Chapter 2 - Truffles versus Gherkins

I have been fascinated by frogs ever since I was a boy, eight, nine years old. My best friend, Stinky Cooper, and I used to take our nets and our empty jam jars to our Sussex village and scoop up tadpoles. They are utterly charmless and for some members of our gang their only useful function was as a way of scaring girls; slimy tadpoles slipped down their collars were guaranteed to produce a satisfying scream. But Stinky and I would scoop our catch into the jars and then transfer the tiny swimming frog larvae with long flat tails to buckets in our gardens. There, we would watch them for hours, waiting for them to turn into frogs. Our most important observation was that the tadpoles which grew legs first tended to be eaten by the others. The lesson was clear for us: it was dangerous to develop too early. Prodigies were doomed to be unhappy. Or to be gobbled up. As we were both remarkably bad at schoolwork, this had something reassuring about it. Then the tadpoles became little frogs and we returned them to the pond, watching them grow fatter and call out for mates. There was another lesson for us: however hideous you looked, females were drawn in by voice. Some years later, our schoolmates – now with Clearasil on their noses and Paco Rabanne aftershave under their armpits – were amazed and envious that the frog-faced French singer Serge Gainsbourg could make such an impact on the sex goddess Jane Birkin that they even sang 'Je t'aime' together. But Stinky and I weren't surprised at all; we knew how it worked. I had explained all this to Lena soon after meeting her at my father's wedding. My father, who resembled a featherless buzzard rather then a frog, had just married an ancient East Prussian woman, Mechthild Beckenbender. It was a strange match between a former bomber pilot and a former war refugee, both somehow bruised by war, but the marriage seemed to be working. They were safely settled on the Anglo-German island of Majorca, eating pork knuckle, playing bridge and drinking gin. The gin + bridge was of course part of a life-prolonging formula devised by the Queen Mother and other members of the British royal family: the alcohol dulled the senses and improved the circulation; the cards kept your brain working. Lena's father had been Frau Beckenbender's doctor. When Lena was a teenager, Frau Beckenbender had helped her with homework and they had grown fond of each other. It was an odd coincidence: the old woman had also taught me German when I first came to Germany. So naturally Lena and I fell into conversation at the wedding. 'I can't grasp the fact that I have a German stepmother.'

'Why not?' said Lena. 'We're quite good at mothering. We are mummy-talented. You're worried Frau Beckenbender will leave you to cope alone while she goes and enjoys her passionate honeymoon? She's over seventy, and you're…'

'Old enough to cope in a world of disappearing women.'

'Oh dear, that doesn't sound good at all.'

And so after my father and neo-mother had exchanged rings we had exchanged stories. My failed marriage and relentless attempt to find a German bride. Her failed marriage and subsequent attempt to avoid German men. She laughed a lot: a chainsaw laugh that sent people hiding under tables. I liked her so much that I told her about how frogs were made and how they will do anything to return to the pond or lake where they first mated; how frogs were the true romantics, and that was why they had figured in so many fairy tales. Their ugliness matched only by their big hearts and their even more powerful lungs, their majestic croak and their sense of place.

'Do you have a big heart?' asked Lena, letting her dark hair fall over her face. It was in the dying hours of the wedding party, after the catering staff had stolen the last of the food and the flowers; after the last of the drinks had been drunk and the musicians had been paid.

'Of course,' I said, 'why else did I tell you the story?'

And so, inevitably, we kissed, just as the frog is always kissed.

Lena, in other words, had chosen the right way to persuade me that her house was irresistible: a frog pond and an East German Schloss for an ugly prince. But on New Year's Day, in the cold light, it seemed to be a little too much fairy tale for an old cynic like me. Sure, we had once agreed that it would be nice – more than nice, perfect – to live in Tuscany. At core though, I was a city person; hating Berlin, its sloppy ways, yet at the same time entirely dependent on it. Tuscany was an interesting fantasy because I could imagine it becoming an extension of, not an alternative to, urban life. People, friends and business partners, editors and clients, would come to visit; of course they would, because of the region's sheer magnetism, its scent, its colours and its pace. There were whole communities in Italy populated by British, American and German media professionals, designers and architects playing at being winegrowers or simulating concern about their peach harvest, but in fact plugged in to the modern deal-broking world. Ringing up their stockbrokers, emailing New York and meeting each other in the evenings for dinner prepared by an Italian cook, their one point of contact with the host nation. I could imagine that kind of semi-exile: at least my brain would not take on the consistency of overcooked turnips. But Brandenburg? Its face acne scarred by the pits left by brown coal strip-mining? The rolling hills that were in fact just old slag heaps covered quickly by grass and easy-to-plant dahlias? How could I communicate the sheer wrongness of the idea to Lena, without breaking her heart?

