Christmas tree Adrián brought home for the Grünwald family

The Christmas tree Adrián brought home for the Grünwald family is more than a seasonal gift: it answers a need that Agneta’s husband, Jan, has refused to meet, and becomes the setting and pretext for Agneta and Adrián’s affair. Its arrival transforms a quarrel about their son into a moment of intimacy; afterward, the tree stands in the room as Agneta sings the song Adrián has recalled, while their private relationship reshapes her feelings about her marriage and eventually leads to pregnancy.

The household and the missing tree

The tree enters a household already changed by loss and displacement. The Grünwald family—Johannes, whom Agneta calls Jan, Agneta, and their young son Rudi—had moved to Luitpoldstrasse in autumn 1947, months after the death of Agneta’s mother, Beate Müller. Beate’s health had seemed to improve after a grave bout of pneumonia, but its aftereffects weakened her heart; she died in her sleep on a bright summer morning. Her widower gave Agneta a choice between keeping the apartment on Winterfeldtstrasse and buying a new one with the proceeds from its sale. By then, Agneta saw less of her father, who had moved to a side street off Kurfürstendamm to live with his girlfriend under the respectable cover of being a lodger. Yet the reduced visits did not mean reduced affection: she was increasingly astonished to find that he loved her as much as ever.

Against this background, the Christmas tree is not simply a decoration for Rudi. It becomes a measure of what Agneta expects a father to do, and of how far she feels Jan falls short. When Jan tells her that if the tree matters so much, she can go down into the street and buy one herself, he makes clear that he will not spend his one free Sunday working. Agneta sits on the sofa and cries, leaving the stack of dirty dishes on the table. Adrián carefully carries the plates to the sink before going to comfort her. She insists that bringing home the tree is a father’s responsibility. The domestic task, apparently small, has made a larger emotional absence visible.

Adrián’s gift and the affair

The following Thursday, Adrián arrives at midday with a large, beautiful fir. He has taken the afternoon off to help Agneta decorate it. As he settles the tree into its pot, he hums the old song Das war in Schöneberg, im Monat Mai. Agneta offers to translate the lyrics, only to discover that Adrián already knows them and wants, more than anything, to kiss a girl in Schöneberg. The tree gives their attraction a practical occasion: they are alone together, preparing a family ornament, while the song turns that ordinary work toward desire.

The song’s May setting does not fit the December scene, but Adrián points out that it only says the earlier encounter happened in May, and that kisses in Schöneberg are common. Agneta senses what is about to happen and thinks she ought to step back from the mouth that wants hers; her mind cannot issue the order. The account leaves unresolved who kissed whom beside the fir Adrián has carried up to her home. This uncertainty makes the tree’s domestic setting inseparable from the first crossing of a boundary that Agneta had not yet put into words.

Their sexual relationship continues beyond that first charged moment. After they first separate, Adrián rests his head across Agneta’s thighs and tells her that, when he met her, he promised himself he would not die until he had done this. Agneta finds the declaration romantic, especially beside Jan’s failure to bring home a tree for their son or to speak to her in the same way. The contrast is not only between two men: Adrián has entered the household by doing what Agneta believes a father should do, then makes the tree-decorating afternoon the beginning of a new intimacy.

What the tree comes to mean

The fir stays in Agneta’s memory through the days that follow. That night she expects not to sleep, but sleeps soundly; in the morning, she wakes with an unfamiliar euphoria combining romantic warmth and the energy of sexual satisfaction. Decorating the tree alone, while singing the song Adrián has returned to her, she decides that what happened need not be bad, or even serious. The tree thus becomes linked to a private reinterpretation: the affair is not yet experienced as a crisis, but as a source of pleasure that she can hold alongside ordinary married life.

For a time, that interpretation seems to work. During the winter, Agneta and Jan get along as well as they did at the beginning of their marriage. Jan believes she has stopped interfering in his affairs; Agneta, meanwhile, thinks constantly about sleeping with Adrián. In spring, Jan begins seeking her out less in bed. She supposes he is being unfaithful and discovers that she does not care. The tree’s arrival has not repaired the marriage so much as helped open a private life within it, a life Agneta increasingly treats as independent of Jan’s attention.

The affair’s consequence

On 25 July 1949, Agneta wakes singing, and Jan tells her roughly to be quiet. The smell of breakfast coffee makes her vomit. The narrative connects this physical symptom with the consequence of the affair, though it does not state a diagnosis in this moment. Agneta calculates months and weeks, composes herself, and returns to the bed where Jan is dozing, waiting for her to tell him breakfast is ready. The shift from the Christmas tree to this measured morning is stark: what began as a seemingly manageable romance has acquired a consequence that cannot be put away with the decorations.

The tree’s significance rests in that change of scale. First it marks Jan’s refusal and Adrián’s care; then it furnishes the setting for a concealed relationship, and remains present in Agneta’s solitary singing as she makes sense of the affair. By the following summer, the choice that seemed contained within a winter of domestic routine has become a bodily fact. The tree does not cause the rupture in the marriage, but the scene around it gives the affair its beginning, its emotional contrast, and the domestic image by which Agneta remembers the transformation.