After we ate, you folded your jacket into a pillow and lay back, eyes closed, arms folded across your chest. I watched as you drifted into sleep. The gentle rise and fall of your chest. Your eyes tight shut, sunlight playing over your skin. I could have sat and watched you all day, but suddenly you woke; your body tight, eyes wide open, tense, and, reluctantly, we both knew it was time to go home.

*

‘Miss Herta?’ A knock at the door. Ingrid.

I snap my journal shut and hide it beneath a cushion beside me on the window seat.

‘Come in,’ I say, arranging myself as though all I’m doing is staring out of my window, contemplating the view.

She opens the door and stands there, giving me one of her looks. The insolent one. The one she wouldn’t dare give to Vati or Mutti or even Karl. I wonder if she somehow senses I’m hiding something. She has a viper look about her – thin face, beady eyes and a tongue she flicks out to lick her lips, a sort of nervous twitch.

‘Yes, what is it, Ingrid?’

‘Didn’t you notice it’s dinner time? Your mother sent me to check you’re quite all right.’

‘I didn’t hear the gong,’ I tell her without moving from my seat. ‘Please tell Mutti I’ll be right down. I have to wash,’ I add, waving her away.

‘As you wish,’ she bristles, and leaves the room.

I tuck the journal under the mattress and push it as far in as I can. With my deepest secrets in there, I can’t risk it being found.

*

After dinner, Karl goes into town for a dance organised by his HJ Schar. We move to the sitting room where Mutti drinks strong black coffee and Vati cradles his cognac.

I sit at the far end of the sofa, away from Vati’s armchair. Smoke curls upwards in the lamplight as Vati puffs his cigar, spreading a thin cloud across the whole room. The sickly sweet, choking scent of it stings my nostrils and the back of my throat, making me cough.

‘I’m starting a new venture in the Leipziger,’ Vati announces, stretching out his legs and allowing his belly to expand as he leans backwards in the chair. ‘I’m calling it The Moral Crusade!’ he says, sweeping a grand arc with his arm. ‘While Hitler looks outwards to expand our nation abroad, we cannot let the enemy take advantage and continue to corrupt our way of life at its very core.’

‘It’s about time something was done about this low life,’ Mutti mutters.

‘I don’t see any low life around in Leipzig,’ I say swiftly. I think of those brutes on the tram, but I don’t mention them. Vati might stop me travelling around on my own.

‘The underground music and art – the prostitution and the immoral literature. It’s not limited to Berlin,’ Mutti comments.

‘But here in Leipzig?’ I ask.

‘Yes, there is a blatant disregard for the law,’ Vati says. ‘The local police know what goes on, yet they do nothing about it. They report to party officials or the municipal government. Letters get sent back and forth, people can’t agree, and so nothing gets done.’