“Madam Po has scented it,” he whispered, winking and nodding at the door.

“What?” asked Petra. “You’re not going to call Frau Thumann Madam Po, or she will throw us out,” she added.

“That’s certain,” he said. “There won’t be any breakfast today. She’s scented it.”

“Shall I ask her, Wolf?”

“Don’t bother. He who asks won’t get. Let’s wait.”

Wolgang tilted the chair, rocked back and started to whistle: Arise, ye prisoners of starvation.… He was quite unconcerned, unworried. Through the window—the curtain was now drawn—a gleam of sun entered the dreary gray room, or what is called sun in Berlin; all the light which the smoke-blanket lets through. As he rocked to and fro the sun lit up sometimes his wavy hair, sometimes his face with its sparkling gray-green eyes.

Petra, who had on only his shabby summer overcoat dating from pre-war times, looked at him. She was never tired of looking; she admired him. It was a wonder how he managed to wash in a little hand-basin with less than a pint of water and still look as if he scrubbed himself for an hour in a bath. She felt old and used up compared with him, although she was actually a year younger.

Abruptly he stopped whistling and listened to the door. “The enemy approaches. Will there be any coffee? I’m frightfully hungry.”

Petra would have liked to tell him that she, too, had been hungry a long time, for the scanty breakfast with its two rolls had been her only food for days—but no, she didn’t want to tell him that.

The shuffling footsteps in the corridor died away, the outer door slammed. “You see, Peter, Madam Po has merely taken herself to the toilet again. That’s also a sign of the time; all business is transacting in a circuitous manner. Madam Po runs around with her pot.”

He again tilted back the chair, starting to whistle unconcernedly, gaily.

He did not deceive her. She could not understand by a long way all he said, nor did she listen very attentively, even. She was alive to the sound of his voice, its softest vibration, of which he himself was hardly aware; and she could tell that he was not feeling so gay as he would like to appear, nor so unconcerned. If only he would unburden himself; in whom should he confide if not in her? There was no need to feel embarrassed, he did not need to tell her lies, she understood him—well, perhaps not altogether. But she approved of everything in advance and blindly. Forgave everything. Everything? Nonsense, there was nothing to forgive, and even should he start to race at her or to strike her, well, it would have its reason.

Petra Ledig was an illegitimate child, without a father; a little salesgirl later, just tolerated by her now-married mother as long as she handed over her salary to the last halfpenny. But there came a day when her mother said: “With this rubbish you can buy your own food,” and shouted after her: “And where you sleep, that’s your own affair also.”

Petra Ledig (it may be assumed that the pretentious name of Petra was her unknown father’s sole contribution to her equipment for life) was, at twenty-two, no longer a blank page. She had ripened, not in a peaceful atmosphere, but during the war, postwar and inflation. Only too soon she knew what it meant when a gentleman customer in her boot shop touched her lap significantly with his toe. Sometimes she nodded, met this one or that of an evening, after shop hours, and courageously steered her little ship a whole year without floundering. She even managed to pick and choose to a certain extent, her choice being decided not so much by her taste as by her fear of disease. But when the dollar rose too cruelly and all that she had put by for the rent was devalued to almost nothing, then she would parade the streets, in deadly fear of the vice squad. She had made the acquaintance of Wolfgang Pagel during such a stroll.

Wolfgang had had a good evening. He had a little money, he had been drinking a little.