“Great,” said Batchelor. He turned to Walli. “What have you got for the B side?”

• • •

“You ought to go out,” Lili Franck said to Karolin.

This was not Lili’s own idea. In fact it was her mother’s. Carla was worried about Karolin’s health. Since Hans Hoffmann’s visit, Karolin had lost weight. She looked pale and listless. Carla had said: “Karolin is only twenty years old. She can’t shut herself up like a nun for the rest of her life. Can’t you take her out somewhere?”

They were in Karolin’s room, now, playing their guitars and singing to Alice, who was sitting on the floor surrounded by toys. Occasionally she clapped her hands enthusiastically, but mostly she ignored them. The song she liked best was “Love Is It.”

Karolin said: “I can’t go out, I’ve got Alice to look after.”

Lili was prepared to deal with objections. “My mother can watch her,” she said. “Or even Grandmother Maud. Alice’s not much trouble in the evenings.” Alice was now fourteen months and sleeping all night.

“I don’t know. It wouldn’t feel right.”

“You haven’t had a night out for years—literally.”

“But what would Walli think?”

“He doesn’t expect you to hide away and never enjoy yourself, does he?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m going to the St. Gertrud Youth Club tonight. Why don’t you come with me? There’s music and dancing and usually a discussion—I don’t think Walli would mind.”

The East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, knew that young people needed entertainment, but he had a problem. Everything they liked—pop music, fashion, comics, Hollywood movies—was either unavailable or banned. Sports were approved of, but usually involved separating the boys from the girls.

Lili knew that most people of her age hated the government. Teenagers did not care much about Communism or capitalism, but they were passionate about haircuts, fashion, and pop music. Ulbricht’s puritan dislike of everything they held dear had alienated Lili’s generation. Worse, they had developed a fantasy, probably wholly unrealistic, about the lives of their contemporaries in the West, whom they imagined to have record players in their bedrooms and cupboards full of hip new clothes and ice cream every day.

Church youth clubs were permitted as a feeble attempt to fill the gap in the lives of adolescents. Such clubs were safely uncontroversial, but not as suffocatingly righteous as the Communist Party youth organization, the Young Pioneers.

Karolin looked thoughtful. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said. “I can’t spend my life being a victim. I’ve had bad luck, but I mustn’t let that define me. The Stasi think I’m just the girl whose boyfriend killed a border guard, but I don’t have to accept what they say.”

“Exactly!” Lili was pleased.

“I’m going to write to Walli and tell him all about it. But I’ll go with you.”

“Then let’s get changed.”

Lili went to her own room and put on a short skirt—not quite a miniskirt, as worn by girls on the Western television shows watched by everyone in East Germany, but above the knee. Now that Karolin had agreed, Lili asked herself whether this was the right course. Karolin certainly needed a life of her own: she had been dead right in what she said about not letting the Stasi define her. But what would Walli think, when he found out? Would he worry that Karolin was forgetting him? Lili had not seen her brother for almost two years. He was nineteen now, and a pop star. She did not know what he might think.