“Don’t, please,” said Rebecca. “You’ll make me laugh again, and then I’ll have to be ejected from this building as well.”

“Sarcasm will do you no good.”

She looked at a framed photograph on the wall showing Hans shaking hands with Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader. Ulbricht had a bald dome, and he cultivated a Vandyke beard and mustache: the resemblance to Lenin was faintly comic. Rebecca asked: “What did Ulbricht say to you?”

“He congratulated me on my promotion to captain.”

“Also part of your reward for cruelly misleading your wife. So, tell me, if I’m not unemployed, what am I?”

“You are under investigation as a social parasite.”

“That’s outrageous! I have worked continuously since graduating. Eight years without a day of sick leave. I’ve been promoted and given extra responsibilities, including the supervision of new teachers. And then one day I discovered my husband was a Stasi spy, and soon afterward I was fired. Since then I have been to six job interviews. Each time, the school was desperate for me to start as soon as possible. And yet—for no reason they could give me—each time they wrote afterward telling me they were not able to offer me the post. Do you know why?”

“No one wants you.”

“Everyone wants me. I am a good teacher.”

“You are ideologically unreliable. You would be a bad influence on impressionable youngsters.”

“I have a glowing reference from my last employer.”

“From Bernd Held, you mean. He, too, is under investigation for ideological unreliability.”

Rebecca felt a chill of dread deep in her chest. She tried to keep her face expressionless. How terrible it would be if kind, capable Bernd were to get into trouble on her account. I must warn him, she thought.

She failed to hide her feelings from Hans. “That’s rocked you, hasn’t it?” he said. “I always had my suspicions about him. You were fond of him.”

“He wanted to have an affair with me,” Rebecca said. “But I was unwilling to deceive you. Just fancy that.”

“I would have found you out.”

“Instead of which, I found you out.”

“I was doing my duty.”

“So, you’re making sure I can’t get a job, and accusing me of social parasitism. What do you expect me to do—go west?”

“Emigration without permission is a crime.”

“And yet so many people do it! I hear the number has risen to almost a thousand a day. Teachers, doctors, engineers—even police officers. Oh!” She was struck by an insight. “Is that what happened to Sergeant Scholz?”

Hans looked shifty. “None of your business.”

“I can tell by your face. So Scholz went west. Why do all these respectable people turn criminal, do you suppose? Is it because they want to live in a country that has free elections, and so on?”

Hans raised his voice angrily. “Free elections gave us Hitler—is that what they want?”

“Perhaps they don’t like living in a place where the secret police can do anything they like. You can imagine how uneasy that makes people.”