Chapter 1 - Dinner Ambush

For an expatriate, New Year's Eve is a troubled occasion. Often you have spent a claustrophobic Christmas at home in Britain confused by how the family seems to have shrunk. Irritated, too, by the fact that your mother still searches through the pockets of your discarded trousers looking for recreational drugs. So on Boxing Day, approximately twelve hours after watching The Guns of Navarone for the sixth time and The Great Escape for the ninth time, you clear your throat and announce that you are expected at a New Year's Eve party. Back home. 'Home'. Abroad. Your parents make no effort to conceal their relief and you too tread with a spring in your stride as soon as you reach the railway station. Yet once you have arrived at the asylum of choice – and for me this has been Berlin for more years than I can count on an abacus – all the buried questions are dug up, like a dog searching for a bone under a rhododendron bush. How does that Clash song go again: 'Should I stay or should I go now?' Where will I be at the end of the year? With whom? Having achieved what? These were reasonable questions for a man of a certain age, a man who was tired of his profession and increasingly uncertain as to his place in the world. Berlin? Well, Berlin had become a home of sorts but nothing confirmed its alien status, or my own estrangement, more than New Year's Eve. The wrinkled and the sad stayed at home to laugh at an unfunny 1950s television sketch starring Freddie Frinton. The funky twentysomethings sweated in warehouse clubs or in seemingly spontaneous but actually precisely planned parties in apartments with bicycles in the corridor and parquet floors that threatened to give way if more than a dozen people danced at any one time. Over in the west, the burghers of the city – the architects and the playwrights – staged dinner parties in high-ceilinged salons. Twenty minutes before midnight the guests would finish their chocolate mousse and dutifully recite their wishes for the coming year. Sometimes that had entertainment value – a husband, for example, blurting out that his special wish was that his wife would stay faithful in the coming twelve months. Yet none of this ritualised exhibition was really for me and though I had been happy to escape Incredibly Shrinking Britain, I did not relish the evening.

Outside, on the streets of the German capital, New Year's Eve is little better. The city briefly, suddenly, appears to be in the throes of a civil war; 365 days of urban anger concentrated on one evening of dull explosions and flashing lights. The Turkish kids of the battered Neukölln district setting up their rockets in bottles and firing them at other kids on the other side of the street. Smoke rising between buildings. The hiss of a Bengal Tiger hurtling upwards, then briefly pausing and, in a moment of brightness, releasing a green sparkling rain over the city, illuminating faces, flattening them as if they had no history, no problems.

What do you do? You cower under your bed, perhaps. But my dog, Mac, a West Highland terrier with the steely nerves of an organic chicken, was already there. Or you shower, dress up, pay 500 euros, and dance in the New Year. But I dance like a zombie, like someone who has just been freed from a crypt, and should not be seen performing in public.

So when Lena had suggested going out to eat, I didn't complain. I didn't even point out that booking a table for New Year's Eve as far ahead as November was somehow typically German. Lena's understanding of the national rhythm was impeccable; I had come to realise that during our almost two years together, had learned to bite my tongue. On 11 November, St Martin's Day, you

eat thick slices of goose with red cabbage and dumplings and begin the long process of fattening yourself up for Christmas. On 12 November, you make arrangements for New Year's Eve; on 13 November you start to plan your summer holiday. It was the German way; nothing was left to chance because that was the road to destruction.

'Good idea,' I had told her, pecking her on the cheek as she rushed out to work.

'I'll book at Borchardt's, maybe they've still got somewhere free.'

'Go for the loo-table.' The so-called Klo-Tisch, the table next to the toilets, was always the last to be booked. 'I love it there.'

'You're so romantic,' she said, grabbing her forgotten BlackBerry that was already flashing like a Geiger counter. 'It will be good to talk again.'

