Archive of Our Own ^beta

So full of artless jealousy is guilt, / It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.
~William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Anni hadn’t meant to snoop; it simply hadn’t entered her mind to knock. Not until later did she realise how naive that was. After all, it wasn’t the first time she hadn’t found Otto and Karin alone in the attic hide-out. Although she and Martin had, in a kind of unspoken agreement, so far generally avoided letting their visits overlap too frequently or for too long, it did happen, though rarely. They took turns delivering food, and for the most part they worked different shifts – luckily, Anni thought.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like Martin. Or did like him, for that matter. They didn’t know each other well enough for either. Before everything went to hell in a handbasket, they’d exchanged polite hellos at best, and being next-door neighbours hadn’t brought them any closer. Being forced to work together these past few months hadn’t really changed that. At best, it had given their non-relationship a strange, artificial veneer of conspiracy. By necessity, they kept each other’s secrets with the utmost, inviolate discretion, aware that the sword of Damocles above them was very nearly literal, but it seemed that a shared risk of death did not for automatic kinship make.

For his part, Martin kept his reserve towards Anni, treating her with a subtle but never dissipating caution. It was clear, if unspoken, that he trusted her only for Otto’s sake, and perhaps because Karin’s involvement meant Anni was in as deep as he was. It didn’t have anything to do with trusting her.

Anni felt the same caution in herself, the same odd contrast between the cool, impersonal distance that separated them and the knowledge that bound them: that they were working together for two people for whom they’d sacrifice anything.

The distance was reasonable, even necessary, Anni reminded herself. One too-openhearted, too-thoughtless fool in this attic was more than enough.

Still, there were times she’d caught herself looking at Martin sideways while his attention lay elsewhere, when she’d considered him in secret and wondered, frowning, not for the first time: Why that one, of all people?

Nondescript to the point of invisibility was Martin Schelling, reserved not just towards Anni; so quiet you could have taken him for shy if it wasn’t for the dry humour and surprising shrewdness of his occasional offhand comments. Physically, he was unremarkable, at least compared to Otto, who’d turned girls’ heads since he was thirteen and who could light up a room with his smile.

From his neatly combed hair to his slight limp, there was nothing that stood out about Martin. Missing limbs were hardly noteworthy these days. Behind his round spectacles, his gaze was blue-grey and mild, although he didn’t seem to miss much. Anni was hardly the only one he observed with quiet watchfulness. He wasn’t unhandsome, but he had none of Otto’s natural charisma. The inattentive gaze slid right off him.

So why that one, if it had to be a man? What was it about this quiet, sarcastic stranger that had made Otto risk everything for him – his reputation, his freedom, his very life? What irresistible quality hid behind those watchful eyes, that deceptive mildness? What was it about him that had driven her little brother, who’d always been prepared to give away pretty much anything, not just to Anni but the next best stranger, without asking for anything in return, to make that desperate ultimatum: I’ll help you with Karin, but first you have to save him… out of everyone, him?

Anni didn’t know. If she was honest with herself, she hadn’t wanted to.

Of the two siblings, she’d always been the pragmatic one. She wasn’t naturally inclined towards navel-gazing contemplations of ideology. Mutti had spotted early where her talents lay and utilized them brazenly whenever she’d had to chase some opportunity to scrape together a few extra pfennigs for the family. Watch Otto, will you, so he doesn’t knock his head building castles in the sky. That’s my big girl. As a child, Anni had considered this egregiously unfair. Why was the little bugger allowed to daydream while she, Anni, had to watch him? Over time, though, it had become habit. Resentment had dissipated, while the instinct to protect him had become ingrained – if anyone was allowed to lay a finger on the annoying little twit, it was her. Even so, a hint of vexation still made itself known every once in a while when everything seemed to fall into Otto’s lap just because he’d turned the force of that sweet blue-eyed smile towards some hapless target who hadn’t known what hit them.

It was strange and not at all pleasant to realize that as adults, they weren’t that different in that regard. Especially in the past few months, Anni had used her smile and charm every bit as much as Otto to get what she needed. She just went about it with more cold calculation.

And Otto? Otto still seemed to dream things into reality, demanding a place the world was unwilling to give him and then occupying it with such impossible, irrepressible courage that Anni was left with no choice but to protect him as she always had, even though she resented the way doing do had shaken her world to its foundations.

Extreme caution when visiting the hide-out had long become routine. Although her eyes constantly scanned all corners and shadows where any danger of discovery might lurk, although she constantly kept a tense ear out for the smallest suspicious noise as she moved, her body knew the way so well by now that it didn’t require direction. Her feet automatically avoided broken bricks and scorched beams, her shoulders and hips angling sideways through half-buried doors. Gently, she lifted the iron door in its hinges as she opened it so it wouldn’t creak. Her footsteps on the ladder were soft. They’d greased the attic door a while ago so it made no noise.

Anni didn’t either. She stood rooted in the doorway, blinking into the room. It was almost fully dark outside; they’d pinned the makeshift curtains to the window frame with thumbtacks so no traitorous light could escape outside. There wasn’t much light anyway. The corner where Karin’s bed stood was partitioned off by a battered old folding screen. For the most part, the attic lay in darkness. The only light source was the ancient petroleum lamp next to Otto’s mattress, which cast its immediate surroundings into a soft-edged circle of dim golden light.

As soon as she noticed it wasn’t just one person lying there but two, Anni instinctively froze. Not that there was much to see, thank God. They were mostly dressed. Otto’s shirt was half unbuttoned, but it didn’t reveal more than a bare shoulder. For a moment, Anni’s gaze got caught up in a leg that was leaning against the pallet at a surely impossible angle, before she realised that Martin must have removed his prosthesis.

