‘The food is a mix,’ Birgit said. ‘Mainly German, but with a touch of American.’ People danced as we considered the menus.

‘Men are such poor dancers,’ Birgit said, covering a smile with a hand. ‘It would be better if women just danced with women.’

With a little straying, they’d press on us. Closest was a woman with her back to my gaze, and a bearded forty-year-old, moving with a soft ungainliness. Birgit was right: the woman was lost to her thoughts. She just happened to be dancing. The man was smiling, content, as if he could see he was doing something silly. I smiled too. Like yawns, smiles carry.

‘Would you like to?’ Birgit asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘Dance!’

‘No!’ I burrowed into the menu card.

‘I can’t force you, but I think you’d be a good dancer.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, there’s a rhythm to the way you walk – and speak.’ I took refuge in the names of courses.

‘These people . . . they’ve been coming here for decades. To dance.’

I wasn’t sure what she meant by ‘these people’. Were the smiling man and the woman whose face I couldn’t see, whose back moved stoically, taking the brunt of his dancing, included? Had they been here then? Was it possible to separate then and now? There was a separation, yes, but I was distracted by the wavering figures.

‘They’ve been coming here for twenty years?’

‘Yes,’ she said, as if saying ‘yes’ was enough. She believed it the moment she said it. She glanced at the crowd. ‘For these dance nights.’

‘And was it always this music?’

Her eyes sparkled.

‘Yes!’

It wasn’t a ‘retro’ event. The sound in the speakers seemed familiar to people, like a dialect. The numbers moved between country and western, hillbilly and the blues without premeditation. Each was seized as a departure to a different mood. I listened for a hit from the sixties. It didn’t come. But the crowd smiled at each song. I began to think the music came from a unique repository: like a record collection you stumble on in someone’s home at a certain point in your life.

Studying the dancers – not with envy but absorption, even faint astonishment – I couldn’t decide where I was. I wasn’t confused. It’s just that I didn’t feel enough of a divide – between present and past, them and myself. The dance floor had a boundary. The tables were arranged accordingly. But to study the dancers was to be undivided from their world. They just moved; some, like the bearded man, a few steps backward, grinning. The enthusiastic ones twirled. They’d forgotten. This happens with regime change: no vestige of one’s history remains. One enters the present anew. Of course, there must be constants: like this music. But it’s as if the great changes haven’t taken place. Or – this came to me not as a question, but an alternative – had the wall not fallen? Why was I here, in that case?