She sat alone for five minutes, shaking. She wished she smoked: it might steady her. She struggled not to cry.

Sergeant Scholz came in. He was a little younger than Rebecca—about twenty-five, she guessed. He carried a thin file. He sat down, cleared his throat, opened the file, and frowned. Rebecca thought he was trying to seem important, and she wondered whether this was his first interrogation.

“You are a teacher at Friedrich Engels Polytechnic Secondary School,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Where do you live?”

She answered him, but she was puzzled. Did the secret police not know her address? That might explain why the letter had come to her at school rather than at home.

She had to give the names and ages of her parents and grandparents. “You’re lying to me!” Scholz said triumphantly. “You say your mother is thirty-nine and you are twenty-nine. How could she have given birth to you when she was ten years old?”

“I’m adopted,” Rebecca said, relieved to be able to give an innocent explanation. “My real parents were killed at the end of the war, when our house suffered a direct hit.” She had been thirteen. Red Army shells were falling and the city was in ruins and she was alone, bewildered, terrified. A plump adolescent, she had been singled out for rape by a group of soldiers. She had been saved by Carla, who had offered herself instead. Nevertheless that terrifying experience had left Rebecca hesitant and nervous about sex. If Hans was dissatisfied, she felt sure it must be her fault.

She shuddered and tried to put the memory away. “Carla Franck saved me from . . .” Just in time, Rebecca stopped herself. The Communists denied that Red Army soldiers had committed rape, even though every woman who had been in East Germany in 1945 knew the horrible truth. “Carla saved me,” she said, skipping the contentious details. “Later, she and Werner legally adopted me.”

Scholz was writing everything down. There could not be much in that file, Rebecca thought. But there must be something. If he knew little about her family, what was it that had attracted his interest?

“You are an English teacher,” he said.

“No, I’m not. I teach Russian.”

“You are lying again.”

“I’m not lying, and I have not lied previously,” she said crisply. She was surprised to find herself speaking to him in this challenging way. She was no longer as frightened as she had been. Perhaps this was foolhardy. He may be young and inexperienced, she told herself, but he still has the power to ruin my life. “My degree is in Russian language and literature,” she went on, and she tried a friendly smile. “I’m head of the department of Russian at my school. But half our teachers have gone to the West, and we have to improvise. So, in the past week, I have given two English lessons.”

“So, I was right! And in your lessons you poison the children’s minds with American propaganda.”