The pallet was narrow enough for one person. Two simply couldn’t fit on it without twining around each other. Martin was lying half above Otto, propped on one elbow, his leg wedged between Otto’s. Otto had his face lifted towards Martin, who’d dipped his head and, without hurry, feathered soft kisses across Otto’s face. Gently his lips touched Otto’s forehead, brows, and temples, tracing the sharp contours of his cheekbones. Otto held perfectly still for it. His hand, curled around Martin’s nape, was the only thing about him that moved, his fingers stroking softly. He was smiling, but it was different from his usual dazzling grin. It was an almost muted smile, quiet and glowing, entirely wrapped up in the moment.

Martin had taken off his glasses. Without them, his face looked less guarded in the semi-dark. He looked younger and more relaxed than Anni had ever seen him. He responded to Otto’s smile with a slight twitch of his mouth and an expression of such warmth, such earnest devotion, that it cut Anni through the centre like a knife.

Artur had looked at her like that, not even long ago. Before her world had startled to crumble around her, the ground suddenly heaving beneath her feet, nothing remaining as it had been or should be.

Including this. Because what she was looking at… it wasn’t what she’d taken notes on in De Crinis’ lectures, was it? It couldn’t be. Was this what he’d so avidly described as the repugnant perversion of nature, the rot in the healthy breeding lines of the Reich? Was this what moral decay looked like, this simple, tender, quiet togetherness? That fond little nudge of one forehead against another, was that the hormonal defect that merited extermination, by means of death if necessary? Two people who looked at each other as if the sun rose in the other’s face, even as the world around them fell to pieces?

Anni felt slightly sick, but not like she might have expected. So many things in nature are crooked and yet beautiful, Otto had told her. She’d often remembered it with secret gratitude when she looked at Karin – her unique little girl, cute enough to take a bite out of. Karin, who was no longer crooked in the least, who was just herself with her impish grin and her determined wobbly steps and large, curious eyes. But Anni hadn’t understood or wanted to understand that he’d been trying to tell her something about himself as well, something brave and hopeful that she hadn’t grasped till now, hadn’t even seen.

Martin lowered his head a little more. His lips brushed delicately across Otto’s eyelashes and then dropped a kiss right on the tip of his nose. Laughing softly, Otto said something Anni couldn’t make out. Martin responded with an amused snort and a murmured “Nutter” before Otto tightened his grip around his neck and drew Martin’s mouth down to his.

The kiss was warm and tender, unhurried. The curve of a smile still lingered in the corner of Otto’s mouth as their lips melded together, and Anni abruptly turned towards the door. She couldn’t, mustn’t, didn’t want to see this. Not just because it was her little brother whose intimacy with his – Anni had no word for it – she was accidentally spying on, but because the sharp pain inside her suddenly mounted into something excruciating.

“Anni?”

At the sound of her brother’s voice, she flinched. She must’ve made some sound after all. There was a suppressed curse from Martin, followed by hurried rustling. Anni kept her gaze fixed on the floor by the door. The floorboards blurred a little bit before her eyes. She clenched her teeth. She’d be damned if she let them see her like this.

“Anni, did something happen?” There was alarm in Otto’s voice now. When she heard him getting up, she had to turn back after all, making a brusque defensive gesture to keep him from coming closer.

“No, no.” Quickly, she slid her rucksack off her shoulders and nervously rummaged around in it so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “No, I just wanted – they sorted out the used clothes on the ward today and I grabbed a few things for Karin. She’s outgrowing clothes so fast now, and the nights are still cool, so I also got some blankets, here, these might be less frayed than the ones up here…”

She knew she was talking too much and too fast, but she couldn’t stop. Clutching the bundle of cloth in her hands, she finally looked up after all. Martin was still sitting on the pallet. He’d put his glasses back on and held his prosthesis in one hand, the other protectively curled over his stump, although it was covered by his trouser leg anyway. He was visibly torn between the urgent desire to put his leg back on and the equally strong reluctance to do it where she could see. His expression matched how Anni felt – upset and awkward, with a healthy dose of chagrin mixed in.

Otto stood a few steps from the bed. He looked concerned but his brows were furrowed and he made no attempt to button up his shirt or smooth down his mussed hair. Anni knew that expression well. You pigheaded muppet, Mutti called it.

“Karin’s asleep,” he explained, slightly defensive. “We weren’t…”

He broke off. Anni looked towards Karin’s screened corner, which remained peacefully quiet, and understood belatedly what kind of accusation he expected from her.

Ironically, it hadn’t crossed her mind. Perhaps it should have; amoral influence on the nation’s youth and all that. It hadn’t entered her thoughts that Otto might expose Karin to anything she shouldn’t see. Not after the long winter when he had so often been Karin’s primary attachment figure. That caused another stab of pain, this one familiar: she’d missed so much. Karin crawling, pulling herself up for the first time; her first steps. She’d missed it because Karin’s father still backed a regime that had no room for Karin or the man who’d protected, fed, and loved her unconditionally in Artur’s stead.

“I know.” Her voice sounded brittle. Her throat was so tight it hurt, and there was still a dangerous sting behind her eyes. “I didn’t mean to…”

They stood facing each other in silence, until Martin sighed. “I guess full sentences are in short supply these days too, huh.”

If he’d meant to break the tension, it didn’t work. Otto still looked confused and slightly defiant, and Anni had no idea what to say. Martin was watching her with his most guarded expression, as if she were a piece of unexploded ordinance that had to be carefully navigated. As if she was the weakest link in their little conspiracy of traitors, even now: the one still capable of reacting to the sight of a forbidden kiss by running to De Crinis and plunging them all into disaster.

The pressure mounted and became unbearable. Quickly, she approached the shelf near the door to deposit the stack of clothing and blankets. “I have to go.” Back to the door; quickly, now.

“Anni,” Otto said again from behind her. This time there was something else in his voice, something cautiously questioning, offering to take some of the pressure off her. She couldn’t have borne that. “Bye,” she said brusquely, already halfway out the door, and practically flew down the ladder.

Back in the safer wings of the Charité, she walked quickly but aimlessly. Her feet automatically took her to the children’s ward, where she ended up helping out. She wasn’t rostered, but nothing awaited her in the consulting room except for Artur and her uncomfortable camp bed. She was in no rush to get back.

