Harry and Pauline move into Auerhaus in the aftermath of two abrupt departures from their former lives: Harry has told his father that he is gay and will not go home, while Pauline leaves a transitional home to join the household. Their arrival brings the residents to six and makes the house’s makeshift hospitality tangible. It also exposes its limits: the last ordinary rooms are occupied, but a packed, windowless room remains unused because the group has not imagined that anyone could live there.

Harry’s Arrival

The residents are opening a second bottle of Imiglykos when Harry appears in the kitchen doorway. His face is marked by red and blue bruises, a brown crust beneath his nose, and two black eyes that make him look as if he were wearing a purple pair of glasses. He tells the group that he has told his father. The bruises make the announcement’s cost visible, though the account does not specify how he received them.

Harry does not return to his family home. Instead, he makes a bedroom in the former slaughter kitchen, laying Styrofoam panels over the tiled floor and adding a blanket. The arrangement is spare, improvised, and practical: a place to sleep assembled from what the house has. In the context of his decision to leave home, the room gives his declaration an immediate consequence. He has not merely disclosed something to his father; he has also moved his daily life elsewhere.

Pauline Joins the Household

On Christmas Day, the narrator and the others hurry to collect Pauline’s belongings from the transitional home. She settles in the hayloft. Her move follows Harry’s, but the two do not receive equivalent rooms: Harry takes the slaughter kitchen, while Pauline is placed above the house in a space the narrator considers ill-suited to her.

The narrator thinks the slaughter kitchen would have been the more sensible choice for Pauline. Its tiled floor and walls, water tap, and channel for draining extinguishing water seem better suited to someone the narrator describes as an arsonist than the hayloft does. That comparison is practical as well as uneasy: the house’s rooms are not neutral spaces, and their physical features shape the residents’ improvisations around one another. Pauline’s actual room is the hayloft, despite the narrator’s misgivings about the match.

Six People, No Spare Room

With Harry and Pauline installed, the narrator counts the household as six, jokingly measuring the number as half a dozen in pieces, half a shilling in pence, or a small carton of eggs. The comic arithmetic makes the new residents feel like a group that has acquired a definite, if makeshift, size. The house is fuller, and its additions are described in the same plain, domestic terms as its improvised bedrooms.

The last regular room is now occupied, apart from a strange room without windows that Harry calls the Darkroom. It has become a repository for whatever the household does not need: old sheets and bedcovers, heavy bedframes, featherbeds, long boards, rusted metal pots, partly full paint buckets, a huge old television, carpet, rolls of linoleum, and, near the door, a stack of interlocked chairs that nearly blocks entry. The accumulation has made the room difficult even to access, much less inhabit.

The residents could have cleared it for another person, but the narrator stresses that they never thought of it as a possible bedroom. A room without air and daylight did not seem like somewhere a person could live. The group’s failure is one of imagination as much as available space: they have filled the usable house and still not recognized every corner as a potential refuge. The move-ins mark the household’s growth, but the unused room quietly complicates the image of a home that can make space for everyone.

Welcome and Uncertainty

The narrator’s response to Pauline’s arrival contains both accommodation and apprehension. He raises the possibility that the hayloft may not suit her and notes that the slaughter kitchen would have been more appropriate in light of her history. Frieder, meanwhile, predicts that Pauline will not remain long, saying she has never endured any one place for long. The prediction places her new home under the sign of possible departure even as the household takes her in.

That welcome occurs within a group already living with uncertainty about Frieder. Elsewhere in the same shared life, the narrator cannot tell whether Frieder’s mood signals safety or danger: cheerfulness may mean a decision to die rather than recovery. Frieder explains that he had not wanted to kill himself so much as to stop living, and when asked whether he should be rescued in a sudden life-threatening situation, he says he can be rescued because he wants to choose for himself. These statements do not resolve the danger; they show how little the others can reliably infer from outward signs. Against that background, adding two people to the house is not a cure for anyone’s distress. It is a practical, provisional form of mutual shelter.

The household’s later history gives this period a boundary without making the move-in a permanent settlement. The residents remain at Auerhaus until Harry finishes his apprenticeship, then move together to a run-down house in Cologne. Their shared life continues beyond the crowded rooms and improvised beds, but the first expansion of the household is defined by its particular arrangements: bruised Harry’s blanket on the slaughter-kitchen tiles, Pauline in the hayloft, six people under one roof, and a dark room that nobody yet thinks to offer.