Six weeks seemed a long time to wait for a proper conversation between lovers, but it was only the slightest of exaggerations. At first our affair had seemed boundless, outside time. Then it had been steadily compressed into our working schedules. Lena was an interior decorator and the business was booming. The global economy was floundering but there was a segment of society that had money to spend: the cast-off spouses of Germany's insecure business barons. Lena called them the Desperate DAX Housewives. The DAX was the German equivalent of the FTSE index and since their alimonies were linked to the fortunes of their ex-husbands, they studied the markets more closely than any floor trader. The running costs of DAX wives were more than their precariously wealthy husbands could afford; tax advisers were telling their unhappily married clients to make a pseudo-generous settlement ('Give them one of the unsellable town houses, the snowless ski chalet in Gstaad, the gas-guzzling Cabrio – and get out'). Better, it seemed, than paying the bills for a lifetime of Botox, teeth-whitening, lava stone massages and personal trainers. And what did the DAX wives want as soon as they were ensconced in their new residences? An interior designer who could reshape their habitats ('Lena, darling, make me look independent'). Lena was also doing up a place in Palm Beach and the long-haul commuting was beginning to tell; the woman I had fallen in love with a year ago used to be loose-limbed, at ease with herself; an enthusiast. Now I could see the bags forming under her eyes, hear the tired slur in her voice when taking yet another midnight call from the Palm Beach exile. 'Come back to bed,' I would say, and we would make love, me sleepy, she wound up with her head full of things to do for the following morning. It was no answer; I hated to see her lose her esprit in this way. Life was becoming work eat-sleep. Sleep-time was shrinking, the eating was becoming fattier and faster, and work was making neither of us happier. Our love was under strain.

New Year's Eve was wet and cold but for some reason Lena was not wearing a coat. I could see her through the window of the restaurant lifting her feet high to avoid the icy puddles, like a sheep treading through a disinfectant dip.

'You're on time,' I said, feigning amazement and rubbing her back to get her warm again. In fact, she was ten minutes late but I didn't want to be pedantic. I knew she had been at her office around the corner on Friedrichstrasse, preparing new cost estimates for the property in Florida. 'My stomach drove me here. I could eat a cow.'

'Give them time to take its horns off.'

Lena, hungry, was an unstoppable force. It was her voracity that I liked. Friends, when they heard that we were together, said we were the perfect match. What they meant was that Lena was from Hamburg, and I was from England. Hamburg = wet, dreary, anally retentive, teatime, tweed jackets. England = dreary, tweedy, tea-obsessed, wet, anally retentive. Hamburg = England. Quod erat demonstrandum. The two belonged together. I fact I was drawn to Lena because of her un Hamburgerish qualities. Lena had a drop or two of Italian blood, had a sharp temper, couldn't keep a secret and hated salted herring. When she was hungry, the rumbling from her stomach made her whole body shake and billow like a curtain in the wind. She was as transparent as glass, as untypical a Hamburger as one could hope to find. And the Italian grandmother had given her the tawniness, the speckled-egg look. As we sat down at the Klo-Tisch – I actually did prefer it because every Berlin celebrity with a weak bladder had to pass us sooner or later – she slipped off her jacket. The light growth of hair on her brown arms looked like clinging smoke.

'You're looking good,' I said, meaning it seriously.

'Maybe I look better than I feel.'

'What,' said Lena, 'even Angela Merkel?'

I looked round to see if the chancellor was schnitzelling but she wasn't visible; presumably at home watching television, as usual.

The restaurant was filling up. Borchardt's was, in normal times, a rendezvous for German A listers, or perhaps the B+ crowd. On New Year's Eve, it seemed we were down to the straight Cs. A starlet was talking loudly on her phone, barking orders to her nanny. An old married couple, with hands glued together. On one side of us, there was a table of six, three generations of a single family. A little boy, maybe seven years old, allowed to stay up late, was picking his nose, licking the snot, rolling it into a ball and flicking it at waiters. His mother, with wire spectacles, pretended not to see this early talent for recycling, on the principle that a silent disgusting child was better than a loudly complaining disgusting child. The grandfather's stomach pushed prosperously against the table.