No one asked questions on the ward. There was too much to do. Burns, cuts, shots, tears, contusions. All the physical impairments that were acceptable for children to have, approved by the Party. Children with bomb trauma, that was fine. Children were allowed to have hideous burns, broken bones, damaged flesh. Broken minds or damaged genetics, not so much.

The fury that rose up in her wasn’t new anymore. It was fury at the regime mixed with fury at herself, rapidly morphing into shame. You’re no better that them. You didn’t want to know. How long would you have played along if it hadn’t affected your own kid?

Late at night, on her narrow camp bed in Artur’s cramped office, her tired thoughts returned again to the scene she’d witnessed earlier, darting uneasily but irresistibly drawn to what she’d seen: her brother and his – whatever – tangled up in each other; the fond tenderness on both their faces. The gentle heat of their kiss, the playful but intimate exchange of caresses, everything about them a negation of the world’s accusations, the things Anni herself had believed without question.

A quiet creak drifted over from the other side of the room, accompanied by a suppressed sigh. It was fully dark by now, but Anni knew that Artur was still awake. She could feel his gaze in the dark, both reproachful and wistful. She also knew that if she got up now and went to him, she’d be welcomed with open arms. If she gave up her daughter, her brother, and his – lover? That sounded daft – betraying them to their deaths; if she went over to reanimate the love that had died a slow and quiet death over the winter, let him take her into his arms and give her another child, a genetically unobjectionable one… that would be commendable, morally approved, in line with racial policy. That would be fine. But two men kissing, with a disabled child peacefully asleep nearby…

This time the fury threatened to strangle her. She felt as if she’d have to vomit up her guilt and her disgust or choke on it.

No, she didn’t vomit. She only stared, with dry, hot eyes long past the point of tears, into the darkness from which her husband stared back. Here in this room with the stranger she had once loved, sensing his unspoken offering of warmth and forgiveness, she felt lonelier than she ever had before.

For two weeks, everything returned to a routine of strange extremes: They were all too exhausted to muster much energy for terror, even when every day was like a balancing act across an abyss, waiting to be shot down. For Anni, that meant endless shifts, avoiding Artur where she could, a few stolen hours with Karin. Not too many; never too many. Too dangerous. Don’t talk to anyone. Too risky. Nurse Käthe had shown her where trusting others got you.

Normally, she’d talk to Otto if she talked to anyone, but at the moment she was avoiding that, too. The scene in the attic cast back its petroleum light to uncomfortably illuminate the moment months ago when Otto had told her that he was… like that. Please understand, he’d demanded, gently but firmly, and then hugged her despite everything. Anni had done her best to try, but they hadn’t talked about it since. The unfinished conversation slunk around the both of them in the dark corners of the attic like a starving cat. Sooner or later Anni would have to face it, but for now she acted as if nothing had happened. Avoidance was so much more convenient.

Otto didn’t push her. When they spoke, it was about the usual – Karin, Charité business, gossip on the wards, the war. She was grateful to him.

She never met Martin in the attic during those two weeks, as if he had a sixth sense for when she’d show up. Down in the Charité, their meetings were strictly practical and as short and infrequent as possible – the last thing they needed was to be seen together too much and someone putting two and two together. Whoever couldn’t make it upstairs that day would pass to the other whatever supplies they’d filched: a woollen jacket, a dusty tin of sardines, a handful of rock-hard raisins. Their silence about Anni’s unfortunate bout of snooping was even more complete than hers and Ottos. So far, so awkward – until Martin unexpectedly waited for her in the corridor on the children’s ward one afternoon. Anni’s heart rate promptly doubled.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed, looking around them fearfully while she pulled him into a side corridor. “What if Artur saw you!”

“I just dropped off a patient from surgery.” He cocked a brow. “I do work here, you know.”

“Still. We can’t be – wait, did something happen to Karin?”

Martin shook his head, but his expression was grim. “Otto needs a tooth pulled.”

“What? Are you sure?”

He lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. “Pretty sure. I think it’s been an issue for a while but he wouldn’t admit it till now. He didn’t want to cause us more problems. You know what he’s like.”

She did. “Damn it.” Anni tried to think. A tooth – such a laughably minor issue, in less dire circumstances. “How bad is it?”

“Well, it’s not critical yet, but that could change. I nearly had to twist his arm before he’d let me have a look at it. The gums are pretty swollen. If it turns into a jaw bone infection… It’s a molar.”

“Shit,” Anni said wholeheartedly.

“Shit,” he concurred. His tone was laconic as ever, but she could hear the deep concern beneath it. “We need to do something, and quickly. So… do you know how?”

“How to pull teeth?” Anni snorted; her own concern came out as biting sarcasm. “No, for some reason we skipped that in psychiatry. What do you think? It’s a completely separate specialty!”

“Yeah, and a much more useful one,” Martin murmured.

Anni bristled at him. “Don’t you know anything about it? I mean, at the front, didn’t you…?”

His laugh was devoid of humour. “At the front, we had bigger problems, Dr. Waldhausen.”

She sighed. “Just what we need. I’ll take a look at it. Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks.”

It was as bad as it looked, of course. Possibly worse.

“Martin is right,” Anni said as she took the tongue depressor out of Otto’s mouth. “It needs to come out.”

Otto moved his jaws with a slightly mulish expression. “It’s fine,” he said shortly, although Anni could tell he was in pain. “What a lot of fuss over one stupid tooth.”

“It’s not fine,” Anni argued. “We need to extract it. The roots are probably infected already. If it spreads…”

Martin, who’d shone a torch on the tooth for Anni, ran his fingers through Otto’s hair. “We’ll manage,” he stated briskly. “What’s a cranky tooth compared to desertion and child abduction and a winter hiding in an attic, with bombs and the flu and all that fun stuff?”

