Not far from him stood another short man, with a face as sly as it was brutal: he had collected the Party subscriptions, and used the opportunity to spy for his masters, the Party bigwigs who had all fled to the Western zone …

But there were enough of the smaller fry left in the town: over here, the mail clerk who had been a sergeant in the local Volkssturm; over there, a schoolmaster, a feared informer; Kurz, the landlord of the station bar, a bully and, as it now turned out, another Nazi spy; and then — Doll’s eyes lit up — standing close together with a look almost of derision on their faces, as if they were watching some trashy theatre show, two women, the wife and daughter of that SS officer whose uniform had nearly been his undoing on the morning of the day before.

Doll leaned forward, speaking more quickly, more loudly, talking now about the times just past, the people who had profited from them, the guilty ones and the ones who had just gone along with it all. And as he continued to speak, and as they persisted in shouting ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Quite right!’ (as though he couldn’t possibly be talking about any of them), it struck him how different these fellow citizens of his now looked. It was not just their pale faces, which were scarred by fear, worry, grief, and sleepless nights, and it was not just the ones who, in order to avoid the initial confrontation, had spent days lying in the forest, so that their clothes were now torn and faded — no, all of them suddenly had a tattered and beggarly air about them, all of them seemed to have slipped several rungs down the social ladder, had given up, for whatever reason, a position they had occupied all their lives, and now stood without shame among their equally shameless brethren. That’s exactly how they looked now, plain for anyone to see, and that’s how they had always looked when they were alone with themselves. For these people from a nation that bore its defeat without dignity of any kind, without a trace of greatness, there was nothing left worth hiding. There was the fat hotelier, whose plump, smiling face was normally flushed from drinking wine, but now was pale and ashen, darkened by a beard that had not been shaved in days. And there was his pious and parsimonious wife, who ran the hotel with him, who had wrung the last penny out of the poorest customer, and if she had had her way would have weighed every bag twice, a woman who had always gone around in shapeless black or grey frocks, and now had a dirty white cloth wrapped round her face, like the cloths worn by toothache sufferers in the cartoons of Wilhelm Busch. Her scrawny body was now covered by a blue apron, like the ones worn by washerwomen, and her hands were wrapped in grubby gauze bandages.

It’s finished, this nation, thought Doll. It’s given up on itself. But in the fervour of his speech, he had no time to think about himself, who privately was in a very similar situation, after all. He called for three cheers for the 7th of May, the Red Army and its supreme commander Stalin, and watched them shouting and cheering (for, as well as justice and freedom, they had also been promised bread and meat) and raising their arms — the right arm still, in many cases, raised in the salute that had been drilled into them over many years.

The speech seemed to have gone down well with the commandant and his officers, too. Doll was invited to come along to the officers’ mess with his wife and have a drink with them. The vodka glasses now seemed to be even larger, the schnaps even stronger — and they didn’t stop at one glass. As Doll and his wife made their way home along the sun-drenched streets, both of them were swaying a little, but Doll more so. Thank goodness the local residents were still eating their lunch, and all of them were condemning the man then walking past their windows as a traitor and defector on account of the speech he had made, yet there wasn’t one of them who wouldn’t gladly have swapped places with him!

By the time they reached the outskirts of town, where there were hardly any houses, along the stretch of road officially known only as the ‘Cow Causeway’ that ran through sparse, deciduous woodland, Doll began to stumble about. The vodka saw to it that a stumble quickly turned into a fall, and he lay where he landed. He fell asleep. Mrs. Doll did her best to coax him back up, but he just went on sleeping, and she didn’t feel strong enough herself to bend down and try and get him back on his feet. She was feeling pretty unsteady on her own feet by now. So she tried kicking him in the side, but the kick she gave him, which nearly made her fall over herself, failed to rouse her sleeping husband.

It was a difficult situation. They were still a good ten minutes’ walk from their house, and even though she thought she could make it on her own, she really didn’t like the idea of leaving her husband lying in the road, which would give the small-town locals the perfect excuse for more gossip. Luckily for the Dolls, two Russian soldiers now came down the road. Alma beckoned them over and conveyed to them through a combination of words and gestures what had happened, and what now had to be done. Whether the two Russians understood her or not, they clearly understood the plight of the man lying in a drunken stupor. So they picked him up and carried him home. With much laughter, they took their leave of the young woman …

But if she thought they had successfully escaped the attentions of the local gossips, she was very much mistaken — again. In a small town like this, there are eyes everywhere, even on the ‘Cow Causeway’, where ‘there aren’t really any houses’, and whatever wasn’t seen was just invented. A rumour now went from house to house, and was retold every time with mockery and relish: ‘You know Doll, the fellow who tried to cosy up to the Russians with that speech of his? Well, he’s come a real cropper! Have you heard? You don’t know the story? Well, the thing is, the Russians were so upset by his speech that they gave him a right royal beating! They worked him over so thoroughly that he couldn’t even walk, and two Russian soldiers had to carry him home! He won’t be up and about in a hurry — and serve him right!’

This was the story that got around, and as is the way with small-town gossip, it was generally believed, even by those who had seen Mr. and Mrs.