Vera and Harry’s Intimate Relationship

Vera and Harry’s Intimate Relationship begins to take shape in a New Year’s gathering at Auerhaus, where Vera leaves the narrator outside her locked bedroom with a packet of condoms and a kiss. The private encounter turns Vera’s maxim that love is not a cake into a painful test: the narrator wants to believe affection can be shared, but cannot keep that belief intact when he imagines himself excluded from Vera’s intimacy and future with Harry.

A Flirtation That Runs in Two Directions

Harry’s approach to the narrator is conspicuously theatrical. He wears jeans cut away up to the crotch, a black nylon stocking, and a red fishnet shirt with nothing beneath it; red lipstick and eyeliner make him look prettier than usual. He puts his arms on the narrator’s shoulders and calls him “Na, Süßer?” The narrator laughs and likes Harry well enough, but is not attracted to him. He knows Harry wants to seduce him, something Harry had said when they were stoned.

That flirtation establishes an asymmetry central to the narrator’s later jealousy. Harry desires him, but the narrator does not return the desire; the woman he himself wants is Vera. The narrator regards Harry’s fishnet shirt as making flirtation ridiculous, because kissing and courtship should not be treated as a joke. The scene therefore presents intimacy both as performance and as something the narrator insists must be taken seriously. Harry’s provocative appearance and teasing address do not make him a romantic possibility for the narrator, but they make his later closeness with Vera especially difficult to ignore.

The Locked Door at New Year

At New Year, the narrator looks for Vera because he assumes couples should first wish one another a happy new year. He cannot find her outside or in the slaughterhouse kitchen. After greeting Frieder, and receiving kisses on the cheek from Cäcilia and Pauline, he knocks at Vera’s bedroom door. Vera calls for a moment; the key rattles in the lock, and she comes out only long enough to hurry to the kitchen and back. She is carrying a packet of condoms taken from the refrigerator. She kisses the narrator, wishes him a happy new year, then shuts and locks the door behind her.

The briefness of the exchange gives its details their force: the narrator receives a kiss, but not entry; Vera’s attention is affectionate, yet her locked room marks a boundary. He cannot find Harry either and imagines that Harry has gone off somewhere with a man. The narrator’s uncertainty is not resolved by what he sees, but the condom packet and the closed door make the possibility of Vera’s sexual encounter with someone else immediate.

Love, Jealousy, and the Narrator’s Reversal

Vera often says that love is not a cake that becomes smaller as more people get a piece. The narrator likes the idea of not being jealous—or at least of not wanting or feeling obliged to be jealous. In the moment, however, he revises the metaphor: a cake that shuts the door behind itself is not merely diminished; it is practically gone. The image shifts from an abstract defense of nonpossessive love to a measure of his own exclusion. The problem is no longer only how much love remains, but who has been admitted behind the door.

His thoughts then sharpen into a counterfactual. It is Harry, of all people, who is with Vera: the narrator imagines that he could have prevented it if he had shut himself in with the person he does not desire, rather than allowing the woman he desires to shut herself in with someone who desires him. He recognizes the absurd complexity of this triangle, but the recognition does not dissolve the jealousy. His effort to be generous and not possessive collides with the concrete fact of a locked room, and his own desire makes Vera’s maxim harder to accept.

The Future Imagined in Harry’s Car

Later, walking uphill through snow with a bottle of vodka, the narrator says aloud that Vera is having sex with Harry, then mentally crosses out the blunt verb and replaces it with the more tentative idea that she is probably sleeping with him. He repeats the corrected sentence aloud. The self-correction registers how little he knows: he wonders whether Vera is now with Harry rather than with him, whether she is with both of them, and whether there is a principal and a secondary man. He asks himself whether sleeping with Harry automatically makes him the secondary one, and how Vera sleeps with Harry.

Harry’s Cadillac Eldorado gives these fears a destination. The narrator imagines that Vera will no longer need to hitchhike, and that she and Harry might travel to Paris or Italy, farther than the Po, a place Vera and the narrator once reached together and briefly found funny. He pictures them going to Bologna or Florence, toward the part of Italy where Harry’s father came from, all the way south toward Africa. These are projections rather than plans confirmed by Vera, but they make the perceived rivalry larger: the car seems to carry Harry and Vera beyond a shared past the narrator had with her, toward a journey from which he is absent.

Harry himself describes the Cadillac as a car with 200,000 kilometres on it that will take him to work until it falls apart. Frieder objects that it consumes an extraordinary amount of fuel; Harry treats that expense as worthwhile because it lets him sleep an hour longer. The narrator turns the hour into an intimate measure, thinking of it as one more hour in Vera’s bed. A practical detail about commuting thus becomes, in his imagination, evidence of Harry’s access to Vera and of the everyday closeness the narrator fears losing.

Departure and Unsettled Intimacy

The relationship’s consequences remain partly uncertain from the narrator’s perspective. He does not know whether Vera is with Harry, with both men, or in some arrangement that would make one of them secondary; the narrative gives his questions, not a definitive account of their relationship. Later, a horn sounds outside. Harry and the Cadillac are there, Vera goes out, and someone shuts the car door. The departure gives the narrator’s earlier imagined journeys a present-tense echo, without confirming where the pair are going or what their relationship means to Vera.

The episodes make the relationship significant less as a settled romance than as a disruption of the narrator’s understanding of intimacy. Vera’s claim that love can be shared survives as an idea, but the locked door, the condoms, Harry’s desire for the narrator, and the car carrying Vera away make sharing feel less like abundance than displacement. The narrator is left with a kiss at the threshold and a succession of unanswered questions about whether he still belongs in Vera’s life.