“Like you, I am also from Berlin,” said Weltz. “As a matter of fact, I was there just last weekend. I’m afraid you’d hardly recognize it. Incredible the destruction that was inflicted by Hitler’s refusal to surrender.” He pushed a packet of cigarettes across the table. “Please. Help yourself to a cigarette. I’m afraid they’re Russian, but they’re better than nothing.”

I took one.

“Here,” he said, coming around the desk and snapping open a lighter. “Let me light that for you.”

He sat down on the edge of the table and watched me smoke. Then the door opened and a starshina came in, carrying a sheet of paper. He laid it on the table next to the cigarettes and left again without saying a word.

Weltz glanced at the sheet of paper for a moment and then turned it to face me.

“Your appeal form,” he said.

My eyes flicked across the Cyrillic letters.

“Would you like me to translate it?”

“That won’t be necessary. I can read and speak Russian.”

“Very well, too, by all accounts.” He handed me a fountain pen and waited for me to sign the sheet of paper. “Is there a problem?”

“What’s the point?” I said dully.

“There’s every point. The government of the Soviet Union has its forms and formalities like every other country. Nothing happens without a piece of paper. It was the same in Germany, was it not? An official form for everything.”

Again, I hesitated.

“You want to go home, don’t you? To Berlin? Well, you can’t go home unless you’ve been released, and you can’t be released unless you appeal your sentence first. Really, it’s as simple as that. Oh, I’m not promising anything. But this form puts the process into motion. Think of it like that pithead winding gear outside. That piece of paper makes the wheel start to move.”

I read the form forward and then backward: Sometimes, things in the Soviet Union and its zones of occupation made more sense if you read them backward.

I signed it, and Major Weltz drew the form toward him.

“So at least we know that you do want to get out of here,” he said. “To go home. Now that we’ve established that much, all we have to do is figure out a way of making that happen. I mean, sooner rather than later. To be exact, twenty-five years from now. That is, if you survive what anyone here will tell you is hazardous work. Personally, I don’t much care to be even this close to large deposits of uraninite. Apparently, they turn it into this yellow powder that glows in the dark. God only knows what it does to people.”

“Thanks, but I’m not interested.”