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second door out into the farmyard.
    Sheet ice lay like mirrors in the barnyard and the old man shuffled along carefully, still wearing his slippers.
    Arriving at the barn, he opened the heavy door and made his way inside. He was going to close the door again, to keep in what little heat there was, but there seemed to be no point to that and he left it open instead.
    Lotti was in a stall among several others, all of them empty except hers. She watched the old man approach, turning her head so she could see with her good eye.
    She had won prizes in her day. A medal from the 1935 Agricultural Fair in Sandvig still hung from an old nail above her stall. ‘Lotti – Beste Kuh,’ it said.
    Per stopped in front of the cow. ‘Lotti,’ he said solemnly, ‘I have to kill you now.’
    The cow just looked at him and chewed.
    After setting down the lantern, Per leaned upon the gun as if it were a cane. Why is this so hard for me, he wondered, but even as the thought passed through his mind, he knew the answer. The death of this animal would mark the end of his life as a farmer. And if he was no longer a farmer, then what was he? What purpose was there left for him in life? And if he served no purpose, then what point was there in going on at all?
    At that moment, it would almost have been easier for Per to shoot himself than it would have been to put a bullet through the forehead of that temperamental cow.
    Exhausted by such unforgiving thoughts, the old man sat down on a bale of hay. ‘To hell with everything,’ he sighed.
    ‘I knew you couldn’t do it,’ said a voice. It was Ole. Hearing no shots fired, he had come to check on his brother and now stood in the doorway, arms folded, with a disapproving frown upon his face.
    ‘I was just . . . collecting myself,’ Per replied defensively.
    ‘No, you weren’t.’
    Per stared at the ground. ‘I’m damned if I will shoot this cow.’ He held out the gun to his brother. ‘You can do it.’
    But Ole made no move to take the rifle. The truth was he couldn’t do it either. ‘God will take her when he’s ready,’ he announced.
    Per rose to his feet, shouldered the gun on its tired leather sling, picked up the lantern and followed his brother out into the barnyard.
    At that moment, both men saw what they simultaneously perceived to be a shooting star, so perfectly reflected in the ice which covered the barnyard that there appeared to be not one but two meteors, each one racing towards the other on a collision course.
    This was followed by a roar of wind, like one of the katabatic gusts which sometimes blew in off the Baltic, wrenching trees out of the ground and knocking over chimney pots.
    The ground shook.
    Both men stumbled and fell.
    The lantern slipped from Per’s grasp and broke upon the ground, sending a splash of blazing kerosene across the ground, which flickered yellow to orange to blue and finally sizzled away into the melting ice.
    Then out of the darkness came a thumping, clattering shower of roof tiles, old nails, pitchforks and smouldering bales of hay.
    The brothers cowered, speechless, as the trappings of their life crashed down around them.
    When this barrage had finally ceased, Per and Ole climbed shakily to their feet and stared at a wall of dust, even blacker than the night, rising from where the barn had been only a moment before.
    As the dust began to clear, and stars winked out of the gloom, they realised that their barn had been completely destroyed. Somewhere in that tangle of charred beams and splintered planks was Lotti. Or what was left of her. There was nothing to be done about it now.
    ‘God did not waste any time,’ remarked Ole.
    ‘He might have been a little less heavy-handed,’ said Per, as the two men returned to their house.

A few hours later
    A few hours later, just as the first rays of dawn began to glimmer off the rooftops of Berlin, a man named Rochus Misch was woken by the telephone.
    Misch opened his eyes. By the pale light