'If you are seriously hungry enough to eat a cow, you should have the Kobe beef,' I said.

'Delicious stuff. The Japanese massage the cattle to make them tender, feed them beer.'

'Sounds like Homo Bavaricus.'

One of my small triumphs in our relationship had been to convert Lena from a lusty vegetarian into a lusty omnivore. I got her to accept the illogicality of eating just green and red foodstuffs.

'You're right,' she conceded after a few weeks of nagging. 'First I was a vegetarian for health reasons, then I got spots and so I became a vegetarian for moral reasons and now I think I just do it to irritate people like you.'

So meat had entered our kitchen again. Lena remained vaguely in favour of animal rights and stayed clear of goose liver pâté and battery chickens and Korean restaurants where the main course smelled suspiciously of fried dog. But Kobe beef, I could see, would appeal to the new Lena. Yes the cow would have to be killed before it reached our plates but not before leading a pleasant life of tipsiness and being rubbed up in the right places.

While we waited for it to arrive, Lena launched into a long diatribe about her customers; their irrational love of gold; the new fad for bay windows; the jacuzzi pools for their poodles. 'If I'm asked to do another leopard-skin bedroom suite, I'll puke,' she fumed, almost strangling our wine bottle. 'I'll tell them I'm vegetarian, even if it's not strictly true.'

I had heard it all before, of course; she loved her profession but not her clients. And I had come to love her, felt a tenderness that I had not known before, yet there was no time or space to let that love expand. She saw me only at the end of the day, or at the end of a journey, when she was too exhausted to develop her feelings, to run them to ground. It was almost as though two hearts were not enough to allow our love to survive. We needed a third heart, an extra ventricle, so that red blood could again course through our relationship. Couples notoriously suffer from the Seven Year Itch. We had the Two Year Twitch: the moment when you ask yourselves, have we arrived yet? Sure, we had weathered the first stage, moving from what appeared to be a fusion of spirits – when we finished each other's sentences and touched each other every few minutes – to a relationship that recognised imperfections. I acknowledged that Lena could be nerve-wracking company if she was in one of her insecure periods; in those moments (which could be forty-eight-hours-at-a-go moments), it was impossible to have a conversation that did not end with a paean to her talents. And then there were the mad times, her transformation into a werewolf if a mealtime was missed or lunch scarcely delayed for an hour. These were ultimately small matters; and no doubt Lena too was still searching for my, let's face it, almost trivial shortcomings. Even taking into account those frictions, our relationship didn't seem to be as brittle as the feuding partnerships of our friends. My best mate Harry – like me a foreign correspondent in Berlin – seemed to be in constant battle with his Bavarian girlfriend, fighting for terrain as if they were pitted against each other (as their great-grandfathers had been) in the muddy trenches of the Somme. Others were plagued by fears of straying partners; or those fears had become real and they were engaged in debate about whether shagging your Slovenian au pair really amounted to relationship-threatening adultery or whether it simply demonstrated over-enthusiastic interest in the family's child-care arrangements.

Compared to our contemporaries, we were doing all right. Lena didn't bang me over the head with a frying pan; I took the rubbish out, unasked. But there was something missing: that third heart. How else to explain the silences on the sofa, the occasional blankness of her gaze?

'You need a joint adventure,' my best friend Harry had told me a few weeks earlier. 'Women need to know whether you are capable of handling stress, whether you will run out if things get tricky. That's what their hormones are telling them: they need to test whether you are a suitable father of their future children. That's why you have to find something to do that is more than just, you know, going to work and arguing about who is going to buy the toilet paper.'

I had thought about this for a few minutes, while Harry had ordered another beer. He was my guru in female matters, my oestrogen analyst, the Clausewitz of the gender war. There were times when he was utterly cynical, and wrong – 'all women are the same when they've washed their faces' – and there were times when he was utterly cynical, and right.

'I suppose we could sail around the world,' I said doubtfully. Thinking: I would get sick.

