At twenty, he became a junior sales representative for Potio Pharma’s Western Europe division, then a senior manager based in Paris, a position which meant he could exploit Czechoslovakia’s need for hard foreign currency and, as important, for industrial intelligence at which he became expert at harvesting. Assured of his status, as much as it was possible to be in the current regime, he married Eva and had the children.

He thought of his mother’s toothless smile and her unremitting fervour. ‘The trouble with your mother,’ Eva had once said (it had been a good day) ‘is that she feels guilty for surviving the camps. Turning fanatic is her way of dealing with it.’ Being older than him, Eva considered herself wiser. She was, too, in some respects. ‘If we sacrifice everything we care about for a political system and expect others to do so too,’ she warned him, ‘then we will become like the Nazis.’

The Velvet Revolution happened in 1989 and the communist regime was disbanded and discredited. His parents were long dead, obstinate in their beliefs to the last. Very soon after that Petr was made CEO of Potio Pharma, in which capacity he was currently in Berlin.

He checked his tie in the mirror and brushed his hair back.

He was always mildly surprised that he didn’t look any different.

Mother? Eva? What would you think now of your son and husband, the good Party man, now full-throated capitalist?

Outside the hotel, the cold was intense, and the wind was a devil which fought its way down Petr’s collar and percolated through the layers he was wearing.

He ordered the doorman to hail a taxi. Sitting back thankfully in its warmth, he reflected on the fault lines of this newly united city. The Wall had been hacked to pieces and bits of it were being kept as a souvenir in biscuit tins all over the globe and a divided Germany married itself. Ossiland and Wessiland were declared man and wife.

A romantic union… but not without problems. Technically, the East German Communist regime was finished but, as Petr well knew from his own country, it wasn’t. Like a murdered corpse, it left traces of its DNA all over the place and, as in Prague, there were lingering anger, tension and resentments to deal with.

‘There has been no proper analysis,’ Petr wrote in his report to the board of Potio Pharma, ‘of how the intensity, the anxiety, and the unreality of a dream-come-true could destabilize even the most practical of people and the Germans are very practical.’