Höppner and Vera’s Romantic Relationship

Höppner and Vera’s Romantic Relationship is an important early bond in the narrator’s life: a first kiss, school-day escapes, and private jokes give it a buoyant intimacy, while a later encounter with Harry reveals that the couple do not experience openness and jealousy in the same way. Vera’s belief that love can be shared without diminishing becomes both a playful maxim and a painful test of what Höppner can accept.

Beginnings and Shared Escapes

When the narrator’s mother’s boyfriend announced plans to work on the ceiling in the house hallway, Höppner took the remark as his cue to pack his things, bicycle across the fields to Vera, and leave with her for Berlin the following day. Their departures were not confined to that first trip. They repeatedly went away for a few days, visiting Vera’s brother in Munich, Amsterdam, or Lake Constance. To cover their absences from school, they wrote their own excuses: Vera imitated the narrator’s mother’s signature, and he copied Vera’s mother’s.

The escapes connected romance to a wider desire for elsewhere. Höppner hoped to move to Berlin as soon as possible after his Abitur, although he had never been there. What he knew was fragmentary: living there meant one did not have to serve in the Bundeswehr, and the Wall ran somehow through the city. Berlin thus stood both as a real destination they reached together and as a place onto which Höppner projected an imagined freedom.

First Kiss and Private Language

Looking back at the spot where he and Vera first kissed, Höppner remembers that the benches were still there at the time. He had just returned from a class trip when they arranged to meet in town. Vera called his name, ran toward him, and leapt into his arms; they turned together as she wrapped her legs around him and kissed him rapidly on the mouth, cheeks, neck, and forehead. She knocked him onto the bench, climbed onto him, and laughed while people beneath the nearby umbrellas watched with irritation. The recollection is exuberant and physical, set against the sour, watchful public space around them.

Their intimacy also had a comic verbal ritual. Vera kissed him and said, “Te amo,” which she explained as “I love you” in Latin. She said it habitually; Höppner responded by asking how to say it in mathematics, and Vera answered, “Minus times minus equals plus.” The exchange makes affection into a private game of translation, joining declaration and teasing rather than separating tenderness from humor.

Love as Something Shareable

Vera’s recurring claim was that love was not a cake that became smaller the more people received a piece. Höppner says he liked the idea of not being jealous—or at least of not wanting or being supposed to be jealous. The qualifications matter: his approval is not effortless certainty but an aspiration he tries to inhabit. The relationship’s language offers a generous ideal, yet it does not guarantee that his feelings will conform to it.

At the New Year’s party, Höppner looks for Vera and cannot find her outside or in the kitchen. After greeting Frieder, Cäcilia, and Pauline, he knocks on Vera’s bedroom door. She comes out in a hurry, goes to the kitchen and back, gives him a kiss and a New Year’s greeting, and leaves him with the door locked behind her. She has taken a packet of condoms from the refrigerator. The small, concrete details turn the party’s general celebration into a moment of exclusion: Vera’s slogan about shared love meets the sight of a closed door.

Höppner’s thoughts make the discrepancy explicit. A cake that shuts the door behind itself, he reflects, is not merely a cake that becomes smaller; it is practically no longer there. He imagines that he could have prevented what was happening if he had shut himself in with the person he did not desire—Harry—who desired him, and thereby kept the woman he desired from shutting herself in with Harry. The counterfactual exposes the painful asymmetry of desire and the tangled bargain he thinks he might have made. His jealousy is not a settled accusation so much as an attempt to reason through an arrangement that, in the moment, feels intolerably complicated.

Desire, Jealousy, and the Limits of the Maxim

Later, as Höppner sits before a stack of books unable to decide which examination subject to avoid studying first, Vera lies on his bed with his duvet twisted between her legs. She tells him she had thought he did not want to sleep with her and had assumed he wanted to wait until he was older. He answers that he had always wanted to; she had been the one who did not. Vera replies that this was a long time ago. The exchange revises their history without resolving it: each had understood the delay differently, and a past refusal or hesitation had not meant the same thing to both of them.

When Vera asks whether a bottle of vodka would have been enough, the conversation turns back toward the possibility of death and rescue. She asks him not to be jealous, adding that she likes him too and beginning her familiar comparison between love and cake. Höppner interrupts. He calls the theory nonsense and argues that its opposite—that love is a cake that gets smaller when shared—is just as nonsensical. Vera says nothing; neither does he. They look past one another while Cäcilia’s violin practice grows loud and dramatic, like silent-film music. The scene leaves their disagreement suspended rather than reconciled: the maxim remains available, but it cannot settle the immediate hurt or make their different desires disappear.

Significance

The relationship is presented through concrete gestures and remembered scenes rather than through a neat declaration of commitment. Vera’s leap onto Höppner at the bench, their coded joke about Latin and mathematics, the forged school excuses, and the locked bedroom door show different registers of intimacy: exuberance, private play, shared rule-breaking, and exclusion. Together they make the romance consequential without making it simple.

The cake metaphor gives the relationship its central tension. Vera uses it to imagine love as abundant and noncompetitive; Höppner wants to believe this is a way of not being jealous, but the New Year’s scene makes the ideal feel painfully abstract. His rebuttal does not establish the opposite as truth: he insists that both formulations are nonsense, even as he struggles with the feelings the metaphor cannot contain. The relationship’s significance lies in that gap between a generous principle and the lived difficulty of sharing attention, desire, and intimacy.