Kretschmann - Nothing I can do for you now but count the days of your sentence off with you one by one, while we wait for Mischa to get you exchanged. Six years it takes us before we manage to bring you home.

Guillaume Home, yes. Only I've got cancer by this time. I've lost all contact with Pierre.

Kretschmann (with Guillaume) Thirty prisoners we paid for you, Günter! You always wanted to know if it was true about the prisoners. And the price has gone up. They're worth almost a hundred thousand marks a head now. Three million marks we valued you at!

Guillaume Home. Is it? I see it with very different eyes now. And how thin that single voice sounds once your ears have got attuned to the complexity of counterpoint! In any case you were right. Now Willy had made peace with the Russians they didn't need to keep their wretched little ally on its feet any longer.

Thefaint thudding of a pickaxe.

(with everyone) That knocking in the timbers grows louder and louder as the months and years go by - and it turns out that this is where the noise was coming from all the time. Not that house. The house next door. Our house.

Brandt The journalists rang me in the middle of the night to get my reaction. The event we'd waited so long for has actually begun to happen. The state whose existence I recognised is passing out of existence before our eyes. The point of all that suffering and struggle and deception is crumbling into dust.

The single pickaxe is joined by more. The sound grows louder. Everyone rises and gazes out into the house. The thudding of the pickaxes culminates in the rumble of collapsing masonry. Light. And at last what belongs together is coming together. Our divided self has become one self.

Guillaume The old peacemaker sets out on his travels once again. So many new lands to wander! So many more upturned faces!

Brandt Eisenach and Dresden . . . Leipzig and Rostock . . .

Guillaume All wanting to see the man who first began to make this happen. Does he ever miss me organising the timetables and laying out his suit? Does he ever consider that I played my own small part in all this? The little man who looked at the great man, and saw that he could be trusted.

Brandt I sometimes wonder about him, of course. His son's turned his back on him, his homeland's vanished. We're both mortally ill.

Guillaume I watch him as he passes. He's changed. So have I. So has everyone and everything. Herbert Wehner . . .

Wehner Dead and with the angels.

Guillaume Helmut Schmidt . . .

Schmidt Long since out of office.

Ehmke And our great party with him.

Guillaume Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who could never be Foreign Minister . . .

Genscher Foreign Minister for the last fifteen years.