Anyway, back then things were extraordinarily animated. Although the means and routes of transportation were demolished and also inhibited by countless checkpoints, incessant swarms of people trickled along the provisionally patched-up nervous system of the Western Zone road network. Trains were so thickly breaded with people that they looked like rainworms after rolling in sand. Railroad stations were military encampments. Basement waiting rooms were like the dormitory of Sainte-Brigitte . . .

And thus, of course, there were all kinds of unexpected meetings. Human destinies interpleated unpredictably, and attachments formed; Christa (whose meager hoard of language was enriched with the lovely images of a farmyard childhood) said, “Cow and donkey harnessed to the plow.”

•

And so where Stoffel’s application for a license is concerned, it was assisted by just such an—at first blush—heterogeneous attachment. You see, the originally involuntary migratory instinct had also seized hold of the moviemakers. But not necessarily every survivor of Ufa Films was incited to move from Berlin-Babelsberg to Munich-Geiselgasteig. A few flocks wound up in Hamburg. There, in the subterranean makeshift waiting room of an eye doctor, Horst-Jürgen Stoffel had his fateful (especially for Nagel and me) encounter with Astrid von Bürger, the emancipated daughter of a professor of metallurgy at the Technical University of Berlin. In blitzkrieg times, by way of the School of Physical Culture, she had become a movie extra at Babelsberg, where a friendly cameraman had got her a tiny part, through which she had caught Reich Minister Goebbels’s eye and then quickly risen to Greater German film fame.

Astrid was a smug girl. In later years, long after divorcing Horst-Jürgen, ruefully renouncing the cinematic art, and remarrying, this time a solid electronics industrialist named Häberle, bearing him flocks of children, and moving to an attractive mountain farm in the Alpine lime countryside south of Bad Tölz (and if she hasn’t died, then she’s still living there today!), she would tell about this meeting in an unadulterated Berlin-Charlottenburg accent:

“Man, if that wasn’t love at first dim sight! . . . I’m sitting on that poor sinner’s bench in the basement office, waiting to be ushered in to ol’ Doc Four Eyes because my specs had dropped and the last Russian in Berlin had tramped on them with his Siberian boots, and without one and a half diopters I can’t tell the difference between the ‘ladies’ sign and the ‘gentlemen,’ and the guy’s dragged down the stairs by two other guys like a plaster war casualty on the Pergamon frieze, and they drop him very carefully in an armchair, and he keeps holding this neatly folded handkerchief over his eye, because while he was inspecting his factory in Dumpsville on Shit’s Creek, a splinter from one of his dolls had flown into his eye, and then he takes the handkerchief off his bloodshot li’l piggy eye and gives me such a heartrending look through his veil of tears, like I should feel a little sorry for him on account of his little boo-boo—and all that plus the blond lock over his thinker’s brow, ya know, and him taller than a centurion and stuffed to the hilt, his flesh white as boiled cod—well, I say to myself, Astrid my girl, I say, you’re gonna buy that rubber lion, he’s one of the blow-up kind, you can let off the overpressure, it’s as easy as pie. That’s my kind of man—it’s not for nothing I’m singing my Häberle’s praises still today. . .”