Vera

Vera is one of the people who makes Auerhaus a home rather than merely a place to live. She joins the plan to keep Frieder company and help watch over him, but her role extends beyond caretaking: she builds a life with the others, treats love as something that need not be divided into shares, and stands beside them when the household’s playful defiance meets grief and official attention.

Identity and Introduction

Vera is introduced in the narrator’s recollection at a moment when Frieder is lying on the stairs. She shines a light down toward him; when the narrator asks whether he is crying, she answers that he is laughing. The compact exchange establishes her as an alert witness to Frieder’s changing states, and places her beside the narrator at the threshold of the story’s sustained concern with his vulnerability.

Before Auerhaus becomes their home, Vera and the narrator already share a taste for getting away. When the narrator’s mother’s boyfriend announces plans to rebuild the ceiling in the hallway, the narrator takes the remark as a cue to pack and cycle across the fields to Vera. The next day, the two hitchhike to Berlin. They also make trips lasting several days—to Vera’s brother in Munich, Amsterdam, or Lake Constance—and forge each other’s mothers’ signatures on school excuses. Their escapes are practical acts of companionship, carried out with the confidence of people who can improvise their own leave-taking.

Choosing Auerhaus

The prospect of moving in with Frieder offers the narrator a way out of the hostile atmosphere at home. He would no longer have to help his mother’s boyfriend lay paving stones in the driveway, paint the facade, or cover ceilings with ugly boards; nor would he have to endure the man’s muttering and explosive drinking. But the plan raises another problem: caring for Frieder alone would mean shouldering too much responsibility. The narrator wonders whether the two of them could move in together to look after him, reducing the burden by sharing it.

Vera accepts. After looking up at the narrator and then climbing onto a low wall beside a dung heap to look down at him, she says, “Gut. Ich zieh mit ein.” Her decision converts a private escape into a collective undertaking: the house will be a place for Frieder to live, but also a home the friends make together. When the furniture van has arrived at Frieder’s grandfather’s house, they sit around the kitchen table for the first time. The only cassette they can find is playing too loudly for conversation. They twirl spaghetti onto their forks and bounce their knees; at this beginning, the lack of anything to say is not a failure of community but simply part of having just arrived.

That shared home soon acquires the steady rhythm of meals and talk. The narrator describes a life full of conversation at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with the talking serving as a way to watch over one of them who had tried to kill himself. He cannot fully understand why someone would try, even after weeks together; he can grasp it in one sense without understanding how a person actually reaches the attempt. Vera’s presence belongs to a household whose care is ordinary and recurrent, built into the work of being together rather than set apart as a single act of rescue.

Love and Household Life

Vera’s view of love offers the household a way to hold closeness without making it a contest. She often says that love is not a cake that gets smaller the more people receive a piece. The narrator finds this appealing, though he admits that his ideal of not being jealous may be as much something he wants to feel—or thinks he ought to feel—as something he has mastered.

At the New Year’s party, the saying meets a concrete and slightly awkward test. The narrator looks for Vera but cannot find her outside or in the kitchen. He sees her emerge from her room, hurry to the kitchen, then return carrying a packet of condoms she has taken from the refrigerator. She kisses him, wishes him a happy New Year, closes the door behind her, and locks it. The narrator does not turn the moment into an argument over possession; instead, he recalls her cake comparison and measures himself against its ideal. Vera’s maxim is not proof that jealousy has disappeared. It is a principle the narrator uses to make sense of intimacy in a household where affection does not fit neatly into exclusive pairings.

The meaning of home likewise shifts with the people speaking. On December 24, the narrator is at his family’s house, but says that home is really Auerhaus. When talking to people who do not belong to the house, the word home has to mean family; among those who live at Auerhaus, it means Auerhaus itself. Vera is part of the community that makes this second meaning possible. The distinction preserves both facts at once: the narrator has a family of origin, and his sense of belonging has moved elsewhere.

Police Scrutiny and Separation

The household’s joking talk of criminality acquires a sharper edge when the police are involved. On the walk back, Vera observes that if they ever really shot a politician or an industrialist, the police could now identify them immediately. Pauline answers that they will have to wear gloves. The exchange turns the prospect of identification into dark humor, but it also registers that the authorities have gathered information about them. Afterward, the friends sit around the kitchen table waiting for Harry and wondering whom the police would notify if they had arrested him: the people at Auerhaus or his parents. Their concern is practical as well as emotional. The household has become a network of responsibility whose standing is uncertain to outsiders.

Later, after a rupture in that shared life, the narrator finds Vera sitting on her bed studying. When he asks where Harry is, she replies that they are not married. The exchange does not explain everything that has changed between the members of the household, but its bluntness marks a limit: living together and caring about one another do not make every relationship permanent or give one person a claim over another. The house that once made collective responsibility feel possible can also fall quiet, leaving each person alone with what remains.

Frieder’s Funeral and Narrative Significance

At Frieder’s funeral, Vera steps into a difficult gap in the ceremony. Frieder’s father is helping move the bier, and Frieder tells them to open the lid because he cannot bear to see the mourners’ stricken faces. Vera goes over to Frieder’s father, puts her arms around him, and speaks with him. When she returns, she tells the others that the pallbearers have not come. The detail is stark: the people expected to carry Frieder are absent, and those who loved him must respond to the omission themselves.

After the coffin is lowered with thick ropes, the pastor gives a brief address about Maundy Thursday, crucifixion, resurrection, and sin taken away. Vera and Harry have faces made puffy by long crying; they look, in the narrator’s eyes, like real adults. After the parents have gone to the grave, Vera takes a handful of sand and throws it down. Harry follows, and then the narrator. The gesture does not resolve grief. It makes their participation visible, one handful at a time, after the formal words have ended.

Vera’s significance lies in the continuity between these scenes. She is the friend who leaves with the narrator, says yes to moving in with Frieder, helps create a home organized around shared care, and offers an expansive account of love. At the end, she is also the one who approaches Frieder’s father and steps forward at the grave. Her steadiness is not presented as immunity from loss; the tear-streaked face seen beside Harry’s makes grief part of the same shared life she helped build.