“In Potsdam. But he’s always complaining. Odd how your suggestion of him coming back to live in West Berlin is so nearly true. But then, you are a Berliner. You know how these things are. ‘I’ve got no friends in Potsdam,’ he says. That’s always the big complaint. ‘Look, Pa,’ I say, ‘there’s nothing to stop you from going into West Berlin and seeing your mates and coming home again.’ Incidentally, the mates—his mates—they thought I was dead. That’s what I told Pa to tell them, as early as 1937. I say, ‘See your friends quietly in the West and live quietly in the East. It’s not like there’s a wall or anything.’ Of course, since the inner border was closed he’s started to suspect the same would happen here in Berlin. That he’ll be trapped on the wrong side.” Mielke sighed. “And there are other reasons. Father-and-son reasons. Is your old man still alive?”

“No.”

“Did you get on with him when he was?”

“No.” I smiled sadly. “We never learned how.”

“Then you know what it’s like. My father is a very old-fashioned kind of German communist, and believe me, they’re the worst. It was the workers’ strike of last year that really did it for him. Trouble-makers, most of them. Some of them counterrevolutionaries. A few of them CIA provocateurs. But Pa didn’t see it that way at all.”

I flicked my cigarette onto the ground and was leaving it there, but Mielke ground it under the heel of his handmade shoe as if it had been the head of a counterrevolutionary.

“Since we’re being honest with each other,” he said, “there’s something I don’t understand.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why you did it. Why you betrayed them. To me. You’re not a communist any more than you were a Nazi. So, why?”

“You asked me a question like that before, don’t you remember?”

“Oh, I remember. I didn’t understand it then, either.”