‘I care! I do care! I care for my future. Mine!’

‘And what is it? Yours?’

‘To be free. To do as I wish, to make my own life for myself.’

‘An emancipated woman, sleeping where you like. Is that it? Singing in bars?’

‘Well, I exist, I exist, Horst. I am not some vegetable as I would be here, sitting shelling peas. Yes Mamma! No Mamma! Crops and cattle, politics and parties with the elite of Lübeck! A well-bred German cabbage! Ah no: I exist.’

‘And who exists? You or the person you pretend to be.’

‘Both. We are indivisible, you see. I am the same person inside, all I have changed is my shell: like a hermit crab. All I am doing is escaping.’

‘All that you are doing is denying your heritage and your blood.’

‘All I am doing is denying the guilt of being German. I will not be responsible for the heritage and the blood which I have been forced, forced, Horst, you see, to inherit. It has nothing to do with me. Nothing. I came into this world as a hideous surprise to everyone, myself included. I had no choice. No one asked me if I wanted to be born. I was. Twenty-one years ago today. But it is not my fault and I will not be held responsible for the terrible things our people did more than thirty years ago. Why should I? Why? To spend my life in shame? Apologizing?’

Horst made small circles with the base of his glass on the chair arm. ‘I was not responsible either, Luise. Not my generation either.’

‘Your generation is linked more closely, you cannot escape it. Mine can, and I did. Mamma calls it “running away”. And so I have; I have started my new life, far away, and I am happier than I can tell you. I will not live with guilt, and I have no proud memories of the past … I am only starting to make mine now.’

‘In bars?’

‘Oh that. No! That is over, it was a joke only, finished, done. I wasn’t any good anyway, but it was a start. It was the only thing I knew a very little about, those bloody songs … they got me started. Now I move on, but not alone. There is someone in England.’

‘Ah.’

‘I love him very much.’

‘And he?’

‘I suppose so. He says so. I hope so. I love him with all my heart.’

‘Of your generation, I would think?’

‘Of my generation, you are right.’

‘And does he know about this? Lamsfeld?’

She laughed suddenly, hugged her knees. ‘God no! Not ever, I hope. Perhaps one day I will have to tell him, how do I know? But for the moment, he thinks I am just an abandoned German-American bastard with an ailing grandmother in Hamburg.’

‘Dear God! Why … I mean, why Hamburg?’