I slid quietly out of bed so as not to wake her. Obviously I needed to think about this clearly, alone.

'Where are you going?' she asked dozily as I headed for the bathroom.

'For a run.'

'You? Run?' She was half awake now, and sat up in bed, her breasts pointing at me, accusingly. 'Don't you always say that if God had intended man to run She would have given us four legs?'

'New Year's Resolution,' I said, 'three kilometres every morning.' I was faintly irritated: did she think I was incapable of change?

'Aha – to the baker's and back.' Lena buried her head under the covers.

As I half-jogged, half-strolled through the debris of the New Year's Eve fireworks – I couldn't go too fast because Mac wouldn't have kept up with the punishing pace – I wondered how I could persuade Lena to take even a modest cheque instead of a house that would end up draining all of our cash. Lena was right in some ways: I had six months free from the newspaper; we both needed a change, to do something creative together. She had no idea, though, as to how incompetent I was in practical matters. Leaving me in a DIY supermarket was like making Stevie Wonder an art critic. Lena would be able to exercise her skills as an interior designer, but what was I supposed to do? The dog gathered pace as the bread shop came into view. The owner had installed a few stainless steel tables, chained to the bicycle ramp, to give the place what he imagined to be a certain Parisian flair. There, every morning, the pseudo-joggers of Grunewald, Berlin's leafy overpriced suburb, could seek refuge and enjoy their first cigarettes of the day away from the gendarme-like glares of their wives. I had mine with a coffee and a sticky bun which I shared with Mac. A retired banker handed around mints to mask the smell of Marlboros, and we silently nodded at each other. It did not do, in these troubled times, to be seen in deep conversation with financiers.

I had obviously pushed myself too hard because after my first drag I had a heart-squeezing coughing fit. One of the bakery's regulars, a bankrupt property developer who lived two doors away, leant over to pat me on the back; I would have done the same for him. On paper napkins, I started to write down the many reasons why I did not want to settle down in East Germany.

It did not look good. What was I supposed to do in the house? Perhaps I would just end up as its incompetent caretaker; no longer the prisoner of my newspaper, but the prisoner of a building, perpetually sweeping up leaves and waiting for the plumber to arrive. There was an existential question at the heart of Lena's house and it was this: how was I going to spend the rest of my life if I divorced myself from my employer? How would I shape the remaining years? To answer that I would have to dig into my past: had I lived the life that I wanted, made sense of my time? And now here was the point. I could escape those problems, dodge the questions, in Tuscan exile – the sun, the sleepy rhythms, the sensuality of it all. Whereas Brandenburg was, in my experience, about as sensual and as stimulating as a dead sheep.

Still, I was determined to think positive. I owed it to Lena at least to look at the place. And it was always a pleasure to watch frogs. There was more to life than humans.

'I'm back!' I shouted, superfluously, since the door had slammed, Mac had marched noisily into the kitchen searching for food and my phone was ringing. It was Harry. There were really only two of us now covering Germany for the British press. Everyone else had given up or gone into hiding. Harry took care of the tabloids, I serviced my bosses, and that was about it. Harry, in his grizzled forties, operated largely out of a Berlin pub, 'The Pheasants' Corner', which had a useful cross section of the German nation as its clientele. If a British paper had a query about a German legal issue, Harry would call across to a lawyer sipping his third beer and ask for information. At any given time in the afternoon, The Pheasant's Corner would have actors, lock-smiting ex-convicts, struck-off doctors and plumbers propping up the bar, all ready to provide Harry with information. It was, in effect, an alcoholics' news agency and Harry was at its helm. I admired his piratical talent. He always rang early to check whether I had come across any interesting news stories. It was no good telling him that I had withdrawn from the news business for a while; 'You're still in the combat zone,' he would tell me, 'even if you are wearing civilian clothes. You've got to stay alert! There's no sensible existence without twenty-four-hour news, it's what distinguishes us from monkeys.' No time for Harry. I pressed the Ignore button.

'Well, thanks for warning me,' said Lena, 'there was just time to get my lover out of the bathroom window. How was the run?'

She ostentatiously brushed some cake crumbs and cigarette ash from my tracksuit.

'Bracing,' I said. 'You should try it. Not that you need to,' I added hastily.

'No thanks,' she said, taking the last of her home-made macrobiotic muesli from the innards of the fridge. 'I wouldn't be able to keep up with you.'

