I’ll see Sergei at the courthouse. I’ll make him feel pain like he has never felt pain before, and he’ll be afraid to even think my name for the rest of his pathetic life.

I remember my father’s face the very first time I saw him in this place, the morning after Lulu died. He was so tired. He closed his eyes and then opened them — and then he opened them wider as he looked at my hand on the table. He reached out and ran his pen along the inside of my index finger where there was a deep cut like a red thread running from the bottom of my finger to the top. “Where did you get that cut, Isabella?” he asked, his voice almost a whisper. I looked at him then just like I’m looking at the warden now — with eyes reflecting back the beige.

The Diplomat

Wiedervereinigung, the German teacher said. Viola knew the Chinese student named Henry would translate just as he had since starting the class two weeks ago, always trying to help, but she already knew this word. It was impossible to be in Germany in 1995 and not know. The teacher, a plump middle-aged woman, told them the fourth anniversary was approaching, and she went around the circle and made them repeat, stretching their lips, raising their eyebrows, as though they were warming up for an opera.

“Wie-der-ver-ei-ni-gung.”

“This means reunification,” Henry said, looking at Viola from across the table. In perfect English. With an accent just like hers. She blushed. His smile was small and careful.

“I know what it means,” she replied in halting German, her eyes closing. The Berlin Wall had come down four years earlier.

“Die Berliner Mauer,” Viola said slowly.

Apparently Henry interpreted this as confusion. “The wall,” he said in his remarkable English, as though he’d grown up down the road from her. “The Berlin Wall.” He stretched his arms out as though showing her how big it was, in case she thought it was a fence for goats like the one on the small saltwater farm on Campobello Island in the Bay of Fundy, near her parents’ house, the farm where Ben now was . . . without her. The teacher clucked and reminded them to speak German. Henry smiled at Viola again, and Mary from Australia giggled as though they were all still teenagers.

It was a small class in a small language school in the centre of Frankfurt, im Zentrum, as the Germans said. Viola had been in the German class for three months. She took the train in every weekday from the small town she lived in with Ralf, whom she’d met on a trip she’d taken to Vietnam after finishing her history degree. When she spoke German at home Ralf would stroke her hair and say: “You are like a kitchen appliance, macerating every syllable. It’s very cute, Schatzie. You sound like a Turk.”

The director had brought in the new Chinese students on Monday morning. The director was an old German hippie, always winking and telling Viola to eat muesli. Mary said that during introductions, Henry had perked up immediately when Viola said she was from Campobello Island. Viola hadn’t noticed — she often shut her eyes when she spoke German, and thought of home. It made her feel braver, to think of the good things back home. Henry was from Beijing. He had been in Frankfurt for one month. He was thirty-one years old.