Foffie and Anna have returned with the horse meat and are telling the tale of their unexpected encounter with the boys when Tatyana comes in with urgent gestures, pushing the girls towards their hiding place in the attic. They run upstairs and immediately hear male voices down in the hall. Tatyana is speaking rapidly. Angry replies. She pleads non-stop. They have never heard her talk like that before. Finally, the door is slammed and the male voices disappear.
The three girls are lying flat on top of the dry-wall ceiling of Father’s study in the otherwise unfinished, open attic. If they keep their heads down and stay all the way at the back, they can’t be seen, but so far they have only been lying far apart to distribute the weight evenly. They have used the old wood ladder to climb up, then Tatyana has placed it on its side in a far corner. This time the ladder is still up, exposing their hiding place.
As more male voices are heard downstairs in the hall, Anna inches forward to at least give the ladder a push away from the room. It does move, and so does the drywall ceiling. The drywall gives way under Anna and she crashes through to the floor of the study, landing on all fours on the throw-rug, the door and front wall holding up. She quickly scrambles behind the flimsy, straight back wall. The sisters squeeze all the way to the rear and hold their breath. Voices approach up the two flights of stairs, male voices and Tatyana’s, and heavy boots stop in front of the door. So far so good. Then someone yanks it open and the girls hear Tatyana’s alarmed deep breath, and three male voices talking at once. She speaks very rapidly and seems to have convinced them to leave, but the girls don’t dare make a move.
Then Tatyana comes running up alone and tries to tell them something urgent. Come, come, she beckons, and holds the ladder for Nadja and Korinna. Anna squeezes out. She wants to run down to the basement and get her red accordion, her only treasure, realizing that a lot of things have been stolen from the house. This she would miss terribly. She peeks out the eyebrow window, and spots Lilly walking in through the gate.
Lilly!
They hurry downstairs. Tatyana, looking troubled, no panic-stricken, pulls her into the house. Lilly and Anna embrace, but Mother appears with an absent look on her face.
“You girls should go back and hide,” she says sternly.
“You too, Lilly.” But Lilly says, “and leave you here all by yourselves? I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Tatyana cups her face in her hands. She makes writing signs in the air. No one knows what she wants. She pushes them into the kitchen, towards the old pantry. Anna runs down into the basement shelter where she had been keeping the instrument case. She looks for it everywhere, but it’s gone. As she straightens up to go, two soldiers are standing in the door, having just appeared through the basement entrance. One blocks the exit now, while the other approaches Anna with a little smile. They have been drinking. They each carry a long barreled pistol in a holster. She sees no other weapons. The soldier in front of her motions to Anna to sit on the makeshift bed on the lower shelf and sits down beside her.
He puts his hand on her knee and squeezes. Just then little feet come running along the outer room, and before the soldier guarding the door is aware what is happening, Foffie has crawled through his legs and jumps on Anna’s lap. The soldier next to her shakes Foffie’s hand and asks if he is Anna’s boy. Anna nods and holds on to Foffie’s midsection. He wants to know what the soldiers are doing in the basement and Anna replies that they may be looking for something.
At that moment Mother is calling Foffie upstairs, and he slips from Anna’s lap and leaves through the door the way he came in. He is followed by the other soldier who wants to see about that female voice upstairs.
Right away the hand reappears on Anna’s knee and the other arm is hooked right around Anna’s neck. The smile is gone. He looks tense. She pulls back, will not kiss him, will not be kissed. What do I do? What on earth do I do? His hand is reaching for her crotch.
She brings both her hands up and scratches him hard down the side of his neck. Now he tries to grab her chin and mouth. She bites and draws blood on his wrist and hand. She brings up her knee to push him away, scratches again wherever she can reach. They wrestle for just a moment. His arms are now up around her neck, one leg trying to trip her when Anna’s hand finds his pistol and pulls it up out of the holster, points it right at his chest. He backs away, but tries to grab it from her. She is shaking all over, has never fired a weapon before, but he doesn’t know that. She has her finger on the trigger, and he is looking at it. She isn’t. She is looking straight at his face.
Then she knows what she must do. She hurls the pistol under the low shelf in the opposite corner where it skids all the way to the back wall. Her attacker lets out an angry shout, instantly lets go of Anna to go retrieve it, while she races out the door, up the few steps outside the basement and sprints the thirty metres to the back gate, the one with the trick catch, and slams it shut behind her. She runs to the Heyn’s door.