She strolled from the fridge to the sofa, clutching her breakfast. I liked her walk, which involved a rolling of hips; more of a disco-glide.

'You been thinking about the house?'

I nodded.

'And?' I could see she was nervous.

'I don't like being ambushed. Why couldn't we have talked about this?' I sat down in a high backed padded chair, my favourite because you could cut yourself off from the rest of the room. It was a mistake. I should have sat on the sofa so that our knees could have touched. 'We never had secrets before,' I continued. 'When did you go to see the house?'

'November. It wasn't a secret, I just wanted to see the place, be sure about it – and then surprise you.'

We didn't really have serious arguments, Lena and I. Perhaps that was a good omen for the house. All I had to do was occasionally stir her sense of guilt and she would end up making space for me. There had been so many other previous relationships that lacked intuition, and that were impervious to prompting. There were times when I knew, with almost mathematical certainty, that I was in love with a woman. And there were times when I was sure that women were in love with me. Somehow these times never seemed to coincide. With Lena though it was different. She had just broken up with a long-term boyfriend and though she had kissed me, her frog, she was still tentative, happy not to move into my apartment but stay on the other side of Berlin. It was, she indicated, to be a holiday romance without the holiday. We would have fun together, laugh together: a sunny-side-up relationship that would end after a month or so on friendly terms. Some men dream of that kind of partnership. It gives them the chance to get drunk with friends or leave their jeans on the floor and the plates in the sink. But it wasn't really for me; I liked having a woman in the house, her subtle, creeping occupation of the bathroom shelves, her scent that somehow neutralised the smell of dog. And Lena, she too quickly realised that we had to live together to establish common rules and common ground. So she came to my flat in Grunewald, allowed me to keep my red velvet sofa recovered from a rubbish skip outside a brothel but forced me to throw out the brown leather armchairs. I feigned outrage but the cold leather was already giving Mac bladder problems; there was no real sadness when they ended up in the Oxfam shop. But however tidy Lena kept the apartment, there was never enough space. And the lighting was too dim for her to draw. The Alt-Globnitz house was, for Lena, an opportunity not only to introduce some more oxygen into our romance but also a place where she could rediscover herself. I had looked up Alt-Globnitz on the map. It didn't seem to exist. Lena had lent me her supersize magnifying glass that she used to examine fabric samples and stabbed at a spot east of Berlin. Eventually I made out 'A-Globnitz', in cramped lettering. I had thought it was a squashed ant on the map, the relic of a picnic perhaps, but sure enough it was a cartographical presence. Part of the problem was that Brandenburg – the rump of the old Kingdom of Prussia – was such a strange, bulky kind of place. It stretched from tranquil Prignitz in the north, within striking distance of Hamburg, to Lausitz in the south, on the Saxon border. The northern bit was a wooded delight; even the cold war's East–West border had become a haven for foxes, rabbits and deer. The southern chunk had big molar cavities opened up by communist strip-mining. The holes were now being filled with water and converted, in line with some crackpot government job-creation scheme, into seaside landscapes with jet skis, marinas and beach bars decorated with flown-in palms. It was a last desperate expensive attempt to stop the migration of locals in search of a decent living. Somewhere, in the limbo-land between the lush vegetation of the depopulated north and the acidic soil of the over-mined depopulated south, lay Alt-Globnitz.

Perhaps, just perhaps, Lena could find peace there. What could Alt-Globnitz offer me? I wasn't sure. It didn't seem to be the right question.

'I want to make jam in the cellar,' she said, 'I want to learn the cello and just work on projects that really interest me.'

'Ah,' I said, 'the post-nuclear attack scenario.'

'It's just, you know, back to the roots.' She fiddled with her hair; she looked tired. Lena was in her mid thirties, could usually pass for mid twenties. The dance classes and yoga had briefly stopped the ageing process. But in the wrong light and after a hard week she looked her age; the greatest of all female fears, the stuff of nightmares. 'You come from a long tradition of jam-makers?'

'You know what I mean. This global work rhythm has got out of hand. The planes, the instant email replies, the phone calls at midnight. I'm losing a sense of where or what I am.' She spoke slowly, seriously and I began to understand what the Ost-Schloss meant for her.

'Then let's go to the house together and you can convince me that it is the Garden of Eden.'

Lena blushed.

'I can't, I've got to do another Palm Beach trip.'

My jaw dropped.

'You can't be serious!'

'Don't look so bloody glum. It'll be the last part of the job – and I'll be back in a week. Then we can get on with things. Why don't you spy out the place with Harry?'