Otto tilted his head and gave Martin a crooked smile as he rubbed the cheek that wasn’t sore against his palm like a kitten. “True. And Karin got her teething over with in here without any major drama.”

Anni busied herself tucking the torch, tongue depressor, and wrapped-up rubbish away in her rucksack so she wouldn’t have to watch the exchange of smiles, their unabashed affection, the small touches bestowed so matter-of-factly. She couldn’t tell if it was simply jealousy that delivered that small and by now familiar stab to her chest; jealousy that the space in her little brother’s heart and life that up until recently she’d thought reserved for some nebulous future girl, pleasant and unthreatening, had been taken up by Martin Schelling, who filled it in his quiet but determined way as if it had always been meant for him.

And Otto was so unmistakably happy that way, as if this crooked-beautiful thing between them was, in a world that had gone mad, the only thing that still made sense.

Perhaps it wasn’t jealousy, Anni admitted while she brushed Karin’s hair and admired her newest finger paintings. Perhaps it was just envy, seeing how the two of them didn’t give a damn about the world’s judgement. Envy at how they were able to say with such equanimity, no matter the challenge or danger facing them, We’ll manage. Maybe if Artur had reacted like that, if he’d stood by her side when Karin… but for them, it was too late for ifs and maybes. It had been for a long time.

“All right, so how exactly do we manage?” she challenged Martin afterwards, when they took a quick detour to his old, thoroughly looted room to confer. “We need to get the tooth out cleanly, including the roots – we can’t afford bone splinters festering in the gums. And he’ll need at least a local anaesthesia, if not a general one.”

Martin simply nodded, ignoring her tone. “The boss has loads of medical tomes in his office. I’ll check if there’s anything about dentistry. And I’m sure we can use some of the surgical instruments from the ward. But as for the specialised tools…”

Anni made a distracted noise of agreement; against all odds, she’d thought of something potentially useful. “I’m going to drop by the Invalidenstraße clinic tomorrow after work. A guy I went to uni with switched to dentistry a few semesters in – I’ll see if I can borrow some instruments from him, and maybe get some tips. Don’t worry,” she added at Martin’s sceptical expression. “Firstly, I won’t tell him anything, and secondly, he’s been a secret communist for years. I haven’t had any contact with him in ages because of it.”

Martin gave her a shrewd look. “But now he’s good enough to use again, huh?”

Anni, who was not at all sure whether Gernot would help her, stared back, refusing to be shamed or rattled. “If it’s to help Otto, yes. Besides, I’m not going to tell him anything that could put him at risk.”

He made no response, but instead of the expected reproach, she found a certain grim mirror in his face, mutual recognition of the fact that there were worse scruples they’d both throw out the window, for Otto and Karin’s sake. There was no warmth in that recognition, but at least there was honesty. Not that she and Martin could even afford warmth, Anni reminded herself firmly. The last thing they needed was to have to worry about each other, too.

Fortunately, the dental clinic at Invalidenstraße was literally around the corner. Externally, it had taken worse damage from the frequent air raids than the Charité had. The roof was half collapsed and all of the window panes had shattered. The empty frames were patched up with planks and cardboard.

Gernot Breuer’s greeting was friendly but guarded. “Anni Marquardt. It really is you. Long time no see.”

She opened her mouth to correct him and, on a sudden impulse, didn’t. From the lips of an uninvested party, the name had an unburdened sound to it that filled her, despite the attendant bitterness, with something like longing. Anni Waldhausen was a barely functioning wreck that had been scooped empty of most of its customary freight and that, apart from defiant love for two people and a bilge full of reeking guilt, did not yet hold enough new things to fill that emptiness. For Anni Marquardt, there might be such a thing as hope.

She forced a smile onto her face. “Gernot. How are things?”

He shrugged and made an expansive gesture that encompassed the larger nightmare of Berlin as much as the bombed-out clinic with its nearly empty shelves. He looked like most of them did these days: too thin, none too clean, exhausted to the bone. “Like things everywhere, I assume. Like at the Charité. I don’t mean to be rude, Anni, but I have a lot to do and I don’t have time for reminiscing. What can I do for you?”

At least he did listen attentively when she described the case to him. “And you can’t bring the patient here?” When she mutely shook her head and avoided his gaze, he added, after a pause, “What about at night? No records, no questions?”

He was already sticking his neck out by offering that, without much of a reason to. Anni shot him a grateful look. Back at university, they’d often discussed politics, initially quite fiercely and with gusto. When even debates were no longer without risk, they’d gradually stopped, until eventually they’d lost touch altogether. She suddenly wondered how many former or potential friendships she’d lost in similar ways, without even noticing. How many people thought like Otto and Martin – people who were waiting for the madness to end, who did their best to protect their loved ones and themselves; people who maybe didn’t rise up in open rebellion but hunkered down and held their ground in silent, watchful resistance?

Briefly she considered his offer, but ended up shaking her head again. There were too many risks involved in smuggling Otto in, too many gaps and moments where discovery was possible. All it would take would be for the wrong person to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Can you tell me how I can do it myself?”

That night, she dreamed about Paul Lohmann. She was at a prenatal check-up, wearing a hospital gown; Karin was back in her belly, which tensed and bulged from her relentless kicks. Anni’s feet were propped in the undignified stirrups, and Lohmann was bent over her, wearing a doctor’s coat. With a sorrowful expression, he shook his head as he peered between her legs. “Self-inflicted,” he declared with a croaky voice. “It’ll have to go.”

Anni tried in vain to close her legs; her ankles were strapped to the leg rests. “No! Where’s Professor Stoeckel? You’re not a doctor!”

He gave her a friendly smile. A young soldier like so many, like Otto… although his face was corpse-pale, his lips bluish, the tiny vessels in the sclerae burst so the whites of his eyes showed red instead. His neck was swollen, the skin raw from the rope that still draped around it. “We’ll manage.”

