The maid left, and she moved back into her bedroom. She let him have his way with her again. Without complaint. She couldn’t help it.

Maids came and went. Few of them stayed long. As time passed her husband calmed down, or so she thought. She was resigned to her fate.

Her daughter grew up. Barbara adored her father, and he showed her great love and tenderness. She was twelve when her father first raped her. It took the mother some time to see the change in her daughter.

She didn’t want to notice the abuse of her own child. Didn’t want to acknowledge it. Was too weak to leave her husband, and where could she have gone? His conduct had one advantage: it meant that he lost interest in her entirely.

The more his daughter grew to womanhood, the less he wanted to sleep with his wife. She was perfectly happy with that state of affairs.

So she kept quiet. Her husband could do as he pleased, he never met with any resistance.

Except once, when the little Polish girl was here on the farm, assigned to them as a foreign worker. The girl got away from him. The way she did it was barred to his wife.

She had lived a hard life. A life full of deprivation and indignity, but she couldn’t give it up. She must tread the path to the end, she would empty the bitter goblet to the dregs. She knew that. It was the trial that the Lord had laid upon her.

Funny, that Polish girl has come back into her mind several times today, flitting through her memory like a shadow. She hadn’t thought of the foreign worker for years. The old woman puts her prayer book down.

She looks through the window into the dark, stormy night.

Her husband has spent all day searching for whatever ne’er-do-well tried to break into the farm yesterday. She heard footsteps last night. As if someone were haunting the place.

Her husband found nothing, and he had been calm enough all day.

“The fellow will have run off again,” he told them. “There’s nothing missing, I searched everywhere. I’ll shut the dog up in the barn tonight; no one gets past the dog. And I’ll have my gun beside my bed.”

That had reassured them all. She felt safe, just as she had felt safe on this farm all her life.

Barbara said she was going out to the cowshed again, “to see that the cattle are all right.”

Where can Barbara be? She ought to have been back long ago. She’ll go and look for her.

Moving laboriously, she gets up from the table. She takes her prayer book and puts it on the kitchen dresser. And goes out, over to the cowshed.

Old Danner tosses and turns restlessly in bed. He can’t get to sleep tonight.

He tries to, but the wind, constantly whistling through the cracks in the window frame, gives him no peace.

He’s turned the whole house upside down today. He can’t get those footprints out of his mind. Footprints leading to the house. He could see them clearly in the newly fallen snow this morning, before the rain washed them away.

He looked in every nook and cranny of the house. Didn’t find anything. He’s sure no one can hide from him on his own property. This is his domain.

He’s repaired the lock on the machinery shed. The fellow must have gone around the house and made off in the direction of the woods. He can only have gone that way. Otherwise he, Danner, would have found more tracks.

In the evening he searched the whole property again. In the process he noticed that the lightbulb in the cowshed had gone out. He’ll have to get a new one. Until then they’ll just have to make do as best they can with the old oil lamps.

The new maid looks as if she’d be a good, hard worker. That’s what he needs. He can’t be doing with anyone who’s work-shy. The farm is too much for him and Barbara on their own. During the summer, anyway.

In winter they get by somehow.

It’s harder and harder to find laborers and maids to work on the land these days. Most of them try their luck in town. Lured there by better pay and lighter work.

Town life, that’s not for him. He has to feel free. Be his own master. No one tells him what to do. He decides on everything here. On this farm he is Lord God Almighty, never mind how much his wife prays. The older she grows the more pious she gets.

What’s keeping the old woman in the kitchen so long? Sits praying under that crucifix half the night, wasting expensive electric light.

He’ll have to get up and go and see.

In his socks, clad only in his nightshirt and a pair of long johns, he slips his wooden clogs on. Shuffles down the stone flags of the corridor to the kitchen.

The door of the room next to it is open.

What the hell’s the idea? What are those women doing in the cowshed at this time of night? You had to see to everything yourself around here.

Very annoyed, he goes into the room next to the kitchen and then on, over to the cowshed.

From his vantage point, Mick has been watching the comings and goings on the farm all day long

He sees old Danner finding traces of the break-in. It’s dead easy to keep out of the old man’s way.

Old Danner searches the whole place. He even climbs up to Mick’s hideout in the loft.

Mick holds his breath. Stands there with one hand gripping the knife in his pocket. Hiding by the chimney, behind the farmer’s back. He could touch his shoulder. Danner is perched on the steps up to the loft not an arm’s length away from him. Trying to light up the dark loft with his lamp, which is very faint.

He doesn’t notice the straw scattered over the suspended ceiling of the barn, or the rope hanging ready.

Mick waits all day. He can take his time. He knows just where the Tannöd farmer hides his money. He’s planned everything out down to the smallest detail.

If it all goes as he’s calculated, he can leave the house unseen. And if not?

Mick shrugs off this idea. He doesn’t shrink from using violence. Violence is part of his job. He’ll play it by ear.

As evening comes on, two more strangers appear in the farmyard. Two women going toward the house in the rain. They knock. Both of them are let in. After about an hour the women come out of the house again. They say good-bye to each other, and one of them goes back indoors.

Hansl Hauer, age 13, Georg Hauer’s son

It was the Tuesday when my auntie told me to go over to the Danner farm.

“No one’s seen or heard anything of them over there,” she told me. “Maybe something’s happened and they need help.”

So I went over.

I guess it was about three. But I’m not sure.

There wasn’t any of them in the farmyard, so I knocked at the front door. I knocked good and loud, I shook the door, but it was locked and nobody opened it.

So then I went around the house. Peered in all the windows. Couldn’t see a thing, though. The place looked quite empty. Like there wasn’t anybody there.

I heard the dog. Whining terribly, it was. And I heard the cattle in the cowshed. The cows were lowing like anything. But I couldn’t get into the cowshed, it was locked from inside.

You can get into the cowshed from the old machinery shed, though, I know that. First you go through the barn, then there’s a wooden door into the cowshed on the left.

And the door of the machinery shed was standing open. Wide open, but I didn’t fancy going in there.

I just stood at the door and called. I called for Barbara and Marianne. But there wasn’t any answer and I didn’t want to go in. I was too scared because the cattle were bellowing like that, and everything was all different from usual. Like as if the place was deserted.

I got goose bumps, I really did, it seemed so scary.

Something’s wrong, that’s what I kept on thinking. I felt like there was a bell ringing in my head. Same as an alarm bell when the fire engine’s coming out. So I ran home quick, I told my auntie and my dad.