Every Monday they began with a new expression or word they had learned on the weekend. This class, Viola offered Heimweh. Henry nodded in agreement when Viola said she missed Canada.

“Homesick,” he said, as though he could picture the sea urchins and shells she saw behind her eyelids. Viola squinted, thinking his name couldn’t actually be Henry. It wasn’t Chinese. He told her later it was a name he had taken for Westerners. His real name was Sun He Peng.

On coffee break Henry was talking with the other two Chinese men as she walked by. Henry smiled and looked down at his feet and then back at her. He was tall. He’d laughed later when she said she thought Chinese men were all short. He told her he used to think Caucasians wore sunglasses so their eyes wouldn’t change colour in the sun. “I didn’t know the colour of your eyes at first,” he said. “Your eyes were always closed when you were speaking. They are green like the ocean.”

Henry had worked at the Canadian embassy in Beijing. He also had worked at the Chinese embassy in Ottawa for one year, part of his training. He’d perfected his English there.

“A translator?” Viola asked.

“A diplomat. At first I thought you didn’t understand the language. You are just shy. Forgive me.”

Viola laughed and closed her eyes and her cheeks were hot.

After the Monday class when the Chinese students arrived, Mary had proclaimed them a mini-UN. Mary was an accountant from Sydney and she was living here with her fiancé, Helmut, a banker she’d met at a conference. He had a telescope. He loved the night sky. They were going to Australia soon to get married. They would go to the desert for their honeymoon so Helmut could see the night sky without light pollution. Viola had never heard this term before.

There was a young couple from Turkey, Gastarbeiter, guest workers doing industrial work there weren’t enough Germans for. Sixteen-year-old Farzad from Tehran who mourned the fall of the Shah and with his large aqua eyes followed every move of Kwan-Sun, seventeen and from Korea, a nanny for a wealthy German family. Padma was from Bombay, her husband an English investment banker. It was the second time they’d been married to each other and she anticipated another divorce and possibly a third marriage. They were made for each other, she said, but only incrementally. It was Padma who said the Chinese were refugees. “The riots, you know, the massacre, in 1989,” she whispered.

And there was Lucien from Burkina Faso, married to a German historian. He and his wife Helga spoke French together, he had told the class. They’d married in Ouagadougou, and now she had a position at the university in Frankfurt. Helga’s last name was von Feldenburg. In the olden days von was a sign of nobility, Lucien stated.

Yes, their teacher agreed, but German nobility ended with the abolition of the monarchy in 1919.