She went to the window and stared out at the rain. After a minute, a tan Trabant 500 pulled up at the curb, and Hans got out.

How dare he come here now?

Rebecca flung open the window, heedless of the rain blowing in, and yelled: “Go away!”

He stopped on the wet sidewalk and looked up.

Rebecca’s eye lit on a pair of his shoes on the floor beside her. They had been hand-made by an old shoemaker Hans had found. She picked one up and threw it at him. It was a good shot and, although he dodged, it hit the top of his head.

“You mad cow!” he yelled.

Walli and Lili came into the room. They stood in the doorway, staring at their grown-up sister as if she had become a different person, which she probably had.

“You got married on the orders of the Stasi!” Rebecca shouted out of the window. “Which of us is mad?” She threw the other shoe and missed.

Lili said in awestruck tones: “What are you doing?”

Walli grinned and said: “This is crazy, man.”

Outside, two passersby stopped to watch, and a neighbor appeared on a doorstep, gazing in fascination. Hans glared at them. He was proud, and it was agony for him to be made a fool of in public.

Rebecca looked around for something else to throw at him, and her gaze fell on the matchstick model of the Brandenburg Gate.

It stood on a plywood board. She picked it up. It was heavy, but she could manage.

Walli said: “Oh, wow.”

Rebecca carried the model to the window.

Hans shouted: “Don’t you dare! That belongs to me!”

She rested the plywood base on the windowsill. “You ruined my life, you Stasi bully!” she shouted.

One of the women bystanders laughed, a scornful, jeering cackle that rang out over the sound of the rain. Hans flushed with rage and looked around, trying to identify its source, but he could not. To be laughed at was the worst form of torture for him.

He roared: “Put that model back, you bitch! I worked on it for a year!”

“That’s how long I worked on our marriage,” Rebecca replied, and she lifted the model.

Hans yelled: “I’m ordering you!”

Rebecca heaved the model through the window and let it go.

It turned over in midair, so that the board was uppermost and the quadriga below. It seemed to take a long time to drop, and Rebecca felt suspended in a moment of time. Then it hit the paved front yard with a sound like paper being crumpled. The model exploded and the matchsticks scatted outward in a spray, then came down on the wet stones and stuck, forming a sunburst of destruction. The board lay flat, everything on it crushed to nothing.

Hans stared at it for a long moment, his mouth open in shock.

He recovered himself and pointed a finger up at Rebecca. “You listen to me,” he said, and his voice was so cold that suddenly she felt afraid. “You’ll regret this, I tell you,” he said. “You and your family. You’ll regret it for the rest of your lives. And that’s a promise.”