child.

Still a child! Of course – he knew his Eva.

Remembering the confectioner’s shop, that wretched ‘Café Cuddle’ with its tinned music churned out from a great horn painted pink and gold, Hackendahl frowned. Yes, she had certainly gone there, but only because of the music from this new-fangled apparatus, and not because she was thinking about men or kisses …

Feeling his glance she flung herself, with the impetuosity which characterized all her movements, on her back, stretched and gave out a sound of ecstatic joy – just an ‘Oh!’, but so happy. Then she looked at him. ‘Is that you, Father?’

‘Good morning,’ he said slowly.

‘Good morning, Father. Listen …’

‘What is it? You should be asleep!’

‘Never mind, I’ll go to sleep immediately. Father, do you know what time Erich came home?’

‘You mustn’t tell tales, you know that.’

‘At one o’clock, Father! Fancy, one o’clock.’

‘Shame, Evchen, you shouldn’t tell tales.’ This was not said very firmly, however, for what he had just heard agitated him very much.

‘Shouldn’t tell tales! When he’s always telling about me! In the Café Köller they said he’d got a lot of money, Father.’

‘You’re not to go to the Café.’

‘But I’m so fond of whipped cream – and we never get any at home.’ She was watching her father shrewdly and saw that he was no longer thinking of her. ‘And now I’m going to sleep, I’m so tired …’

‘Yes, go to sleep.