‘The real miracle is meeting one of Papa’s friends on a park bench . . . Who would believe it?’

After this, and after another hot chocolate, we picked up the thread of our conversation.

‘Good old Hans! What did he die of?’

‘Oh . . . you know, he was old . . . he hadn’t been very well, but his death was very sudden.’

‘Ach, das tut mir leid . . . he should have stayed here in Germany. The fresh air here is like a fountain of youth. What was he doing over in Africa? Where did you say he lived?’

‘Algeria. He was a weapons instructor, he trained soldiers . . .’

‘Ach . . . that is not good . . . these countries, they do not need armies, it sucks the blood from them. There is war in Algeria, no?’

‘Yes, a brutal war, but it is fought in the name of Allahu Akbar and His Holiness the Raïs, so that justifies the exterminations and the rest of it. Tell me what Landorf used to be like, tell me about you and my father and his friends.’

‘Back when?’

‘During the war . . .’

‘Ach . . . that’s all so long ago. They’re all gone now, I am the last and . . . well, you can see for yourself, we don’t really lead an exciting life.’

Silence. His face clouded over. Selective amnesia. It seemed clear to me that he and his friends went the same way as Papa. Or maybe the opposite. Boys are like that, they follow each other blindly, that hopping on the first bandwagon without looking to see where it’s headed. The estate Malrich and I grew up on is just the same, it’s like a station where all the trains read Destination: Paradise and they go straight to hell. You have to dodge the fare to get off.

‘You were saying . . . ?’

‘Hans was a good boy, he was loyal, he did his duty, we all did . . . that’s all there is to it.’

‘Papa used to talk to us a lot about his duty, he’d tell us stories about his time in the Hitlerjugend, the pranks he and his friends used to play, the parties and the torchlight processions. He talked about his time in the Wehrmacht, too, about the war . . . all of it. In fact, when I was a boy, back in Aïn Deb, I was in the youth wing of the FLN, the FLNjugend, and I was a real activist. I miss it sometimes, we were obsessed with it, we were always arguing about this and that, we drilled morning, noon and night, we were passionate about purging the ranks and we celebrated our victories howling with the wolves . . .’

‘The wolves?’

‘Figure of speech.’

‘What is this FLN?’

‘The National Liberation Front, the National Socialist party of the great leader . . . you haven’t heard of it? Anyway, we were talking about you, about the Reich.’