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Pascal got to his feet before the thought was finished, his courage sparked by the sight of Noemi’s bitten lip. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but…’

His father’s face mottled with fury; his eyes turned molten. Pascal had never felt the force of Viktor’s fury targeted so brutally at him before, and it paralysed him. It took all Carina’s strength to drag him back down.

‘Stop it. It won’t help her; it will make matters worse. She’ll need you later, and you have to go to her then, which you won’t be able to do if you rile him.’

If you rile him woke him up to the danger he’d put himself in. Pascal sank into his seat as his father switched his focus back to the rest of his audience as if the disturbance hadn’t happened.

‘Tomorrow every household will receive a copy of these. They will also be posted in the market square and announced through the town’s loudspeakers so nobody is in any doubt about what is coming.

’ He laid the papers on the lectern, smoothed them out and began to read their contents, striking the key words so they rang out.

‘From the first of January 1936, the following statutes will become legally binding and subject to punishment if broken. Firstly, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour . This forbids marriage and physical relationships between Germans and Jews. Secondly, the Reich Citizenship Law . This removes all citizenship rights from Jews, who are now to be classed at the lower level of state subjects. In the following weeks, definitions will be published determining who is Jewish and to what degree.’ He looked up.

‘There will no longer be any doubt about who is a true German. There will be no doubt who is the enemy.’ He paused for a second or two while the room digested enemy .

Then he turned to the families behind him.

‘Not that anyone in our town needs to question that.’

‘You bastard. So that’s why your invitation was so insistent we came.’

Hauke’s voice rang around the silent hall. Frieda had her head in her hands. She made no attempt to stop him as he launched himself to his feet.

‘Did you have to do this with so much pleasure? Did you have to humiliate honest people who’ve lived their entire lives here and never done you or the town any harm?

’ He looked Viktor up and down and shook his head.

‘I always knew you were no good, and now you’ve proved it.

What’s your plan after this? Are you going to march us round the market square wearing placards?

Are you going to chase us from our homes? ’

The two men stared at each other while the hall coughed and looked away. Nobody stood up; nobody protested. Carina’s hand was a vice on Pascal’s arm. But there were one or two mutters of, ‘Shame,’ and, ‘Let them alone, for pity’s sake,’ which Pascal wished had come from him.

Viktor clearly hadn’t expected a challenge. Hauke laughed as the muttering, and the lack of applause, reached the stage.

‘It’s not so easy, is it, when you stick an evil label on your neighbours? Look out there – look at them. They know us. They can’t look at us and see vermin or disease . But they can look at you and see a bully and a fool because that’s what you are. A show-off in a sad uniform.’

It was a brave speech. From the tears on Frieda’s face, she clearly thought it was a reckless one.

And it’s not entirely true. There’s more people on my father’s side than Hauke thinks.

Pascal gazed round the familiar faces who were staring at the two men squaring up to each other on the stage. Some of them were shrugging as if the new laws weren’t entirely unwelcome. Some were smiling to themselves. Everyone was silent now; everyone was keeping their own counsel.

But why is he doing it? Surely he doesn’t want people here to behave like those girls did in Nuremberg?

Whatever Viktor intended, Pascal knew that’s what Noemi was thinking. He knew she was afraid – she looked as if she was about to be sick. And when Viktor’s temper snapped and he grabbed Hauke by the collar and snarled, ‘You’ll regret this, if it’s the last thing I do,’ she finally burst into tears.

‘Noemi, wait. Please. I need to talk to you.’

The last thing Noemi wanted to do was to wait – or to talk.

Especially not to Pascal. She ignored him and flung herself out of the hall after her parents, flinching away from the townspeople who flinched away from her.

Nobody spoke to her. Nobody had spoken to Frieda or Hauke as they stumbled off the stage.

Or to the Schusters or the Flecks, even though Frau Fleck had wept and clung to her husband as if she was about to collapse.

Vermin. Disease. Contagion.

The words stormed through the air until she thought they would blind her. When Pascal grabbed her arm, she whirled round ready to strike him. It was a good thing he ducked.

‘Did you know about the new laws? Did you know what your father was going to do?’

‘Don’t talk to him, Noemi, do you hear me? He’s not your friend, not after this.’

Frieda’s voice tore through the night’s frost before Pascal could answer.

Noemi half turned away from him, but Pascal’s, ‘Please give me a chance to say sorry for how you were treated in there,’ pulled her back.

She could feel her mother’s fury spilling through the, ‘You’re a fool if you listen to him,’ she shouted next at her daughter, but Noemi had no choice.

She could easily hate his father; she couldn’t switch so quickly to hating Pascal.

But she definitely couldn’t bear to be watched anymore.

‘Down here. I don’t need more eyes on me.’

She pulled him round the corner into a deserted back lane as the hall started to empty.

‘I didn’t know about any of it, I swear.

’ He started talking before she could tell him he only had a minute.

‘You’ve been to Nuremberg – you know how many speeches there are.

I didn’t go to half of them. I didn’t go to any in the Congress Hall where all the politics gets done.

The only thing I was interested in was the army stuff and the competitions. ’

Noemi dropped his arm, although she couldn’t uncurl her fist. Her body felt as if it would never relax again.