He lifted his hands, which were holding an absurdly huge pair of dental forceps. Anni gasped with terror. She tried to fling herself out of the chair, but her arms were strapped down as well. She did manage to jostle Lohmann, though. He stumbled and nearly lost his balance. Something thick and viscous splattered across her bare legs, repulsively warm.

“Oh dear.” Lohmann looked down to where dark blood gushed from the broken scab on his stump, and shook his head at Anni reproachfully. “Look what a mess you’ve made. What a lot of fuss over such a minor procedure. The hydrocephalus is a self-inflicted injury, do you understand? So please…”

He executed an almost comical little hop, which was followed by another gush of blood. Again, he leaned over her, carefully opening the forceps, its pincers sharp and gleaming. “It’s got to go,” he announced cheerfully.

Anni strained against her bonds, writhing and fighting for all she was worth. Her belly seemed to be fighting too, distorted into nightmarish dimensions, jerking and tearing at her insides as if the unborn child were trying to escape on its own. At the windows, other children were pressing their hands and noses against the glass. They were the children from the bus, and they were watching: blind children; happy, cross-eyed children; children twitching in the grip of seizures.

“It’ll be over in a second,” the dead soldier told her soothingly. Anni felt the cold kiss of the forceps against her thighs and screamed.

She woke up gasping and soaked in sweat, her heart pounding away. It wasn’t the first time she’d dreamed about Lohmann, or the children, but it had never been like this. She thought she could still feel the sluggish trickle of half-congealed blood on her legs and wiped frantically at her thighs, shuddering with revulsion.

The consulting room was dark and quiet except for Artur’s even breaths. The need to jump up and run for the attic to check on Karin was almost overpowering. Anni forced herself to be sensible, and her hectic breath to slow down.

All her life she had thought her moral compass was reasonably steady. Self-loathing was new to her: a feeling without purpose and without a way out. She had been raised to believe in the power of making amends. If you did something wrong, you strove to fix it honestly as best you could instead of wallowing in showy self-flagellation. Had she been able to challenge that younger, oh so morally confident Anni, it would have changed nothing. She knew it would never have entered her mind that she might one day commit a wrong so devastating that no reparation was possible.

But that was exactly what she had done.

The children on the bus – true, she could not have saved them. It simply hadn’t been in her power. If she had raised more of a fuss, it would only have sealed Karin’s fate, possibly her own. Still, they weighed on her soul, they and the faceless thousands in whose deaths she’d simply refused to believe for too long.

It was different with Paul Lohmann. His fate was not a matter of simple allocation: this much responsibility for Max De Crinis, this much for her. Nor did she want part of the whole deducted. Lohmann was dead. It was her fault. And there would never be amends.

She couldn’t even apologise to his family, because that, too, would be a selfish act. She couldn’t burden his grieving loved ones with useless knowledge that would make everything even worse for them, acutely heightening the pointlessness and careless cruelty of his death just so she, Anni, could lighten her soul. No. She could only carry his pale face and the quiet accusation in it with her. The tired phrase she once used to rattle off automatically in church had become incontrovertible reality. Confiteor quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, opere et omissione: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

I confess that I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.

Pulling teeth is no great feat, Gernot had assured her. Apart from anaesthesia, not that much has changed since the barber or smith used to do it.

He was probably right and there was nothing to it, until you had to entrust the task to a half-baked psychiatry student cum paediatrician and an orderly, who had to perform the procedure in the attic of a bomb-damaged hospital using supplies stolen at random, with not a thimbleful of dentistry experience between the two of them, and with a cranky toddler on the floor. Oh yes, and nothing must go wrong and they could not fetch anyone to help, otherwise their patient and his sore tooth might end up on the gallows.

No great feat.

“Damn it, I keep slipping,” Anni ground out. “Can I get more light from up top?”

Martin adjusted the angle of the torch and grabbed a cloth to wipe the sweat off Anni’s forehead without asking. Underneath her mask, her entire face felt damp. He was masked as well; she wondered how he managed to keep his glasses from fogging up.

“You’ve got it. The angle looks all right,” Martin commented with a sidelong glance at the open page of the Handbook of Dentistry. “Is it moving at all?”

“Yes, a little.” Anni could feel new sweat beading on her forehead almost immediately. She’d had a vague idea that you placed the forceps and simply yanked, but apparently the tooth needed to be manually loosened first, a process that involved a barbaric amount of levering and pushing with a special prying tool in order to widen the socket enough to release the tooth.

She fervently hoped that the local anaesthetic would last long enough. Martin had administered the Procaine injection calmly and competently and so far it seemed to be working fine. There were some pilfered Eukodal tablets for afterwards, along with a bottle of cognac. It would have to do. Otto, his head laid back, was sitting in the old rocking chair they’d tilted back as far as it would go and propped into place with wooden wedges. He wasn’t moving, and so far his only response to Martin asking at intervals about the anaesthetic had been a mute thumbs-up. At the moment, though, his hands were clenched around the edges of the chair and he was staring grimly up at the cobweb-shrouded roofbeams.

Anni focused on the tooth, that dratted thing at the bottom left. Naturally, it had to be the last molar, a thumb-sized beast with brownish discolouration that made it stand out from Otto’s other teeth. It also seemed to have the roots of an ancient oak.

“Pass me the elevator, I’ll try to lever it again,” she announced, holding out her hand. Martin handed her the tool and she repeated the motion Gernot had shown her: pressure from the wrist with the elevator, a slight twist with the forceps, counterpressure from the other direction, followed by the slightly nauseating give of the gums when metal instruments and reluctant tooth pressed against them. The forceps with their angled beaks seemed incredibly primitive compared to most surgical instruments: a crude brute of a tool you could use to pull teeth or nails or bash someone’s head in a pinch.

“It should come out now.” She gripped the handles more tightly, ignoring the ache in her wrist from all the yanking and levering, adjusted the forceps and pulled. She could feel the tooth moving laterally, but the roots still clung on stubbornly. “Come on, you bloody stupid thing, move,” Anni panted.