'You would get sick,' said Harry. 'Why not travel down the Amazon and discover a pygmy tribe?'

I nodded slowly. Thinking: they'll shoot us with poison darts.

'Or monitor global warming together in an Arctic tracking station. They can be quite cosy up there, it's not all igloos.'

Breakfast: whale-meat and baked beans? Lunch: whale-meat and chips? Dinner: whale-meat sushi?

Harry saw me hesitate.

'Oh, work out something for yourself! You must have a dream that can be realised with Lena. Surprise her! Women like to be surprised. You have a bit of time before New Year's Eve. Do some research. And think adventure, not romance – Lena's too bright to be taken in by sentimental goo.'

I liked Borchardt's. It was a barn of a place. Its nineteen-euro Schnitzels were a little too popular with mini-celebrities and their hairdressers, but it had a vague sense of history, a Huguenots meeting place that had later become Hermann Göring's favourite restaurant, a suitable place to muse whether one should prefer guns to butter or butter to guns. Obviously a restaurant for my editor who was fascinated both by Nazis and by truffles. There was something of Nero about my boss; he could, at a whim, destroy the image of a country by refusing to publish anything serious about the place or by proclaiming himself bored. Newspaper editors were the last people in Britain to enjoy imperial privilege.

'You OK?' asked Lena, catching my grimace.

'I was just thinking about my boss.'

'Don't,' she said, leaning over to touch my hand, 'try and concentrate on positive karma. New year, new beginnings, that kind of thing.'

It wasn't so easy though. Some months earlier I had hoped, naively, that my newspaper was going to officially declare the end of World War Two. There was a new boss. The old one, with a face like cracked concrete, had been obsessed with Germany's past. It seemed somehow to be tangled up with Britain's decline. Why had Britain won the war but lost an empire? Why had Germans lost the war but won control over the continent? The publisher had replaced him with a man so young he could have been my illegitimate son. I went to see him in London to bring him the news that Hitler was now well and truly dead.

'Good to see you!' he said, scrambling to remember my name. He wore a beard and so did his three deputies. Sitting in his conference room was like being together with a community of cave dwellers waiting for the Ice Age to end.

'Online news is the future,' he boomed. We all nodded, the beards and me. 'So we expect our correspondents to generate new readers. Our surveys show that the most popular stories from Germany are…' he glanced down at a piece of paper, '… about polar bears. There are polar bears in Germany?'

He seemed genuinely puzzled.

'Just a few,' I said, 'in zoos. One has become a star.'

The editor stared at me, unsure whether I was being subversive.

'Good,' he said, finally. 'Stick to those bears! The readers love them.'

He went down the list.

'No more Boris Becker, please. But we will take freaks, German freaks; they get a lot of clicks.

So: cannibals, babies in deep freezes, incest families.'

I pretended to take notes. 'That was Austria,' I said, 'the incest family. Not Germany.'

The editor rubbed his beard and his three deputies did the same.

'That's what the Germans always say, isn't it? Which reminds me: more Nazis please! Hitler is the darling of the Internet, the all-time favourite; Adolf sells.'

He was right, of course. Britain's unhealthy fascination for Hitler was no longer just a historical oddity. It had become scientific marketing. The Nazis used to shout: One Reich, one people, one Führer! Now, to keep up Internet traffic, we had adapted the slogan to: One click, one Führer. I was in the wrong profession; I should have been a taxidermist, embalming and stuffing old dictators.

'I think I would like to take a sabbatical,' I told the beards. 'Time, you know, to contemplate.' The editor dug in his ear with a pen, always a sign that he was on edge.

'Are you feeling all right, no health problems? He looks fine, doesn't he?' The editor looked towards his claqueurs. One had picked up a pencil and I waited for him to imitate the boss by sticking it in one of his orifices. 'Yes,' he said, 'for a correspondent, he looks fine.'

'Pleased to hear it,' I said. 'It's probably the last stage before burnout. You know how it is with steaks: rare, medium, well done – and burned to charcoal. I'm at the well-done level. Looking good on the surface but in a few more minutes I'll be inedible.'