But she believed Pascal: she knew he would have spent every second he could in the youth camp, proving how fast and strong and brave he was.

She tried to push away the fear and the anger Viktor’s performance had filled her with and focus as he carried on.

‘I don’t know why my father chose to humiliate you like that; if I’d known what was coming, I’d never have let you sit up there, I swear it. That’s why I tried to stand up, to stop that part. You have to believe me.’

She did, although she wished he’d tried harder.

‘Nobody spoke up for us. Not one single person.’

The weight of that tore at her shoulders; it took her knees away. She sank onto a wall and stared at the ground.

‘I thought we were welcome here. Everyone comes to the café and the shop and the bar, and nobody gets married without my mother’s wedding cake.

She always says she gets to hear about engagements first. That she can tell from a girl’s smile that it’s time to get out the special cherry compote and the best vanilla.

I thought that meant we were part of the fabric, like the seasons.

But now we’re a disease ? What does that even mean? ’

She looked up, but Pascal was shuffling his feet, and he looked as if he was about to cry. She waited while his silence stretched out and the rest of his words came back.

‘What did you mean by that part ?’

He shuffled and coughed. She hadn’t been properly listening to his stumbled apology, but she was listening now.

‘Oh dear God. You would have tried to get us off the stage, but you wouldn’t have stopped the announcement. That’s what you meant, isn’t it?’

It was dark in the lane, but she could see the blush creep across his cheeks. His reply was a patch of black ice on a pathway, its jolt sharp enough to take her breath.

‘How could I? It’s not my father’s doing. They’re new laws; it’s his job to tell people about them. I didn’t like the way he did it, but I can’t change what he has to do.’

How can he separate one thing from the other? Does he not understand what happened to me and my family in there?

Pascal was a head taller than her now and broader than he’d been a year ago. He had a shadow on his top lip by the evening. But Noemi felt twice his age as she pulled his answer apart.

‘You understand what these laws do, don’t you? You understand they make me – and everyone else your father paraded up there tonight – worthless? That they make us not citizens, not German. Not part of the us the country apparently belongs to now?’

The silence that followed was so complete, she could hear him breathing; she thought she could hear his heart.

The confusion clouding his face made him look like the little boy she’d raided orchards and licked stolen icing spoons with.

It made her hope he’d seen the cliff she was dangling over.

Until his frown cleared, and she realised this was Pascal, who had his own way of making everything well with the world, and he hadn’t understood a thing.

‘No, no. That’s all wrong.’ He dropped down onto the wall beside her, his voice growing stronger as he explained how she’d been the one who didn’t understand.

‘When Hitler talks about the Jews being a problem, he means the crooks and the swindlers. The ones who turned traitor in the war or made money out of it. That’s who these laws are intended for.

My father used you and the other Jewish families as examples to make a point, which was a stupid and mean thing to do, and I’ll tell him that, I promise.

But the laws themselves are nothing for you to worry about. ’

He sounded so sure of himself. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to drop her head onto his shoulder and believe him.

She longed to do that. She’d never craved comfort more, and nothing could have been more normal than physical contact between them.

As children, they’d collapsed and slept curled round each other wherever they ran out of energy.

They could lose a summer afternoon now lying in a meadow, listening to the bees buzz and watching the clouds with her head on his stomach, planning their next climb.

You can no more separate those two out than you can extract the eggs from a cake.

Frieda’s long-ago words floated back into Noemi’s head. She’d loved that description of them when she’d heard it, although she’d laughed off her father’s, ‘Don’t I know it, I should probably start saving for the wedding.’

Frieda wouldn’t celebrate that closeness now. Noemi would be surprised if she ever let Pascal back into the Drachmann house.

And our wedding would be illegal.

Whether she’d ever thought about marrying Pascal, or wanted it, or dismissed the idea as the adults talking nonsense, no longer mattered. The possibility no longer existed.

All of a sudden, his body was too close; it was alien.

She stood up, her head full of Viktor’s contempt.

Wondering how long it would be before Pascal gave in to the beliefs he spent so much of his time immersed in and started displaying that same contempt too.

The thought was unbearable. Which meant she had to make him listen to the truth.

‘I know you’re trying to make me feel better, but please think for a moment. How can what you said be right? How are they not about me? They’re about Jews, and I’m Jewish. There’s no changing that.’

Everybody who’d ever smiled at her simply for being young had talked about innocence as if it was a state they longed to return to.

They were more innocent times was a line she’d heard repeated countlessly by old men and women reminiscing about the days before the war had taken their loved ones or the country’s subsequent economic collapse had wiped out their savings.

She imagined they would describe Pascal – with his bright eyes and his bright smile – as the picture of innocence now.

He looked delirious to Noemi – or deluded. His answer confirmed it.

‘But you’re not… that sort of a Jew, are you? You’re not a crook; you’re not a traitor. You and your family – and the Schusters and the Flecks – are good Jews, not bad ones. So trust me, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Good people don’t get punished – everyone knows that.’

Good Jews and bad Jews.

It was such a simplistic view of the world. She didn’t have the heart to explain to him how naive and insulting and wrong it was. And she couldn’t find the words to ask him how the National Socialists intended to tell the two kinds apart if they ever decided it was time for the vermin to be gone.