Karl Hergesell and Grigoleit

Still angry after a woman demanded butter and bacon for a decrepit second-hand pram, Karl Hergesell runs into Grigoleit, his old comrade from Trudel's illegal cell, now working underground as a courier alongside Babyface. Grigoleit needles him for abandoning the cause for domestic happiness — 'you're stealing it' from those who suffer while he stays passive — but Hergesell shrugs off the lecture, laughing despite himself. Grigoleit asks him to mind a heavy suitcase while he travels to Königsberg, and Hergesell reluctantly agrees, resolving not to tell Trudel, since anything touching her old 'death sentence' upsets her. Finding Trudel asleep and pale at the station, he impulsively leaves the suitcase in left luggage rather than carry it home. When she wakes and mentions seeing him with a huge suitcase, he flatly denies it, insisting she dreamed it; hurt, she drops the subject, privately troubled that they are now both keeping secrets — hers about Quangel, his about Grigoleit.

Grigoleit's confrontation restates the novel's argument against private happiness as refuge, aimed this time at a couple the reader has been invited to like. The suitcase Karl lies about mirrors the postcard Trudel is hiding, giving the marriage its own small rupture just as the Quangels' larger one is tested.