All that was a long way off. Right now his ambition was that the Bobbsey Twins would become popular enough for him and Karolin to become full-time professionals.

Joe’s musicians drifted in while Walli was setting up, and they began to play at seven sharp.

Communists were ambivalent about jazz. They were suspicious of everything American, but the Nazis had banned jazz, which made jazz anti-Fascist. In the end they permitted it because so many people liked it. Joe’s band had no vocalist, so there was no problem about songs that celebrated bourgeois values, such as “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” or “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

Karolin arrived a minute later, and her presence lit up the shabby backstage area with a glow like candlelight, bathing the gray walls in a rosy wash and making the grimy corners vanish into shadow.

For the first time, there was something in Walli’s life that mattered as much as music. He had had girlfriends before, in fact they came without much effort by him. And they had usually been willing to have sex with him, so intercourse for Walli was not the unattainable dream it was for most of his schoolmates. But he had experienced nothing like the overwhelming love and passion he felt for Karolin. “We think the same way—we even say the same thing sometimes,” he had told Grandmother Maud, and she had said: “Ah—soul mates.” Walli and Karolin could talk about sex as easily as they talked about music, confiding what they liked and did not like—though there was not much that Karolin did not like.

The band would play for another hour. Walli and Karolin got into the back of Joe’s van and lay down. It became a boudoir, dimly lit by the yellow glow from the car park lights; Joe’s cushions were a velvet divan, and Karolin a languorous odalisque, opening her robes to offer her body to Walli’s kisses.

They had tried sex using a condom, but neither of them liked it. Sometimes they had intercourse without a condom, and Walli withdrew at the last moment, but Karolin said that was not really safe. Tonight they used their hands. After Walli had come into Karolin’s handkerchief, she showed him how to please her, guiding his fingers, and she came with a little “Oh!” that sounded more like surprise than anything else.

“Sex with the one you love is the second-best thing in the world,” Maud had said to Walli. Somehow a grandmother could say things that a mother could not.

“If that’s second best, what’s first?” he had asked.

“Seeing your children happy.”

“I thought you were going to say: ‘Playing ragtime,’” Walli had said, and she had laughed.

As always, Walli and Karolin went from sex to music with no break, as if it were all one. Walli taught Karolin a new song. He had a radio in his bedroom and he listened to American stations broadcasting from West Berlin, so he knew all the popular numbers. This one was called “If I Had a Hammer,” and it was a hit for an American trio called Peter, Paul and Mary. It had a compelling beat, and he felt sure the audience would love it.