‘Gladly. I don’t have to answer to anyone any more.’

‘I know’, she said.

That was how it all began, and everything else followed on from that. They were drawn to each other out of defiance, protest, a sense of isolation within the community. At last, they thought, someone I can really talk to, who won’t betray me. Over time, this became something more — genuine affection, love even. They had long since ceased to care about the small-town gossip. They moved in together, living in the little chalet that belonged to the young woman, putting two fingers up to the scandalised locals. Nor did Doll care any more that Wilhelm the vet — so everyone was saying — was now telling all and sundry ‘I told you so’, claiming that every word of what he’d said before had been ‘right on the money’. Let his enemy crow: Doll couldn’t care less.

But later on, after they had married, not in the little country town but in the big city of Berlin, and were sitting together in the kitchen of their badly fire-damaged apartment, writing out addresses for the wedding announcements — then the old hatred rose up again in both of them, and they did not forget a single one of their enemies. Every one of them received their wedding announcement, and Piglet Willem and the hotelier’s sanctimonious wife were top of the list! What effect they thought these announcements would have, they wouldn’t have been able to say exactly. But to them it was something of a triumph just to have married — in defiance of them all, a poke in the eye for prudery!

From Berlin, they went back to the small town only on the odd occasion. They often forgot about the place for days on end in the chaos of the big city, in its gathering gloom, relieved only by the ghastly flickering firelight of whole streets in flames. They sat with each other in air-raid shelters that afforded little protection, heard the drone of the approaching bombers and the impacts of the bombs getting closer and closer … They held each other tightly, and the young woman spoke words of reassurance: ‘They’ve gone on!’ Then there was a deafening cracking and crashing sound, the light flashed bright yellow and died … They could taste plaster dust in their mouths, as if they were eating their own death.

But when they had fought their way out of Berlin again, passing railway tracks and stations destroyed by the bombing, when the train took them deeper and deeper into forests that appeared completely untouched by the war, and when in the evening, before embarking on the last homeward stretch, they entered the station bar again to have a quick beer, they found everything just as it had always been. The landlord had become a little more mean with his provisions and a little more insolent towards his patrons, but the leathery old vet was still sitting in his usual place on the sofa.

But the moment Doll saw this man again, the old hatred suddenly flared up within him once more. It erupted with elemental force, and it was only later that the memories of all the trouble this man had caused them came back to him, as if to rationalise the feeling after the event — for all the good that did him. This hatred seemed senseless to Doll, when there was so much hardship to be borne in these times, and when life itself felt like a new gift after every air raid. This mean-spirited hatred seemed senseless to him, and yet he had to deal with it somehow. He had made room for this hatred in his heart, had allowed it to lodge itself there — and now he had to live with it, probably for the rest of time.

For the rest of time — but, as it turned out, only for the rest of the other man’s time. When he walked past the old vet’s closed-up house now on his way to work with his young wife, the place looking so gloomy and forbidding, or when he passed the battered old brass plate, flecked with verdigris, on his way home by himself, he averted his gaze from the house — but not because he still hated the dead man. No: the hatred had gone when he died, and in its place was a kind of emptiness, a vague memory of a feeling that he had felt ashamed of. In this time of the country’s collapse and defeat, no feelings lasted for long; the hatred passed away, leaving only emptiness, deadness, and indifference behind, and people seemed remote, out of reach. Never had he felt so alone. No man had ever felt so alone. Only the young woman was still with him. But he let her know, too: ‘Let’s leave it there. We won’t talk about it again. The subject is closed.’

No: there was another reason why Doll averted his gaze from this house of the dead. There was one thing that he kept on turning over in his mind: I saw him sitting there in the station bar, with tears streaming down his face, and telling everyone he would have to take his own life because of the humiliation he had suffered. But the old whinger hadn’t taken his life: instead he had turned his humiliation into a business opportunity, without dignity or shame! He’d been a coward all his life, this Dr. Wilhelm, scared of being kicked by a horse, gored by a cow, or bitten by a dog, and reduced to giving injections to pigs when they were too young to be dangerous: Piglet Willem! The nickname was well-deserved, and he had never protested when they called him that and ribbed him mercilessly for filling his glass at somebody else’s expense … he’d always been a man without dignity or courage.

And yet, Doll brooded, this same Dr.