He caught himself wishing her suffering would come to an end at long last. He was tired of the sight of her and her martyrdom. He could no longer bear the smell of sickness and death, a sweetish smell surrounding her like a cloak. He couldn’t bear to look at her, so thin and emaciated.

He was out of the house as often as possible. Even on the day of her death he had been out all day. Had stayed out, walking around the place, even when his work was done. He’d wandered through the woods, spent a long time sitting on a rock. He would do anything rather than go back to his house. He didn’t want to feel aware of the narrow confines of life and mortality.

When Anna told him the news, he was relieved. He didn’t mourn, he was glad. A millstone had been lifted from his neck. He could begin to live again. He felt free. Free as a bird.

No one would have understood.

Before the first month of mourning was over, when his relationship with Barbara began, he showed no shame or sense of guilt. After all, he was free. For the first and perhaps the only time in his life he felt free.

At first her interest in him surprised him. He doubted whether her feelings for him were genuine. But the readiness with which she gave herself to him laid the doubts in his mind to rest. Indeed, it made him long for her and her body even more.

Her body, free of the breath of death and infirmity. A body still enfolded in the smell of life, a body full of lust for life. Greedily, without inhibition, he gave way to that urge, to that passion.

Let the rest of the world consider his conduct improper and immoral—in Barbara he had found what had been denied him all his life before, not only in the last years of his marriage.

That marriage had always been more a marriage of convenience than the union of two kindred spirits. An arranged marriage, something usual among farming people. “Love comes with the years. What matters is to keep the farm going.”

After a brief moment of fear when the desire he felt near Barbara frightened him, he indulged his sensuality without inhibitions.

When Barbara finally confessed her pregnancy to him he was happy. Only slowly did doubt grow in him.

Her attitude toward him changed. She refused herself to him more and more often. Her passion for him gave way to increasingly open contempt. If he went to the farm to speak to her, she refused to see him.

But he couldn’t retrace his steps now, he’d changed. Had given himself up to an addiction he had never known before, to a frenzy.

He knew the talk in the village. All the same, he had told everyone that the boy was his child, whether they wanted to hear it or not. His Josef. He had himself entered in the register of births as the father. And he was the child’s father; he clung to that thought like a drowning man clinging to a rope thrown to him.

Josef was his son, and his little boy was dead. Murdered. He couldn’t forget the sight of the child. He saw the dead boy in front of him all the time, whether his eyes were open or closed. The image wouldn’t leave him night or day.

Anna Meier, shopkeeper, age 53

Oh, the misery out there, it’s just terrible.

We’ve all been afraid here in the village since it happened. Everyone’s afraid. Who could do a thing like that?

Who could simply go there and kill all those people in their own house? And the little children, too, that’s the worst of it. A man who could do that can only be out of his mind. Downright out of his wits. No one in his right mind could do such a thing. No, no one in his right mind.

The whole graveyard was full of people for the funeral. I never saw so many at a funeral before. They came from everywhere. There was a good many faces I didn’t know at all, and I know everyone from around here because of my shop. I mean, they all come to buy from me. But there were people in the graveyard at the funeral that I never set eyes on, not in all my born days.

They weren’t from around here. They’d come like it was some kind of a show or a funfair. And they stared and gaped. Because it had all been in the paper, all that about the “Murder Farm.”

“The Murder Farm,” that’s what it said in the paper. The man from the paper even came into my shop, wanting to ask me questions. He went around the whole village. And then he wrote that terrible story about the “Murder Farm.” People even came from out of town to join us in the graveyard. Terrible, it was. Plain terrible.

When did I last see Barbara Spangler? Wait a minute, it was just a week before her death I saw her. On the Friday. She came into the shop and bought a few things. I took the opportunity of asking whether they had a new maid yet, because I knew just the girl for them, a good hardworking young woman.

“Tell her she can start with us come St. Joseph’s Day,” Barbara told me.

So I told Traudl Krieger.

I blame myself bitterly, but how was I to know everyone at the farm would be murdered in the night?

These days it’s not easy to find a reliable maid. It’s not the way it was before the war.

All these young girls want to go to the big city and work in the factories now. They don’t want a place here in the village with a farmer. Well, they earn much more in the factories than on the land. And they don’t get dirty either. It’s not like the old days.

So Barbara bought her things and then she went out of the shop, and it was all the same as usual.

A burglary at the farm? Oh no, I really don’t know anything about that. Once in autumn, yes, Barbara told me then someone had tried breaking into their farm. But that was some time ago. Nothing was stolen, folk said then.

But that’s why Anna left. Anna was the maid they used to have at the farm. They managed without a maid through the winter. There’s not so much to be done on a farm in winter. Now and then a casual laborer helped out about their place, Barbara told me that as well.

No, I never asked who he was. There were strangers at their farm quite often. Mostly they moved on again after a while.

You can be sure they weren’t the kind who are registered with the authorities.

I liked Barbara myself, I don’t know anything about the stories they tell. It’s none of my business. I’d have my hands full if I made what folk tell me all day my business, wouldn’t I?

I could write books, whole books. But it’s nothing to do with me.

That story about Barbara and her father, there was a lot of talk about them, but nobody knows anything for certain.

I mean, nobody was there, right?

How did she get the little boy? Oh, you can imagine how tongues wagged here in the village. It made a great stir.

When it was known that Farmer Hauer was the father, there was a great to-do. Slut and tart, those were some of the nicer names they called Barbara.

I listen to the tittle-tattle and then I forget it again. In one ear, out the other.

I can remember that Vinzenz, Barbara’s husband. He wasn’t keen on farming. Not him. He didn’t stick it out there at the farm for long. If you ask me, when it came to work on the land he had two left hands. He was in the wrong job farming with old Danner up at Tannöd.

You can say what you like about Danner, but he was a good hard worker. A proper farmer, he kept his place going well, even if he was an oddity.

I think he made sure he was rid of Vinzenz again. They say he paid him off, but there again that’s just rumors.

What’s a fact is that Vinzenz went off, here today, gone tomorrow. Some say he emigrated to America. But I don’t believe that. He’ll have gone back where he came from. He was from over the border, you see. A refugee. He came in ’45, just after the war. They placed him on old Danner at the farm.

But he hardly stayed a year. He wasn’t the man to work on the land, not him.