Doll stood quietly and breathed again. The fury of a moment ago had ebbed away, and her mood was almost sunny as she gazed upon the street, deserted by its residents, where apart from her there was nothing to be seen except tanks and a few Russian soldiers with submachine guns. Then she remembered that it was probably time to be heading home again, and with a soft sigh of contentment she turned to retrieve her bicycle. But before she could reach it, a Russian soldier stepped towards her, pointing to her hand, and pulled a little package from his pocket, which he tore open.

She looked at her hand, and only now realised that she had cut it when she was grabbing the bottles from the children. Blood was dripping from her fingers. With a smiling face she allowed the helpful Russian to bandage her hand, patted him on the shoulder by way of thanks — he looked through her blankly — got on her bicycle, and rode home without further incident. But at the very spot where the German army truck had been parked an hour earlier, Russian tanks were now rolling through. Had the truck got away in time? She didn’t know, and would probably never know.

When Mrs. Doll reported back to her husband with this latest news, it only served to confirm his decision to await the victors and liberators at the door of his house. But as the Russians could turn up at any moment, even in this remote corner of the little town, Doll abruptly broke off his conversation with his wife and went back to his work on the shrub borders with a dogged determination that seemed almost beyond reason at such a momentous hour, intent on clearing the last tangles of wire and rolling them up neatly and removing the last of the ugly wooden stakes.

Neither the departure nor the return of the young woman had gone unnoticed on the neighbouring properties. It wasn’t long before these neighbours came round looking for Doll — always on some plausible pretext, of course, such as wanting to borrow one of his tools — and, as they watched him work, they tried to find out in a roundabout way what Mrs. Doll had been doing in the town and what news she might have to report. If he’d been asked a direct question — which would have been entirely justified under the circumstances — Doll would have told them immediately what they wanted to know, but he hated this sort of mealy-mouthed beating about the bush, and he had no intention of satisfying their unspoken curiosity.

So the neighbours would have had to go away empty-handed, if Alma had not emerged from the house to join her husband. Like most young people, she couldn’t wait to relate her adventures, all the more so as they had been highly enjoyable and reassuring.

And what the young woman had to tell them brought about a complete change of heart among the neighbours. There was no more talk of hiding in the forest. All of them now planned to follow the example of the Dolls and await their liberators in their homes. Indeed, some began to wonder quite openly whether it might not be better to retrieve items that had been hidden or buried, and put them back where they belonged, so as not to offend the victors by the appearance of mistrust. Such suggestions were greeted by other family members with much irritation and head-shaking: ‘You wouldn’t, Olga, surely!’ — ‘What nonsense you talk, Elisabeth, better safe than sorry!’ Or even: ‘I don’t think we’ve hidden anything away, Minnie, you must be imagining things!’

This neighbourly exchange reached its climax when two old men, who must have been in their seventies, got really fired up over the account of the scene in front of the hotel with the drunken children. At first, the fury of the two old men was indescribable. Had they not, for weeks and months past, been beating a path to the door of this self-same hotelier, whose regular customers they had been since time immemorial — and making that journey almost daily, despite their advanced years and the distance involved — and had not this villain, this criminal, this traitor to his own people, refused their requests for a bottle, or indeed just a glass, of wine, nearly always with the same refrain: that he just didn’t have anything left, because the SS had drunk the lot?! And now it turned out that he still had wine after all, lots of wine most likely, a cellarful, whole cellarfuls, which had been unlawfully denied them, and which children were now emptying onto the street!

And the two old men stood there looking at each other — their faces, which had been grey and careworn just a few minutes earlier, now flushed red to the roots of their white hair, as if bathed in the reflection of the wine. They patted each other on their bellies, which had grown so slack over the past year that they no longer filled out their trousers, and recited the names of their favourite grape varieties to each other in fond reminiscence. One of them was short, invariably clad in a green huntsman’s suit, and a passionate devotee of Moselle wines; the other was tall, always in shirtsleeves, and tended to favour French wines. As they danced around each other, shouting and patting each other on the belly, they seemed to be drunk already on the wine they had not yet imbibed. The uncertainty of the hour, the war that was barely over yet, the danger that might be lurking round the corner, all this was forgotten, and every memory of long-endured suffering was blotted out by the prospect of a drink. And as they now resolved, each egging the other on, to head into town immediately with a couple of handcarts, and fetch the wine that had been wrongfully denied them, Doll compared them in his mind to people getting ready to dance on an erupting volcano.

Thank heavens they both had wives, and these wives now made sure that the day’s planned foray into town came to nothing, especially as the roar of heavy vehicles passing through the town, which could be heard very clearly across the lake, was getting steadily louder. Turning back to his loose wire ends, Doll said: ‘But if things don’t turn out quite as expected, we’ll be the ones to blame because they didn’t go and hide in the forest. Just as we’ll be the ones to blame for everything that happens from now on …’

‘Well, I didn’t say anything to persuade them one way or the other’, said his young wife defensively.

‘It’s not about what you said’, replied Doll, and yanked a staple out of the stake with his pincers. ‘The point is that our dear neighbours have now found a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong.’ He coiled up a length of wire. ‘They won’t show us any mercy, you can be sure of that! For the last few years they’ve always tried to put the blame on others for everything that’s happened, and never on themselves. What makes you think they’ve changed?’

‘We’ll get through it’, replied his young wife with a defiant smile.