The boss exchanged glances with the other beards. As if to say: the man really is on the verge of madness.

'Yes, quite. Well, I suppose we can let you go for a while. But make sure you come back to us refreshed and full of ideas.'

So, rather than risk the breakdown of his Man in Berlin, the editor granted me a six months' unpaid leave of absence, starting on the first of January.

All I had to do was to come up with a project that would somehow enrich my abilities as a foreign correspondent. Like work in a mental hospital. Or a zoo. Lena had been pleased for me but I knew that she was worried that we would drift apart: she with her all-consuming job; me on the run from my nonsensical profession. And I really did not have a concept for my half year off. For the first time in my life I didn't have a plan.

Just as the Kobe steak arrived, delivered to the table with the special care that waiters use when transporting the most expensive dish on the menu, there was some commotion from the neighbouring table. A scraping of chairs; a clearing of throats. Lena smiled gratefully at the waiter and we both leaned to listen in to the chatter coming from the next table. The Germans are a nation of restaurant eavesdroppers; perhaps because of the tendency to cluster tables together and maximise profit; perhaps because of so many decades of Nazi and communist dictatorship that had established a tradition of snooping on your neighbour. Either way, I had come to share the national passion for nosiness. Some of my best journalistic scoops had come from using my ears as radar devices.

The grandfather was tapping on his wine glass with his dessert fork. The table fell silent apart from a low-pitched whistle: the rebellious boy was blowing on the top of an empty Coke bottle. 'Shhh!' His mother snatched the improvised instrument. 'Opa wants to make a speech.'

'I don't want to listen to Opa, he's old.' The mother caught my disapproving glance and smiled apologetically.

'It has been a good year for our family,' announced the grandfather and I could see the various relatives arranging their faces for the long annual review: success in the family business, a silver wedding anniversary, a happy pregnancy, the promotion of a son-in-law. Opa was paying for a night at Borchardt's and tribute had to be paid by the rest of the family.

'I want to go to the toilet,' said the boy.

'Wait,' said his mother.

'And in June,' said Opa, who was soldiering his way through the calendar, 'we had a wonderful time at the Kiel regatta.'

'Wasn't that in July?' asked a son-in-law, perhaps hoping to hurry the speech along a bit.

'Toilet,' said the boy. I wondered if he had Tourette's syndrome.

The grandfather rolled on, imperious, oblivious. 'In August, Emma's garden was blossoming…' The boy grimaced at me and I grimaced back. The Kobe was growing old on the plate.

'We had a good year too, didn't we?' said Lena, taking up the Opa's leitmotif.

And it had been: a year of learning about each other, satisfying our curiosity. But now, we both knew, something was slipping away.

'Of course we did. Remember driving up, through the vineyards, past Montemare, that little church?' That had been our summer holiday in northern Italy, in search of Lena's distant ancestors who had turned out to be Etruscan grave robbers.

Lena was radiant now, as if she had caught the noon sun, basking in the memory.

'And then the puncture?'

'And how the village idiot tried to chat you up while I was sweating to change the wheel?'

'Do you remember how you said that this was all you wanted: a place in the country alongside the woman you love?'

'Vaguely.' We had got ourselves dirty fixing the car and decided to take a room in the village, to clean up and slow down.

'Of course you do. We talked about how we would really like to live, not in a city choking on fumes. You wanted to throw open the window and hear the singing of larks…'

'Before they got gunned down by Italian hunters.'

'… and the clip-clop of horses' hooves, and get dew on your bare feet…'

'That was your idea. I hate wet feet.'

'… before collecting the fresh eggs for breakfast.'

'I hate eggs for breakfast.'