I thought about this: maybe it was better to go with Harry than with Lena. It would give me time to make up my mind about the house.

'Just make sure that Harry doesn't go Nazi-hunting in Alt-Globnitz. I don't want him scaring the locals.'

Harry had other things on his mind when I met him a day later.

'We're going to keep this short, right?' he said. 'I don't like travelling into the bush in your wreck of a car.'

Harry's Mercedes was in the workshop being finely tuned for another expedition into the German hinterland. Which was a pity because the car might have made a Brandenburg safari more palatable. There was no better way to travel east: behind smoked-glass windows, listening to Pink Floyd on a quadraphonic sound system, your back being massaged as thoroughly as that of a Kobe cow. If in doubt, travel in a bubble. Instead we were going in my battered Opel Corsa that I had inherited from a slightly mad ex-girlfriend. After our final argument she had stuffed her clothes and cosmetics into a leather bag and announced: 'I'm leaving the country – don't try and follow me!' Later, having indeed failed to follow her to the airport, I found the keys to her Opel and adopted the sad, orphaned vehicle.

Harry was stacking a crate of mineral water into the back of the Opel. There were blankets, two sleeping bags, an emergency flare, groundsheet, firelighters, tins of condensed milk and baked beans.

'You've forgotten the shotgun,' I said, 'and a steel animal trap.'

'But I've got a mosquito net,' he said proudly, holding up a brand new net displaying the shop label, Tropical Adventures. We both knew, of course, that mosquitoes tended to lie low in a Brandenburg January but I guessed the reason for Harry's caution. Our newspapers had sent us the previous autumn on a ten-day 'war-zone' training course in the Welsh borderlands; insurance companies had made the course a condition for covering the lives and limbs of correspondents abroad, even those stationed, as we were, in a country that had not seen much war for the past sixty-five years. The instructors, all hardened raw-meat-eating ex-soldiers who looked as if they would rather be night-parachuting into enemy terrain than spoon-feeding baby-skinned reporters, told us the three main causes of death of war correspondents. Not bullets and bombs, but: 1. bad driving in bad car; 2. using the toilet on a long-haul air flight – the most scientifically interesting but fatal viruses got passed on in the loo; and 3. mosquito bites. Ever since taking the course Harry had been terrified of mosquitoes; every trip out of Berlin became a venture into the jungle. And he insisted on driving the Opel; I was to read the map and give due warning if it looked as if we were about to be ambushed by cannibals.

The drive out of Berlin was as ponderous as a funeral cortège. It was Friday noon, the moment when Berliners start their weekend, and the Great Escape had begun. The city was eight times larger than Paris and much emptier. Down Frankfurter Allee, now filled with the smart and young who thought it cool to live in Stalinist apartments, a sharp wind was funnelled between the buildings, making a whooshing noise past the Opel's imperfect windows. A chill slipped into the car. Harry shuddered and clearly yearned for his Mercedes 500. The street was drained of colour, its pointlessly oversized houses parchment-yellow, the waxy complexion of someone who has just left prison. A splash of DDR-red, 'Long live the Success of Marxism-Leninism!', something gigantic and striking, would have done the Allee good. Instead it was little more than a concrete canyon. It was followed by housing estates, built in the last years of socialism and showing their age. Then came urban wasteland, the kiosks where drunks could pick up their late-night booze, the car repair workshops, the One Euro shops, the warehouses, ever onwards until the mess of the suburbs faded into the mess of a scruffy countryside of collective farmland that had been run like factories and then abandoned. As the buildings became smaller, the light became brighter, an unusual winter dazzle. Then, the countryside proper: the Potemkin villages, with flower tubs in the main street, the wooden windows freshly painted as if in readiness for a state visit, and, in stolen glimpses, the wreckage of a car or a dumped refrigerator, supposed to be hidden from view. Seabirds, far from home, and big fat crows flapped away from a lake, driven from the water by a dog with attention deficit disorder. Every few kilometres or so there would be a shrine on the roadside, the picture of a teenager, a wreath. A victim of the Brandenburg chicken game: his foot jammed hard on the pedal of a car with hot-rodded engine hurtling down the country lanes towards another crazed driver. The first to give way lost the game. If neither blinked, the cars crashed. The options were lose and live, win and live, or both drivers die and win.

'They must have some other form of entertainment,' mused Harry as we passed another shrine. The straighter the road, the greater the number of shrines. 'I really think it's a bad idea.'

'Me too, obviously. Such a waste of young men. They could be in uniform, killing the Taliban.'

