She shuddered, then snuggled down closer into her bed. But immediately she started up again and struck a light. Had she not been awakened by a cry from Gustäving? Jumping out into the icy cold, she went across to him. He was sleeping quietly, lying on his side, one bony shoulder – blue with the cold – peeping out of his shirt. Gently she covered him up. The child’s nose was too sharp; his little arms were as thin as sticks, looking as if there was hardly an ounce of flesh on them. She sighed. With a feeling of impotent resignation she once again tucked the blanket round the little body and returned to the warmth of her own bed. Trying to go to sleep again, for it was only two o’clock in the morning, she lay listening to the howl of the wind as it shook the windows – she might be living not on the fifth floor of a tenement in the great stone city of Berlin but far out on the plains where houses are exposed to the full fury of the storm. Vividly she remembered how the blustering wind would shake her parents’ house on Hiddensee, and how as children they would be in bed listening to the sound of the waves breaking on the shore, and how they could never forget that their father was out in his boat catching the herring off Arkona or flounders in the shallow waters.
