Claus was startled. “Why?” he said. Then he added: “Not that there’s much to tell.” All the same he looked guilty.

“I can’t lie to Bernd,” she said. “I love him.”

“And you obviously can’t lie to me, either,” Claus said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t something to apologize for—just the opposite. Thank you for being honest. I appreciate it.” Claus looked crestfallen, and amid all her other emotions Rebecca felt pleased that he liked her enough to be so disappointed. He said ruefully: “If you’ve confessed to your husband, why are you here with me now?”

“Bernd told me to go ahead,” she said.

“Your husband wants you to kiss me?”

“He wants me to become your lover.”

“That’s creepy. Is it to do with his paralysis?”

“No,” she lied. “Bernd’s condition makes no difference to our sex life.” This was the story she had told her mother and a few other women whom she was really close to. She deceived them for Bernd’s sake: she felt it would be humiliating for him if people knew the truth.

“Well,” said Claus, “if this is my lucky day, shall we go straight to my apartment?”

“Let’s not rush, if you don’t mind.”

He put his hand over hers. “It’s okay to be nervous.”

“I haven’t done this often.”

He smiled. “That’s not a bad thing, you know, even if we are living in the age of free love.”

“I slept with two boys at university. Then I married Hans, who turned out to be a police spy. Then I fell in love with Bernd and we escaped together. There, that’s my entire love life.”

“Let’s talk about something else for a while,” he said. “Are your parents still in the East?”

“Yes, they’ll never get permission to leave. Once you make an enemy of someone like Hans Hoffmann—my first husband—he never forgets.”

“You must miss them.”

She could not express how much she missed her family. The Communists had blocked calls to the West the day they built the Wall, so she could not even speak to her parents on the phone. All she had was letters—opened and read by the Stasi, usually delayed, often censored, any enclosure of value stolen by the police. A few photos had got through, and Rebecca had them next to her bed: her father turning gray, her mother getting heavier, Lili growing into a beautiful woman.

Instead of trying to explain her grief she said: “Tell me about yourself. What happened to you in the war?”

“Nothing much, except that I starved, like most kids,” he said. “The house next door was destroyed and everyone in it killed, but we were all right. My father is a surveyor: he spent much of the war assessing bomb damage and making buildings safe.”

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“One of each. You?”

“My sister, Lili, is still in East Berlin. My brother, Walli, escaped soon after I did. He’s a guitar player in a group called Plum Nellie.”