'No, I wasn't talking about the kids. Chicken's an OK game, we used to play it with knives in my day.' He pointed to a faint scar on the right side of his face. 'I meant you moving to Brandenburg. What the hell are you going to do out here?'

Harry did not approve, I knew that. Not because of any prejudice against the east. He just thought it was wrong to disengage from journalism. For Harry, journalism had meant social improvement, a way of extracting himself from a working-class family – his mother was a supermarket cashier, his father had run away with a younger woman – and a kind of fame. Others in his school had wanted to be football players or punk rockers or bank robbers, but a friendly schoolteacher had recognised that he understood word order – subject-verb-object – and had steered him towards the local newspaper. After Harry jettisoned his knowledge of grammar, he was taken up by the tabloid newspapers and, for a few years, had been a star. Thanks to journalism, he dressed in well-tailored clothes, had travelled the globe (often in search of surviving Nazis) and slurped fine wines at someone else's expense. Journalism had turned him into the simulacrum of an English gentleman. To turn away from journalism, to declare that it was betraying its noble roots by becoming part of the entertainment business, that was too much for Harry. As far as he was concerned, journalism was like the priesthood: you stayed in it until you died or you were thrown out for paedophilia. And, he told me, we were in a business that gave us the freedom to be fools, to jump from one social situation to another – interviewing a minister's discarded lover on a Monday and reporting the effects of a train crash on a Tuesday. It was, he said, staring at me pointedly, the only sensible profession for a person with butterfly levels of concentration.

Settling in Brandenburg was the very negation of my previous freedom. I was, he said, trying to put down roots in a strange country.

'I'd have told you the same if you were going to set up home on the Costa del Sol, or buy a chateau in the Loire. Although at least you could get pleasantly drunk in France.'

'Brandenburg has wine too.' If the world became one degree hotter, East Germany would become the new Burgundy; it was something to look forward to.

The fields were barren. January was no time to visit the countryside. I wanted the soil to be blossoming yellow with rapeseed, or even with wild poppy; I longed for the scent of freshly mown hay. Anything, really, to convince Harry that I wasn't being a fool. According to my map we were approaching Erkner. The German writer Gerhard Hauptmann had set one of his stories there. As I recalled, the hero lost his son in a train accident, killed his wife, slit the throat of his baby; lost his mind, was confined to a lunatic asylum in Berlin. I decided not to mention this uplifting story to Harry.

'You're doing this out of love?' asked Harry.

'Maybe,' I said, 'but so what?'

Perhaps that was what irritated Harry most; a woman intruding on a male bond. We had been on plenty of stories together, Harry and I, and our partnership was akin to the two cops in Germany's Sunday evening TV cop show, Tatort: one of us was impulsive, the other a careful detective, but together we were a team defying the bureaucratic small-mindedness of our society, righting wrongs, the defenders of the weak. In Tatort, as in life, the only thing that disturbed this winning formula was if one of the cops fell in love with a woman. In Tatort the dramatic tension was usually resolved by the woman getting a bullet in her head. I had decided that this was not an option for Lena, and Harry felt a bit jilted. So his question was legitimate. Was I embarking on the Brandenburg adventure (merely) out of love? I was sure that my relationship with Lena had become pretty solid over the past twelve months; the central problem, it seemed, was the role of work in our lives; too invasive, too draining of energy. But I was beginning to understand that women wanted more from me; they had left me in the past because I was so reluctant to commit myself. Now I could change that pattern by setting up a home. My brain was still with Harry: rebuilding a house in a godforsaken part of Europe was an act of clinical derangement since nothing in my life suggested that I could make a success out of it. My heart, though, was with Lena. Harry interrupted my train of thought.

'Got to stop for a pee,' he said. We drew up to the side of the road. It was more of a lane, lined by hawthorn bushes. There was a narrow gap so we pushed our way through into a potato field that rose up into a gentle hill. While Harry attended to his needs, sighing loudly, I climbed up the hill to try and get reception for my mobile phone. Brandenburg's marketing slogan could be: 'No network available'. Frustrated, I punched the buttons that should have connected me to Lena.

Nothing happened. 'Shit,' I said.

'Take a look at that!' said Harry as he panted up the slope to join me. 'What a great view.' I glanced up from the phone. Laid out below us was a patchwork of fields, a copse of birch trees, a plantation of fir trees, grown for Christmas but evidently unsold because of the recession. A narrow stream curled through the fields.

'Just like England,' said Harry, and there was no greater compliment. 'Apart from that camp watchtower.'