A questioning little voice drifted over from the other side of the attic. “Awah?”

“Keep at it, Mouse,” Martin softly called out to Karin over his shoulder. “You want to build the whole castle for Mama, right?”

Anni couldn’t afford to look away, but judging from Karin’s contented gurgling, she’d turned her attention back to her building blocks, thank God.

“Getting there,” Martin said to her calmly across Otto’s head, although by now they had to be drawing dangerously close to the end of the anaesthesia. He carefully dabbed some of Otto’s saliva from under her hand. Anni let her vision narrow to the brightly lit tooth in the tortured gums. Once again she adjusted her angle slightly so the beaks of the forceps grasped the tooth as close to the root as possible. Then she gripped tight and yanked up and backwards with all her strength.

There was a dull cracking noise, followed by a muffled cry of pain from Otto, and she stumbled back a couple of steps. Blinking, she stared at the forceps in her hand, clutched around a brownish white something with a long yellow root.

A root. Just one. And as for the tooth…

“It broke.” She could see the break line, almost neatly through the middle. “Goddamn it. Goddamn it.”

Martin’s gaze met hers only briefly, his expression unreadable behind the mask, before he busied himself with swabs inside Otto’s mouth. The white cotton balls quickly turned soaking red. “I can see the other part. It’s sticking out – Anni, quick. Try again. You can do it.”

She stepped beside him and forced herself to pause long enough to carefully place the partial tooth on a piece of gauze so they could check it for fragments after.

“Can you see?”

“Not well.” Everything looked blood-soaked and ravaged. Martin pressed a swab against the half-empty socket, and when it soaked up the blood, she glimpsed the second part, a yellow spike sticking out of the red.

“Hold on, Otto. Just one more time, Anni. You can do this,” Martin said again, evenly, as if there was no cause for hurry or concern. His fingertips brushed Otto’s hair, a casual, grounding touch. She let some of his composure sink into her, absorbing it gratefully, and suddenly her hands were calm. She applied the forceps and grasped the sharp spike of the tooth, the tips of the forceps nearly inside the hole. Taking a deep breath, she ignored Otto’s suppressed moan and pulled, a sharp, quick yank.

She didn’t lose her balance this time. There was only a jerk and a sudden yielding, and then she stood holding the second root grasped in the bloody forceps.

“We… we have to make sure we’ve got all the parts,” she said. Her voice sounded strange, as if it was coming from far away, through a buzzing in her ears. She deposited the extracted piece next to the first one, turning and prodding at both on the strip of gauze, comparing them. Eventually she drew a shaky, relieved breath. “It looks like a clean break. Only two pieces.”

Martin was bent over Otto with new swabs. “Let’s check the socket to make sure.” He was holding a magnifying glass over the dark red hole, dabbing off the rising blood every few seconds. “Can you hold the light for me?”

Anni reached for the torch. They both stared at the wound, straining to see anything that shouldn’t be there while Martin carefully used a cotton tip to prod for fragments. “I can’t find anything. You?”

“No.”

“Good.” He straightened up, pulled off his mask, and grabbed the bottle of cognac to fill a glass. Cupping the back of Otto’s head for support, he held the glass to his lips. “You made it, Süßer. Your sister is an interdisciplinary genius. Here, rinse out your mouth.”

Anni sank onto a crate, pulled down her own mask, and focused on breathing. The pet name that usually would have sent her brows towards her hairline drifted harmlessly past her.

Otto sat up slowly, his movements stiff. Martin, one arm wrapped around his shoulders, helped him rinse before he applied a sterile swab to the hole to stop the bleeding. Otto looked a bit like Anni felt herself: shaky, pale, and clammy with sweat.

“There wasn’t much left of the anaesthetic, was there,” said Martin, not really a question. Otto managed a wobbly grin and tipped his hand from side to side, so-so, which Anni figured had about a fifty percent chance of being true.

“I couldn’t do it any faster. Sorry, Otto,” she said guiltily. The corner of his mouth on the uninjured side pulled up a little and he gave her a little reassuring wink. Her return smile felt as crooked as his.

Over Otto’s shoulder, Martin met her eyes and gave her a slight nod. “Good work.” He reached for the bottle of cognac and took a generous swig before handing it to her. Anni hesitated briefly, but accepted it.

“You too.” She wasn’t used to cognac; it burned its way down her throat and almost made her cough. After a moment, though, a pleasant warmth started to spread through her and she could feel tension starting to seep out of her limbs. She let her hunched shoulders drop and allowed herself to relax.

It was only late afternoon; the sun still shone through the curtains and the newspaper pinned across the panorama window. It was unusually warm for March, and the noises of the city – the almost familiar war bustle, these days overlaid by the nerve-wrecking wait for the end – were subdued far below, seemingly miles away from the exhausted, oddly companionable quiet of the attic. They sat, drinking cognac, and Otto inspected his extracted tooth with exaggerated noises of disgust. Karin came toddling over to join them, insisted on being shown the tooth as well, and almost caused another dental emergency when she promptly tried to stick it in her mouth.

They didn’t linger long. It was too dangerous, as always, and it was clear Otto had no energy left besides. They gave him painkillers and Martin manoeuvred him over to his bed in spite of his mumbled protests while Anni shoved the instruments and used supplies into her rucksack.

“Are you staying tonight?” she asked Martin while she crouched beside Karin’s play area to admire her building block castle. “I can’t risk Artur coming to snoop again if I stay out all night.”

Martin just nodded as if the question were redundant. Otto was sleepily trying to pull him onto the pallet, his head slumping against Martin’s shoulder, eyes already half closed. Martin murmured something to him as he gently pulled free of his arms. He shot Anni an embarrassed look.

She cleared her throat and gave Karin a kiss. “All right. I’ll bring water early tomorrow morning if I can.” After a brief hesitation, she leaned over Otto to kiss his forehead. His eyelids fluttered and he blinked at her tiredly. “Get some rest,” she told him, “and don’t you dare get complications, do you hear?”

He mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “Yes, General.” Anni stuck her tongue out at him.

Martin walked her out to pull up the ladder, and Anni used the moment to discuss aftercare. “He’s not supposed to eat anything solid at first… nothing that could get stuck in the socket. Broth, apple sauce, scrambled eggs and things like that, Gernot said.”

Martin looked at her as if she’d lapsed into Russian. Anni returned his incredulous stare as expressionlessly as she could until she felt her control slipping and her mouth starting to twitch. “Yes, I know. Don’t shoot the messenger, though.”

“Broth,” Martin said in his driest tone. “Is this Gernot living in some secret land of plenty we don’t know about? Apple sauce.”

“And scrambled eggs,” Anni cackled. All of a sudden they were both laughing, trying to keep it low because they were already at the ladder, but unable to help themselves. You had to laugh, or you’d cry.

Martin shook his head, still snorting with laughter. “These days, lobster would be easier to get than apple sauce. Fine. I’ll see if I can find something to trade tomorrow morning.”

“Try this,” Anni said, pulling something out of her splattered doctor’s coat and handing it to him. Surprised, he let the golden chain unravel so the heavy pocket watch dangled between them. An errant beam of sunlight caught the dark gold and made it glow like a magical amulet from a fairy tale.

Martin whistled appreciatively through his teeth. “Not bad. Where did you get it?”

“Where do you think?”

He raised his eyebrows, then scooped up the watch to inspect it more closely. “It’s engraved. For Artur, with love, Anni.”

“I’m sure it can be ground off,” Anni interjected uncomfortably.

Unexpectedly, Martin’s lips twitched. “Sure,” he agreed blandly, pocketed the watch and held the ladder’s ends for her with exaggerated politeness. When she was most of the way down, he suddenly leaned out and added, “You know, Anni, if you’re not careful, I might start to like you.”

“Oh, bugger off,” she shot back, although it didn’t come out at biting as she’d wanted, and jumped the last two rungs to the floor. As the ladder floated up and out of sight, she heard his quiet laugh again.

Later, the endless weeks of that April would run together in Anni’s memory like the bodily fluids of the children on her ward, a sickening effluvium of blood, pus and lymph, mixing with nightmares and the bombs raining down into a never-ending blend of horror. She worked twelve-, fourteen-, sixteen-hour shifts, often side by side with Artur, in a strangely familiar rhythm that felt almost soothing on the one hand and entirely surreal on the other. After all, they worked together so well because they knew each other: She was always able to anticipate what he needed, and he knew precisely which tasks he could delegate to her. Still, these days he seemed so strange to her that sometimes, in the midst of the grim, hectic bustle of the children’s ward, she’d startle up out of some automatically performed task and feel disoriented looking at the man beside her. A man who competently sutured wounds, removed bone fragments, treated burns. A slim man, good-looking, with a ready smile for his young patients, and practised, gentle hands. A man who didn’t want to ask inconvenient questions, would suffer no inconvenient qualms. A man like many others, and Anni had felt so in tune with him for so long. Was he truly more unscrupulous than she was, or simply more cowardly?

But even the mildest impulse to want to understand him or find excuses for him died when he pressured her to tell him Karin’s hiding place. In his face, with its half-aggrieved, half-hurt expression, showing so clearly that he still considered himself the injured party, even now, she saw nothing that could have repaired her trust in him.

For months, she’d climbed the ladder to the attic as a rescuer and co-conspirator, bearing supplies, water, news. In these final weeks, with the Battle of Berlin already raging outside, she came seeking shelter. She fled to Otto, who was making a steady recovery from the tooth extraction, laughing as he and Karin shared the last of four jars of apple sauce that Martin had somehow got his hands on against all odds. She fled to the small, isolated world beneath the roof that was anything but safe, yet somehow still a comfort.

Above all else, she fled to Karin, who tottered through this little world on gradually steadier little legs. Karin, who despite the uncertainty and many dangers of the past months was growing into a determined little person of her own; Karin who’d survived air raids without a bomb shelter, protected only by her uncle’s arms and lullabies. Karin, who knew herself loved, despite everything; who determinedly climbed into Martin’s lap and followed Otto everywhere like a young puppy; whose face lit up like the sun every time she saw Anni come in the door. Anni ran to her and scooped her up, swinging her high into the air until she squealed with joy, and then hugged her close. Feeling the warm little face against her neck, she knew there was at least one thing she’d got right, and may the devil take the rest.

Strange how events unspooling from a single decision could make an entire worldview unravel, moral compass and all, dissolving it into redundant ballast. Now, after months of airless terror and waiting, stealing, and lying, all from behind the façade of a compliant paediatrician’s assistant, she had no trouble tossing that ballast out without qualms, without shame, without the slightest bit of guilt; not over that. The decision had been right, which meant anything resulting from it had to be right as well, no matter if a whole former identity had to be chucked out too. Quod erat demonstrandum, as De Crinis had so liked to hear her conclude. The ballast weighed nothing, was disposable, entirely worthless, when weighed against Karin and Otto’s lives; Martin’s too. It was time to concede that he belonged with them.

And then it was over. After the scared wait in the bunker, after a last attempt at reconnection with Artur, when he had confirmed for good who he was; after the tense hours of fear for Otto’s life, Anni stepped outside into a Berlin that was no longer theirs, and only thought, Thank God.

Thank God that Otto lived, that the war was over. Thank God as well that she no longer needed to worry over or concern herself with Artur. The nagging little doubt whether there might still be a spark of hope for them, whether Karin might get to grow up with a loving father after all, was gone, choked on the ashes like the rest of Berlin. She could feel a remnant of sorrow deep within her that would, perhaps, remain. But above all else, she felt a strange kind of relief. She didn’t know whether she deserved a fresh start after everything she’d burdened her conscience with; but deserved or not, she planned to use it.

