On Unter den Linden, office buildings were massive and fragile in the same way Soviet architecture was. The hugest structure was, in fact, the Soviet embassy. Trabis were parked nose in. Figures shifted under the lime trees. A man stepped out and hoisted a hand and a cigarette like a question mark. Arkady hurried by, surprised he looked good to anyone.

He was approaching the floodlights of the Brandenburg Gate and the familiar outline of Victory in her chariot when the city opened up into a sudden expanse of stars and grass. It wasn’t a park, but a wide ridge of green hillocks that stretched north and south. Over them a breeze lifted waves of insect calls. His first impulse was to step back. This is where the Wall had been, he realized, which was like saying, “This is where the pyramids were.”

Actually, around the Gate there had been two Walls, stranding it like a piece of Greece in the middle, so that it was not a gate but a terminus, with the view on either side brought to a halt. The Wall had been a white horizon four meters high. There had also been a flattened no-man’s-land of watchtowers both round and rectangular, trip wires, sapper charges, tank traps, dog tracks, brushed fields of antipersonnel mines and seasonal brambles of concertina wire. Everywhere, lights had crackled like an electric charge.

The void left by the destruction of the Wall and all this attendant apparatus was more immense than its presence had been. An image returned that was more connection than memory. He had been at this same point one summer night long ago. Nothing special had happened except that he had noticed a handler with a brace of dogs that were trotting excitedly along the base of the inner wall. The handler was East German, not Soviet, and the way he kept the dogs encouraged but in check was exactly the same way the charioteer up on her pedestal lightly reined her horses. The dogs had sniffed the ground, then turned, straining on their leads, in Arkady’s direction. He had had the irrational fear—he was a young officer who had done nothing wrong—that they were tracking him, that they could smell his treasonous lack of fervor. He had stood his ground and the dogs had turned aside before they came near. From then on, though, he had never looked at the Gate without seeing in the chariot’s silhouette a handler and dogs.