'It's a raised hunter's hide,' I said, 'they shoot rabbits.'

Harry, I could see, wasn't convinced.

'What's that down there?' he asked, squinting into the middle distance.

'If we're not lost, then it can only be one thing – the church tower of Alt-Globnitz.'

'Looks pretty.'

And it was.

Harry's mood improved in the final stretch of the drive. The countryside had captivated him and as his enthusiasm grew, so it infected me. We had left the greyness of Berlin in search of colour and though there wasn't a Mediterranean explosion of bougainvillea and azure skies, the winter sun lit up the subtle greens and browns. For the most part our route had been flat and devoid of humans. Now the terrain was rolling a bit – 'Perfect artillery country!' was Harry's verdict – we felt, rather than saw, the proximity of the Oder river.

'Welcome to Alt-Globnitz,' said the sign at the fringe of the village, optimistically circled by the stars of the European Union. 'Twinned with Dunkirk, Hastings…'

'Notice anything about that sign?' asked Harry.

'I was concentrating on the map, the Schloss must be somewhere close.'

'All places where the English were defeated in battle,' said Harry. 'You're going to have a great time here.'

The Schloss wasn't marked but it proved to be easy to find: it was next to the church. Brandenburg towns are easy to decode. Under communist rule, landowners and private craftsmen were seen as class enemies. So they were pushed out. Instead, some kind of factory was usually built to convert peasants into workers. High-rise buildings were slapped up quickly to barrack them. The historic town centre – usually no more than two or three streets of neglected houses – was thus always hidden from view as you approached the place; anything remotely beautiful or interesting was tucked behind a wall of prematurely ageing prefabs. And so it was with Alt-Globnitz. But the church steeple peeped up from between the three or four 1970s housing blocks and we negotiated our way around a needless one-way system until we came to the graveyard. Burying the dead seemed to be the main focus of spiritual activity in Alt-Globnitz. The church, angular and graceless, was locked. But across the low red-brick cemetery wall we could make out, through a screen of trees, what seemed to be Lena's family estate. We reversed the Opel out of the church grounds and found a wrought iron gate marked simply 'Das Schloss' as if it were a prop in a Hammer horror film. No cloaked vampires jumped out at us, however, as we bumped the car down the gravel driveway, flanked by solid oak and chestnut trees.

'I don't see the frogs,' I said.

'For goodness' sake, just concentrate on the house,' said Harry, 'the frogs can wait.'

We got out, stretched our backs, and looked up. Sure enough, as I had suspected, the house was in worse shape than in Lena's pictures. The hole in the roof was man-sized: broad enough to accommodate a sumo wrestler. The drainpipes were blocked by leaves, suggesting that the place hadn't been touched since the autumn. Or perhaps the autumn of the previous year. The window paint was flaking as if inflicted with some rare skin disease. One of the panes was cracked, the entrance steps were chipped. Two rusting padlocks kept the front door closed. A cat galloped past us as if someone had tied a firework to its tail.

'Amazing what you can do with Photoshop,' said Harry, rattling the front door. 'Wouldn't have recognised the place from your pictures.'

The stench of old rubbish sacks wafted out of the house. I spotted a big brown damp patch, the shape of Australia, spreading out on the first floor, tucked underneath some ivy. 'I'm going to see if we can get in through the back door,' said Harry.

'I'll try and find the caretaker.' In fact, I was curious about the frogs and wanted to find the pond. I guessed it was behind a cluster of trees to the left of the house. The grounds were much larger than usual for a Prussian mansion. I took another look at the façade of the house, trying to see beyond its obvious flaws. There was a kind of neglected grandeur there; the house had survived war and dictatorship and it deserved a bit of attention. I heard a crack as sharp as a sniper's bullet and wheeled round, following the sound. Hidden behind a cluster of conifers, I spotted a small fire made up of old branches that kept shifting and spitting. Stoking it was a wiry man in his late fifties, as trim and as undernourished as a jockey. He had the long face of a Norseman, extended by a goatee beard. 'You must be Frau Berger's young man,' he said, 'I'm Lutz.'

Lena had told me about Lutz: a former sailor in the DDR merchant navy, he had come back to Alt-Globnitz after the fall of communism and survived on carpentry and odd jobs. The town hall paid him to keep an eye on the Schloss to ensure that it did not collapse into an exhausted heap. 'Nice to meet you,' I said. 'So that's the pond.' In front of us stretched a bottle-green brackish expanse of water, as long as an Olympic swimming pool. Just beyond it there was the wall dividing the estate from the graveyard. The pond was ringed by trees and slightly sunken, explaining why we had not spotted it when we drove up. For the non-initiated the pond was not much to look at. There was a small jetty, with a canoe moored to one of its supports, but it was difficult to imagine the boat's function: the water was too dirty, the pond too narrow to serve any recreational purpose.

