Lili’s father had been forced to take a job, even though he was still trying to run his business in West Berlin by remote control. He had to work as an engineer in a state-owned factory in East Berlin, making televisions that were far inferior to the West German sets. At the outset he had made some suggestions for improving the product, but this was seen as a way of criticizing his superiors, so he stopped. This evening as soon as he arrived home from work he came into the kitchen and they all sang “Hoch Soll Sie Leben,” the traditional German birthday song meaning: “Long may she live.”

Then they sat around the kitchen table and talked about whether Alice would ever see her father.

Karolin had applied to emigrate. Escape was becoming more difficult every year: Karolin might have tried to cross, all the same, had she been alone; but she was not willing to risk Alice’s life. Every year a few people were allowed out legally. No one could find out the grounds on which applications were judged, but it seemed that most of those allowed to leave were unproductive dependents, children and old people.

Karolin and Alice were unproductive dependents, but their application had been refused.

As always, no reason was given.

Naturally, the government would not say whether any appeal was possible. Once again, rumor filled the information gap. People said you could petition the country’s leader, Walter Ulbricht.

He seemed an unlikely savior, a short man with a beard that imitated Lenin’s, slavishly orthodox in everything. He was rumored to be happy about the coup in Moscow because he had thought Khrushchev insufficiently doctrinaire. All the same, Karolin had written him a personal letter, explaining that she needed to emigrate in order to marry the father of her child.

“They say he’s a believer in old-fashioned family morality,” Karolin said. “If that’s true, he ought to help a woman who only wants her child to have a father.”

People in East Germany spent half their lives trying to guess what the government planned or wanted or thought. The regime was unpredictable. They would allow a few rock-and-roll records to be played in youth clubs, then suddenly ban them altogether. For a while they would be tolerant about clothing, then they would start arresting boys in blue jeans. The country’s constitution guaranteed the right to travel, but very few people got permission to visit their relatives in West Germany.

Grandmother Maud joined in the conversation. “You can’t tell what a tyrant is going to do,” she said. “Uncertainty is one of their weapons. I’ve lived under the Nazis as well as the Communists. They’re depressingly similar.”

There was a knock at the front door. Lili opened it and was horrified to see, standing on the doorstep, her former brother-in-law, Hans Hoffmann.

Lili held the door a few inches ajar and said: “What do you want, Hans?”

He was a big man, and could easily have shoved her out of the way, but he did not. “Open up, Lili,” he said in a voice of weary impatience. “I’m with the police, you can’t keep me out.”