Please God, let them be home and hear her, and open, NOW!
The Heyns have seen her through a small window by chance, and pull her in as her attacker comes up the basement steps and watches her disappear into their house.
“Upstairs,” says Tante Heyn, “in the attic, the steamer trunk.”
Anna takes the stairs three steps at a time.
“The middle door, straight ahead,” calls Tante Heyn as they brace for the furious banging on their door. And here it is.
In her panic, Anna has locked the door to the attic behind her and tiptoed up. The house is built differently from their own, with an octagonal landing, five identical white doors leading into various rooms, one to the attic.
Uncle Heyn greets the surprised intruder with a few words of Russian, but nevertheless has a pistol pointed at him.
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to look for her,” says Uncle Heyn, and he follows the soldier who has already run upstairs. He yanks open drawers, spills the contents on the floor, pulls blankets and sheets from beds, leaves the room, strides across the hall, tries another. Tante Heyn closes all the doors as soon as he enters elsewhere. He crosses back and forth, back and forth, runs in and out, smashes a mirror in the bathroom - tries all the doors, except the one that leads to the attic - and finally, after half an hour, gives up and returns to Anna’s house.
Half an hour later, when it seems the convoy of trucks and wagons is moving off towards the auto route at the corner, Tante Heyn knocks on the door leading up the attic stairs.
“He’s gone.”
And Anna unlocks the door, sits right down on the bottom step.
“I couldn’t shoot him,” she sobs, “I just couldn’t shoot him. I had his gun in my hand, and I was scared out of my mind, but I couldn’t pull the trigger.”
“Well,” says Uncle Heyn, “it seems he couldn’t shoot me either. He was mad as a hornet, but he didn’t pull the trigger.”
“And he missed the attic door altogether, went in all the others several times, but he got disoriented because of our peculiar hall. He ran back to your house, but they seem to have left now. The trucks are gone.”
“If it hadn’t been for you, I don’t know where I would have gone,” says Anna, still shaking. “How can I ever—”
“I had better go with you, just in case,” Uncle Heyn says.
As they round the far corner of Anna’s house, he stops and looks at large hieroglyphs scratched into the yellow stucco.
“This says ‘GIRLS HERE’.” And he rushes inside.
Anna follows and sees a battlefield. Nadja leans with her face to the wall, pressing wet paper to her bleeding forehead. Behind her the large flower stand has crashed, the pot broken, the plant in ruins, the piano stool is on its side. The Käte Kollwitz drawings are smashed on the floor, glass shards everywhere.
They hear a loud wail from the study. Lilly is curled up on the sofa in the fetal position, rocking back and forth. Mother has backed herself to the window in the small space behind the desk, both eyes badly bruised, her clothes torn. She stares at Anna and the neighbour without seeing. They find Korinna and Foffie hiding upstairs in Tatyana’s closet, unharmed but shaken up. Tatyana is missing, her things untouched in her room.
“We must go,” whispers Mother, “right away.”
Anna puts her arms around her. “Alright, Mom,” she says, “alright.”
Lilly doesn’t want to be touched.
“Yes, you can’t stay here,” says the neighbour, “I’ll be back in a moment,” and runs home to talk to his wife.
Anna and Nadja hurriedly carry down Foffie’s old basket weave baby carriage, the high, roomy kind, with a bottom rack. They throw in items willy-nilly, pots, cups, a blanket, tea.
Tante Heyn appears with shorts and pajamas for Foffie, and shoes, long outgrown by her boy. She gives them a jar of ersatz-honey, a treasure, and some rice. She looks immensely troubled, but when she sees Mother, she can’t speak.
Lilly appears in the door now, composed and determined.
“We need to find your mother a pair of slacks,” she says, “throw out her torn dress. And you should all go in several layers of clothes.”
They run upstairs and find a pair of Father’s gardening trousers. Mother wears it with a blouse and a light sweater. They roll up two of her dresses and push them in between the kitchen things in the carriage. She seems driven. She can’t wait to get out of this house.
In the last moment, self-consciously, Tante Heyn gives Anna thirty marks, tucks them into her pocket.
“God bless you.” She kisses Foffie, who looks unperturbed, walks out the door holding Korinna’s hand. Lilly and Anna lift down the baby carriage. And they walk along the street, just flee the terrible scene, without once turning back.