'Don't say you want to turn it into a swimming pool,' said Lutz, following, and misunderstanding my gaze.

'It's perfect as it is,' I said.

Lutz understood.

'You like frogs!'

'They're the creatures of the future,' I said.

Lutz shook my hand enthusiastically.

'A man after my own heart. One day soon all the world will be underwater and we'll become amphibian again, you'll see, and then every year will be the Year of the Frog.'

Behind us we could hear Harry knocking on a window; he was inside, displaying yet again his talent as a cat burglar. 'He did it right,' said Lutz. 'You have to use one of the French windows in the back.'

We walked away from the pond round the side of the house to the back garden. Lutz gave me a potted lecture as to how the von Pandow family – Lena's ancestors – had moved to the area only in the nineteenth century. The family did not have ancient roots in this part of Prussia – and so the house wasn't really loved as it should be loved. Hermann Göring, among his many other titles also Hitler's Chief Forester, used it once as a base for a hunting trip and there was a photograph somewhere in the village museum of a pile of slaughtered wild boar laid out in front of the house. The hunters were all wearing swastikas.

We had reached the back of the house. There was a non-functioning fountain with eight open mouthed fish at its centre. No doubt in happier times water spewed out of them. And there was a sundial. No doubt the sun would shine again. Lutz showed me how to reach inside the French window and undo a latch; Harry of course had instinctively understood. If anything the house was more impressive from behind than from the front. The garden was just scrubland, but there was a lot of it, perhaps 150 metres. The tall windows opened up onto a terrace.

'It could be good in the summer,' said Lutz. 'See those trees on the fringe of the garden? They're pear trees, planted in the nineteenth century to compete with the von Ribbecks in the Havelland. You know the Fontane poem about the Ribbeck who gives pears to the village children?' I looked blank. A former sailor was going to quote Fontane at me?

'My mother taught it to me. We didn't do it at school of course. It's about a kind-hearted aristocrat, and so obviously the commies did not teach it at school. Aristos were the Class Enemy – and their houses were either bulldozed or used to house old people or nutters. So no money was ever invested in manor houses. That's why yours is such a mess.'

We were inside now, in a long salon that had been split in two by an artificial wall. Lutz was still talking but I tried to switch off and concentrate on the space. It had become clear to me after only half an hour of acquaintance that Lutz was an autodidact who was determined to share his knowledge. Perhaps it was all those years at sea. They say that westerners are supposed to be the know-it-alls lecturing their colleagues, their wives and their dogs as if life was an eternal classroom. But it seemed that the Ossis too had an urgent need to put strangers straight.

'You'll have to take away that divider-wall, of course,' said Lutz, 'it was put up when the house was used as an old people's home. This was their common room and behind the wall was the kitchen.'

I held up my hand, hoping that Lutz would understand my need for silent communion with the house. In the background, I heard a toilet flush.

'Plumbing seems to be working OK,' said Harry.

'This is Lutz,' I said, 'he's the caretaker.'

Harry stretched out a hand. Lutz, conscious of where Harry had just been, merely raised his palm in greeting.

'What are those?' Harry asked Lutz, pointing at piled-up tables, with inkwells and flip-up tops.

'They're school desks,' said Lutz. 'It was used as a classroom.' Lutz explained to Harry how the house had been used after the Berlin Wall came down to retrain Russian language-teachers. Modern German history is divided into the period before and after the Fall of the Wall; the events of 1989 are known as the 'Wende', the turning point. The house too had gone through its Wende and Harry was fascinated. He had clearly taken a shine to Lutz. That left me free to explore. There was an impressive blue-tiled stove in the corner. Alt-Globnitz's one factory had made the tiles for stoves, glazing them at high temperatures. Sadly such stoves had had their day. Lutz was right about knocking down the wall; the room had to recover its natural length. There were four tall windows on the front side of the room; two sets of French windows opening up onto a terrace on the rear side. The place should have been full of light. Instead it seemed cramped and dark. Green, blistering linoleum on the floor merely added to the impression of a Dickensian orphanage. The kitchen was rudimentary: a long sink, a draining board, a scratched work surface. Everything valuable or useful had been ripped out long ago.

'It's bloody cold here,' grumbled Harry, interrupting a long conversation with Lutz about the bars of Bilbao.