There had been a light holiday-tristesse. A musing about the roads we had chosen, the roads rejected. I had been moaning about my increasingly senseless job as a foreign correspondent. The journalism had started off as a young man's adventure; all my generation at university had been desperate to leave Mrs Thatcher's Britain. Now those years are hailed as an epochal turning point. To us, though, Milk-Snatcher Thatcher, setting her sights on the sloppily financed universities, seemed to be replacing Great Britain with Mean Britain. And we wanted out. Some took refuge in what seemed like Thatcher-resistant institutions – the Foreign Office, the BBC, the British Council – and arranged foreign postings. Others went to teach English and Drama to the bright, bored daughters of rich Greek shipowners, walking to class every morning down the beach; writing notes in the siesta that could one day become the germ of a sardonic novel about Britain's failures. As for me, I set out to report from abroad. It had been a good life: bloody wars and revolutions and absolutely no dinner party conversations about the rising prices of a Georgian attic in Islington. But my other self-exiled contemporaries had made their way back to Britain, many shamefacedly admitting that they might have misjudged Thatcher and that she did not perhaps, on balance, figure alongside Pol Pot and Baby Doc in the Tyrants' Top Ten. I stayed on abroad, and from a safe distance watched Britain change and not-change. Every weekend my now chosen non-home town of Berlin was invaded by whey-faced easyJet clubbers convinced that the city, my refuge, was cool. Or hot. Or whatever. It was never that though. Berlin was merely unfinished, the result of an untidy merger between east and west. Cheap rents meant space for galleries and discotheques and writers. In the end though, it was just noise. Nothing of creative note had been produced in Berlin since David Bowie had a flatshare there in the 1970s and Iggy Pop used to steal his muesli-milk from the fridge. Low-cost living – inevitable in a place with too much space and no jobs – ensured that Berlin's main product was mediocre art daubed by middle-class kids with parental allowances. A painting sold to a colour-blind tourist from Ohio for 600 euros was sufficient to pay for three months' rent. So why try harder, why strive for quality? The city had become the Slackers' Capital of Europe.

As for Lena, she too had come to Berlin thinking it would be a well of fresh ideas. Didn't the best ideas come from friction between like and unlike? Between East and West, the foreign and the native? Yet her cohort of designers spent most of their time gossiping about and spying on each other. Berlin wasn't just not-cool, it was also not-rich. On the road in Italy, Lena made plain that she could do her job anywhere in the world, providing there was an Internet connection and an airport nearby. 'I'm in the colour business,' she had said in the car, 'I match tones. What am I doing in a city that is scruffy and grey and where the sky looks like gravy? I would be exposed to more colour if I locked myself in a washing machine with your pyjamas.' I was slightly taken aback by this image. Lena appeared to be mocking my tangerine orange T-shirts, presents from a Dutch friend. They were my pride and joy and I refused to sleep in anything else. Lena's point though was that our joint energy – that which made us interesting to each other – was being curtailed by the city. In the ambling Italian countryside that had seemed plausible: urban life was turning us into dullards.

'It was stupid talk,' I said, 'embarrassing to think about. Too much sun, too much Chianti.'

'But you wanted a home in the country, right?'

'Well, of course, I did. Just like twelve-year-olds want to win Wimbledon, or seventeen-year-olds want to sleep with Beyoncé, or twenty-three-year-olds want to save the world, or forty-year-olds want to own a Porsche, or fifty-year-olds a facelift – it doesn't mean it's going to happen. In fact maybe it's better that it doesn't happen. Some dreams are toxic.'

I paused. Lena was looking at me with strange intensity, like a Scientologist about to recruit a new member.

'Why are you asking?'

'Because we now own one,' she said, clearly relieved – her face suddenly slack – to have spoken the words.

The Japanese cow suddenly stopped its progress down my throat.

She leaned over and took my face in her two hands. So that she could study my face for traces of deceit. Or perhaps to render first aid, since the chunk of meat, value approximately twelve euros, was making me choke.

'Of course I am,' she said. 'It's the German way; serious is sexy.'

Slowly, the drama of the moment sank in. I felt my face crack open into a smile.

'We-have-a-house-in-the-country?'

Lena nodded, solemnly as if taking an oath.

