“I think I’m going to faint,” I said.

“The Allied Control Commission made an attempt to arrest him in February 1947, but the Russians were never going to let that happen.”

I had stopped listening. I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. Only, that wasn’t quite right. There wasn’t anything to listen to unless you counted the singing in my ears from when Erich Mielke’s father had hit me twenty-three years ago. Only, that wasn’t it either. Something cold and heavy was lying on the side of my head, and it was a moment or two before I realized it was the floor. The numbness in my hands was spreading through my whole body like embalming fluid. The hood over my head grew thicker and tightened, as if there were a hangman’s noose around my neck. It was difficult to breathe, but I didn’t care. Not anymore. I opened the bag and climbed inside. Then someone threw the bag off a bridge. I felt myself drop through the air for twenty-three years. By the time I landed, I had forgotten who and what and where I was.

14

GERMANY, 1954

I felt myself being carried. Then I fainted again. When I came to again, I was lying facedown on a bed and they had removed the manacles from one of my wrists and I could almost feel my hands again. Then they lifted me up and let me stand for a minute. I was thirsty, but I didn’t ask for water. I just stood there waiting to be shouted at or struck on the head, so that I flinched a little when I felt a blanket on my shoulders and a chair behind my bare legs; and as I sat down again a hand held on to the bag, pulling it off my head.

I found myself in a larger, more comfortably appointed cell than my own. There was a table with a little sill around the edge that might have stopped a pencil from rolling onto the floor and not much else, and on it a small potted plant that was dead. On the wall above me was a mark where a picture had been hanging, and in front of the double window—which was barred—was a washstand with a jug and a porcelain washbasin.