'That's from upstairs,' said Lutz, 'from the roof. Oh, and the boiler's not working. And… be careful!'

The warning was to me. I had started to climb up the rickety wooden staircase to the first floor and made the mistake of thinking the banister would help the ascent. Instead, the banister knob fell off and rolled free. The stairs led to a gallery which overlooked the salon, like the bridge of a ship. A corridor then ran left and right to two separate wings – where the infirm pensioners had been housed.

From the attic I could hear scratching noises. Mice, perhaps, or rats; certainly something alive with claws. After a career in newspapers, I hated rodents of all kinds. Even as a child I had been kept awake by a hamster, bought for me by over-eager parents, chewing the pink Financial Times pages that had been placed in his cage. In the end I had quietly got rid of the animal – swapping him with Stinky Cooper for twelve Panini stickers – and told my parents that little Tommy had gone to heaven. They were very impressed by my stoical attitude to death.

'There are nine rooms with sinks in the two wings, and a bathroom at the end of the corridor,' said Lutz. 'In those days, it was three old women in each room.' He shuddered. 'To be honest I don't much like going in them.'

Harry pushed open the door of one of the rooms: empty, apart from an iron-framed bed with springs. Some mould high up on the ceiling; a naked non-energy-saving light bulb.

'Remind you of your boarding school?' smirked Harry. I ignored him.

'What happened to the residents?'

'Most of them are buried in the cemetery.'

The inspection tour lasted another hour. The priorities were clear: the roof had to be propped up and repaired, the old DDR boiler had to be replaced, the windows sealed.

'Can you find a team of workers, Lutz?'

He nodded. One of his most profitable ventures was to convert farm doors – bought in Poland – into interestingly rustic dining tables for the Germans.

'Next time I cross the bridge, I'll ask around. But it will cost – the Poles are not as cheap as they used to be.'

Harry and I glanced at each other. Neither of us had grasped exactly how much money was going to have to be ploughed into the house, just to prevent it from falling down.

'This is going to be like burning a fifty-euro note every thirty minutes for the next two years,' said Harry. 'It would be cheaper to invade Iraq. Again.'

Lutz agreed. 'I think you will have to borrow lots and lots of money.'

'And how are we supposed to pay that back? Lena is going to work less, I'm on the brink of chucking in journalism.'

Harry grimaced.

'Why don't you just go for something smaller, more modern, a little cottage somewhere? Sell the place and use the money? Or,' Harry added leadenly, 'you give up the idea and stay true to journalism. Why pretend to be laird of the manor?'

'It wouldn't work. Lena wants to get back to her roots. And actually' – this just slipped out – 'I like the place. It may look sick but it can be brought back to health.' I surprised myself but it was true – I felt sorry for the old pile. It had probably never been really grand, but it deserved better.

'Yes,' said Lutz – we were sitting on the broad downstairs windowsills since there were no chairs – 'you are right. The house is like an old ship that has been battered by storms. It just needs to recuperate a bit.'

'But there's going to be a cash flow problem.'

We sat silently drinking Scotch out of the emergency flask brought by Harry. Even Lutz held his tongue, a sure indicator of crisis.

'Got it!' said Harry at last, jumping off the sill. 'A British bed and breakfast! The full works: fried eggs, grilled tomatoes, black pudding and baked beans for breakfast. Endless cups of milky tea with sugar. The Union Jack flying in the garden. Mountain bikes so that the visitors can get out during the day and leave you in peace to write your books.'

'Lukewarm beer and egg sandwiches,' chipped in Lutz, recalling no doubt one of his stopovers in Liverpool.

'Laura Ashley quilts in the bedrooms,' said Harry, 'hot water bottles. You'll bring some British culture to Brandenburg, the land that God forgot – you'll be Our Man in the East, a bringer of civilisation.'

'And how is any of that supposed to bring in cash? Is there any evidence at all that the Brits give a toss about Germany?' My experience as a correspondent suggested otherwise. It was difficult to forget the sheer indifference on the faces of my bosses.

'Let me explain how it'll work,' said Harry, his face flushed at the thought of a new, subversive adventure.

And so through a long cold night, Harry and I cooked up our plan.

TUSCANY	BRANDENBURG
Tagliatelle con tartuffo	Gherkins
Etruscan tombs	Old Soviet barracks
Close to jet set resorts	Close to German Army cemeteries
Frescoes	Fried sausages
Natural disaster: Poor grape harvest, wine too sugary	Natural disaster: Flooding along the Oder river, thousands homeless