'Where?' I almost shouted, briefly rattling the table. 'No, wait, don't tell me – it's Todi in Umbria, right? Or – no, I know, that old Etruscan settlement! The old manor house, the one with the lemon groves! I knew you had that special look in your eyes!'

The waiter took away the plates so that I wouldn't smash them with my windmilling arms.

'No,' said Lena, 'it's better than that. In some ways. I mean no lemons or anything. It's a bit different…'

'Alt-Globnitz?' Suddenly I felt cold.

'Alt-Globnitz. It's a really nice place. You will love it.' She didn't sound very confident. 'I've inherited the house from my great-grandmother.'

'Where exactly is Alt – wherever?' I needed a cigarette.

'Brandenburg. East Germany. Don't make that expression.'

What expression? But, of course, I was confused. Hadn't her great-gran been dead for years? Wasn't everybody's great-gran dead?

'It's almost perfect. The village has a cobbled square – a piazza really – and the house was where she lived when she was just married. There's a garden where you could write, and plenty of space, and Berlin is only eighty kilometres away, and it's just very very romantic. Who needs Tuscany? It's just full of sunburned German professors and Social Democrats hiding from their constituents. This is real life, and a dream too.'

'Well, sunburn is probably not a danger in Brandenburg.'

'OK, OK, it's not Italy. But you should see the long straight avenues. Feel the peace of the place. After all the hectic – it's just right.'

Lena reached into her handbag and took out three photographs.

The first showed a large two-storey house, maybe mid-nineteenth century. The ground floor had tall elegant windows hinting at high ceilings inside, and six curving steps led from the front door to what looked like the beginnings of a garden.

'It's very grand,' I said.

'You see! It's a Schloss.'

'No, it isn't. That's what all those impoverished Prussians called their houses so they could make better marriages.'

'Well, a manor house then.'

'Smaller than that, more of a villa.' It didn't look uninteresting but something was wrong. 'This picture, the trees – it was taken in the summer.'

Lena blushed. 'The pictures are a bit old. To be honest it doesn't quite look like that at the moment. It needs a bit of work.'

I raised my eyebrows.

'You know the storms that swept through Brandenburg? They smashed the roof. So we'd have to fix that. And when the spring comes the storks come to nest there.'

I thought about the storms.

'The roof collapsed when the floods came to Brandenburg?'

'Yes.' Lena was a combination of nervousness and enthusiasm. Her breathing was shallow. I hadn't seen her this excited for months.

'That was the year when Schröder put on green rubber boots when he led the campaign to fight the flooding of the Oder river? When he captured the hearts of the East Germans, the Ossis? And won the election?' It was still fresh in my memory: a masterpiece of cynical political positioning by the former German leader.

'I suppose so,' said Lena doubtfully.

'Darling,' I said, 'that was eight years ago. The roof hasn't been touched since?'

Lena shook her head and embarked on the history of the house. It turned out to be a trot through German history. Lena's great-grandmother Elfriede had fallen in love with a minor Prussian aristocrat, a dashing rogue who felt more comfortable on a horse than at a desk. Just before getting into a tank to move eastwards, he made his young wife pregnant. He died somewhere fighting the Russians near Kursk but Elfriede stayed in the house with the baby and a servant for as long as possible before the Red Army arrived on its way to sack Berlin and bury the Third Reich. Rather than hang around and be raped, Elfriede fled to Hamburg. The Russians took everything that could be unscrewed and put it in the back of a truck. After the war, the 'Junker' house was taken over by the state, the DDR. First it housed refugees, then it became an old people's home; after the fall of communism, it was made into a retraining centre for redundant teachers of the Russian language until the roof fell in. Since Lena's family had put in a claim for restitution, no one could be bothered to invest anything in the building. It was, said Lena, with an un-Hanseatic tear rolling down her cheek, a house that had once seen love and was now unloved. The message was clear: she thought that we could bring love to the place and rescue it. She had found her project, our third heart.