Beside her, Karin tromped through the rubble, looking around with wide eyes that showed more curiosity than fear. “Whadda!” she gurgled, her little finger pointing up. Anni followed the direction of her gaze and smiled. “That’s the sky, my love.”

After several months in the attic, immediately followed by several weeks of enforced bedrest in the bunker to recover from his bullet wound, Otto would not be contained. He couldn’t get enough of the open air and open sky, even though for now both were significantly impaired by dust and the smell of smoke, and even though his perimeter of exploration was initially limited, under Anni and Martin’s watchful eyes, to the piles of rubble immediately surrounding the Charité.

On one such outing between clean-up duties and ward shifts, Anni had spontaneously declared a picnic, although the rations they’d pooled for it were anything but impressive. And then she finally dared to broach the subject she’d avoided for so long.

She hadn’t planned to. She and Otto were sitting on a stack of gently singed wooden beams that had been categorised as potentially reusable. They drank watered-down beer and ate sandwiches with a near-imaginary scrape of margarine as they watched Karin navigate the world. She was clutching Martin’s hand while climbing a small set of stairs leading to a side entrance a few meters away. Stairs were a recent discovery for the little girl, who evidently considered them the most brilliant phenomenon in her rapidly expanding world. She squealed with joy at every conquered step.

Martin patiently indulged the expedition, even when Karin insisted on starting over for the fifth time. He just smiled and swung her from the top of the stairs back down to the burst cobblestones. Grasping her little hand again, he said, “Off we go, then.”

Anni watched him thoughtfully. She realised, without any particular surprise, that the feeling of semi-hostility she’d made such a longstanding habit had quietly dispersed. Whether it was due to the necessity of mutual trust during those final attic weeks or the events on the day of the invasion, she saw him differently now. Perhaps something had changed when they’d both waited by Otto’s bedside and the depth of Martin’s feelings had been painfully obvious on his tear-streaked face. Whatever else Martin Schelling might be, he was true and steadfast, a rare find.

She cast a sidelong look at Otto, who watched the conquering of the stairs with a fond grin, and felt a brief stab of the familiar fear go through her. Fear for Otto, who was often too thoughtless and open with his feelings, whose face gave away so much. Fear that he might smile like that at the wrong moment, when there was no adorable toddler presenting an acceptable target for the obvious affection in his eyes.

She shoved the fear away with an effort. There was no point. She had to trust that he was grown up, that it had gone all right so far; that you could at least depend on Martin’s instinct for caution. At least when Otto wasn’t dying from a shot in the stomach.

She cleared her throat. “So… was it always like that for you?” At his surprised glance, she nodded towards Martin. “You know. With boys.”

He was uncommonly quiet for a bit. Anni was fixedly staring at her clasped fingers, already half regretting the question, when he hesitantly said, “Yes, I think so.” He paused again before he added, “I only really noticed when I was about fourteen. All that mandatory Hitler Youth attendance and their crap about healthy young bodies exercising and the natural bonds of brotherhood, and all I really took in was that I clearly wanted more than brotherhood from Werner Koch.” His grin was only slightly embarrassed.

“The mayor’s son? Good lord, you didn’t…”

Otto sighed and rolled his eyes at her. “No, Anni, I’m not as stupid as you think, if you can believe it. I kept my head down.”

“I only meant…”

“I know.” He nudged her shoulder with his own. “I do know how to be careful.”

She cast her mind back ten years, to a time when she admittedly hadn’t wanted much to do with her little brother. Still, she couldn’t recall anything unusual. She tried to imagine it, the burden of a secret like that on shoulders that young, impossible to share but always present. She failed thoroughly.

She swallowed around a sudden tightness in her throat. “So you were always alone with it?” The idea stung painfully – Otto, sunshine of the household, perhaps always beaming so brightly because it was meant to distract from a fundamental part of himself, ten years and counting.

“I was used to it.”

“That doesn’t make it better,” she protested. He shrugged.

“I did mean to tell you earlier. At least I thought about it, once we were more grown up and got along better. But then you started going out with Artur, and he was… well, I didn’t think it was safe.” He shot her an apologetic glance, although he was right. His instincts about Artur had always been right.

Anni lowered her head. “I did it all wrong, Otto. So much of it. I’m sorry.”

He didn’t argue, but his smile was without reproach and warm as ever. “Well, you’re doing it right, now. With Karin. With us.”

That “us” triggered an unexpected spark of joy – joy at being included, in a way, despite everything.

Despite everything… memory followed joy, bringing with it guilt, heavy and implacable and, by now, familiar. “Too late for Paul Lohmann.”

A shadow darkened Otto’s face. “For him, yes.”

They were both quiet for a while. Anni was grateful that he made no attempt at an absolution that would and should never come. The cold burden of this guilt was hers; it could not be extinguished or reduced.

They went back to watching Martin and Karin, which made her remember something.

“What do I call him, anyway?”

With a girl, she’d have simply said “his sweetheart” or “his girlfriend”; these days, probably “fiancée” pretty quickly. There didn’t seem to be an equivalent for the former, and “boyfriend” sounded both too normal and too odd. His lover? That evoked pulp fiction from the wrong genre.

Otto burst out laughing when she explained it like that, and eventually patted her on the shoulder. “Why, he’s my swain, of course,” he mocked in his broadest Bavarian, before he took pity on her and stopped cackling. “Boyfriend will do just fine,” he said and wrapped an arm around her shoulders to give her a quick squeeze. “It’s not like you’ll frequently need to call it anything, what with our considerate laws.” He looked over at Martin who was leaning over Karin to chuck her under the chin. “Actually though, he’s just my Martin.”

Anni saw how his face changed, a hint of tenderness around his mouth and warmth in his eyes, and felt something gently shift inside her, a small shift only, but part of a movement that had been happening for a while: slow and a little painful, not entirely voluntary. Good, though; all in all, good.

“I’ll stick with boyfriend, if you don’t mind,” she said, just to try out the word. My brother and his boyfriend.

She nodded, to herself more than Otto. “That works.”