Michael and Hanna begin their affair

Michael and Hanna begin their affair when a visit to Hanna’s apartment turns an ordinary errand into an intimate encounter. Michael is fifteen and Hanna is an adult more than thirty; he experiences the start of the relationship through attraction, uncertainty, and physical closeness, while Hanna directs much of their early intimacy. Recalled years later, the affair carries both the force of Michael’s first love and the imbalance between a boy and an older woman that his attachment cannot erase.

The Encounter at Hanna’s Apartment

Michael returns to Hanna’s apartment and waits for her. When she arrives carrying a coal scuttle and a box of briquets, she is in her streetcar-conductor’s uniform and looks tired. She asks him to bring up two more scuttles from the cellar. As he fills the second one, the piled coke shifts and tumbles, leaving him ankle-deep in coal. He sweeps the spilled pieces back into the bunker, latches its door, and carries the scuttles upstairs.

Hanna laughs at his blackened appearance and offers to run a bath and beat the dust out of his clothes. She tells him to remove his clothes carefully to keep the coal dust out of the kitchen; after he gets into the bath, she takes his clothes to the balcony to shake them clean. The scene moves from a practical kindness to a more charged encounter. When Hanna returns with a towel, she dries him and initiates physical contact. Michael is overwhelmed and unsure how to respond, neither affirming nor refusing at first, before telling her that she is beautiful and embracing her.

The shift is decisive for Michael. He remembers fearing that he would touch or kiss Hanna badly, or fail to please her. Once they have held each other, however, that fear gives way to an intimacy he experiences as both physical and emotional. The account presents his participation and attraction without making the two equal in age or experience: Hanna is the adult who has invited him into her home, set the terms of the earlier encounter, and now takes the initiative.

A Repeated Affair and an Unequal Intimacy

In the days that follow, Hanna works the early shift and returns home at noon. Michael cuts his last class to wait outside her apartment, and they meet before he rushes back to school for lunch. Their encounters settle into a repeated routine, organized around her work schedule and his deliberate absences from class.

Michael recalls that Hanna was scrupulously clean and showered every morning. He preferred the scents she carried home from work, but also enjoyed their shared showers. She teaches him to touch her with assurance rather than bashfulness, and she is generally the more experienced and directive partner. He describes her as taking possession of him, telling him where to touch her and shaping the encounters around her pleasure. He does not present this as an absence of tenderness or pleasure for himself; rather, he remembers gradually learning to take initiative in return, though he says he never entirely mastered that balance.

The arrangement reveals a central tension in the affair: Michael is emotionally and physically invested, but the relationship develops on terms Hanna largely sets. His later recollection distinguishes his youthful enjoyment of being guided from an equal exchange of power. The intimacy matters to him, yet his account also makes visible how the age difference and Hanna’s greater experience shape what the two can ask of each other.

Michael’s Attachment and Imagined Future

The night after their first encounter, Michael falls in love with Hanna. He can barely sleep, yearns for her, dreams about her, and wants to be with her rather than relieve his desire alone. His feeling quickly becomes a framework for interpreting their repeated meetings and imagining a future together.

Michael asks Hanna about her past, including whether she had siblings, how she had lived in Berlin, and what she had done in the army. She brushes off these questions. He also imagines how their relationship might look years later and proposes a bicycle trip during Easter vacation, including sharing a room as mother and son. Hanna does not want to think as far ahead as Easter. The mismatch is telling: Michael builds a future out of the affair, while Hanna resists even near-term plans.

He is not embarrassed by the idea of being seen with Hanna, although he remembers having felt too old to travel with his own mother or to be accompanied by her. He takes pride in being with a woman who could have been his mother, though she is ten years younger than his mother. Looking back, he is struck by how much confidence Hanna gave him at fifteen; at the time, that confidence sits alongside his sense of growing ease at school and with girls. The affair becomes part of his adolescent self-understanding, even as its adult-minor imbalance remains unmistakable.

Retrospective Meaning and the Wider Story

Years later, Michael recalls that his attention had first fixed on Hanna not simply because of her body, but because of the way she held and moved herself. He distinguishes her unselfconscious manner from deliberate display. This retrospective reflection shows how memory revises the beginning: what he could not explain as a teenager becomes, in adulthood, an attempt to understand the force of the encounter without reducing it to appearance alone.

The affair also acquires a different significance when Michael later identifies Hanna in court. He asks whether she joined the SS despite Siemens having offered her a job as a foreman; her lawyer objects to the framing, and Hanna says that the SS recruited women at factories for guard duties and that she applied and was hired. During her trial, Michael observes that she tries to correct what she believes is false and acknowledge what she cannot deny, but does not understand how the court’s procedures turn statements into judgments of guilt and innocence. His private knowledge of her illiteracy leads him to consider telling the judge, yet he recognizes that exposing it would violate Hanna’s sense of self. The boy who had once been drawn into her private world becomes an adult witness to the limits of his understanding of her.

When Michael later explains to another person that he sent Hanna tapes and that she learned to read and write in prison, he identifies their relationship plainly: when he was fifteen, they had a relationship. Asked whether they had slept together, he confirms it. The brief exchange strips away the elaborate memories without resolving their emotional meaning. In retrospect, the affair is at once Michael’s first love, an adult’s relationship with a fifteen-year-old, and the beginning of a bond that persists into the story of Hanna’s crimes, trial, and imprisonment.