His room was on the fourth floor of one of the newly built hotels which had sprung up since the reunification of East and West Germany. The view from it was of a city landscape pitted with old bombsites and unlovely former communist blocks of flats. One good thing was the number of flourishing trees, now in their winter livery. These, Berliners informed him, were the replacement for those chopped down during the war and its aftermath when it was feared no tree would ever flourish in the city again.

The telephone by his bed rang and he picked it up.

‘Just checking up on my old dad,’ said a voice.

His daughter, Maria, was calling from Paris.

Petr sat down on the bed. ‘Could we have less of the old? Forty-six is still a teenager.’

They spoke in French, rather than Czech, which had become the habit between them. He pictured her, almost certainly fiddling with the ends of her hair, which she had grown long, and almost certainly smoking a French cigarette to which she had taken with gusto.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked tenderly. ‘Enough money?’

Nineteen-year-old Maria was at the Sorbonne to study politics and economics and Petr was conscious that even now, years later, his daughter’s grief for her mother ran deep and inconsolable. During the good periods, Eva’s spirit embraced them as a containable, even benign, memory. In the bad times, it was as impenetrable and unforgiving as the Golem haunting the streets of old Prague.

‘Are you serious, Dad? No one ever has enough money in Paris.’ She changed her tone. ‘Of course, I’m fine. It’s me checking up on you, remember.’ There was a pause. ‘You know we will be doing communism this term. I’ll be ringing you for the inside info.’

At his end of the phone, Petr raised an eyebrow.

‘Dad, you do still believe, don’t you? Or has it all gone? The ideals, the methods, the benefits?’

The notion that he had spent his life and energy in the service of an ideology which was generally considered to have feet of clay saddened and depressed him. But perhaps that was what courage was all about? Knowing that something might not come good but still being prepared to put your future on the line?

How did his children feel about his life and work? Unsure of their hidden political sympathies, he was careful not to question them in case sides had to be taken. But he did remember, word for word, the letter that his former au pair, Laure, had sent him on her return to England.

‘If you give up on the freedom to think, then your being will dissolve drop by drop. But, at least, that won’t happen to Tomas, whatever you may have done to him.’