Those words of Pfister’s—“a woman no man ever loved”—change everything.

The next day Oleg was planning to take the train to Kiel, somewhere he has often pictured: a boy of eleven and a little girl a year younger than him, holding hands and watching the snow falling on the sea. The future Peter III’s first meeting with the future Catherine II … He would like to see this place, so as to convince himself that the tsarina’s life could be summed up in these two stories: the young dreamer in her German fairy tale, the “red-blooded” empress in her cruel Russian saga …

The next morning he locates Eva Sander’s address on the map of Berlin. The likelihood of her still living in the same place is scant, he knows, but he might as well eliminate that hope, too.

The district, near Heinersdorf in former East Berlin, reminds him of Russian towns—low-rise buildings, streets lined with trees, streetcar tracks, patches of wasteland. A similarity no doubt connected to the war that shaped the towns in the two countries.

An old apartment building, a courtyard covered in snow. Oleg stops, observes the windows—the stunted plants behind the glass, you would see them in any small Russian town. The main door opens, an old man emerges, turns to greet a woman, a neighbor, who comes out after him … A moment of panic prevents Oleg from recognizing her. On seeing him she makes an about-face and retreats into the entrance hall!

For a split second he believed she was avoiding him. Then the woman reappears, pulling a shopping cart on wheels. Oleg plucks up courage, struck by the banal nature of the situation: a woman going back up to her apartment to collect a cart and now setting off as she intended.

Eva Sander, whom he has not seen for fourteen years …

At this first glimpse, confused by his emotion, he notes that she seems to have grown younger, which is illogical, and yet her face has a vulnerable simplicity, a hint of childlike frailty.

Oleg lets her move forward, then calls out to her softly in Russian: “Your Majesty, where are you off to, with that conqueror’s stride?”

He is expecting a great “Oh” of astonishment, a burst of enthusiasm, and, possibly, tears. Eva turns her head, raises her eyebrows. “Oh, but it’s Herr Erdmann in person.”

She shakes his hand, asks in a matter-of-fact way, “So when did you get here? Are you spending a bit of time in Berlin?”

Oleg is just starting to reply, with a fixed smile on his lips, feeling the slight pique one experiences after telling a joke to which the listener already knew the punch line. “Perfect,” Eva cuts in. “We’ll have some tea in a little while. I’m just off to do my shopping … If you have no other plans, come with me …”

He finds himself pushing a shopping cart and notices Eva is adding a few odds and ends to her list for “their” tea. This detail seems to him both comic and irritating: an extra packet of biscuits, the only change occasioned by his coming. At the checkout Eva takes out a handful of coins and lays them out in a row to count them. Oleg cannot tell if this is a case of Western stinginess, or quite simply a lack of cash in former socialist Germany, as it comes up against economic reality.

On the return journey he learns why his coming caused Eva so little surprise. When the borders were opened the Russians hurried into Europe. “I’ve seen several people from Kozin’s team,” she confides. “They come hoping to find work … When they get here they do what they always used to do in the old days: find my address and ring at my door.”

“I was going to do just that. Forgive me. I know that in the West you have to telephone your friends six months in advance …”

Hard to avoid this acid note. But they try to get over it and act out a scene of old comrades reunited.

Eva’s apartment is large, two vast rooms, but the traces of the former socialist life show through—in the look of the furniture, the tired colors, the kitchen reminiscent of Soviet apartments. The objects from Italy that can be seen here and there look like tourist trinkets.

They drink tea, making a pretense of casualness, but the tension is there, from the effort they are making to put the past behind them, that time when Kozin was shooting his film in Leningrad. The long walks they went on after the day’s filming, far away from the crowded parts of the city … It was the period of the Wall, of watertight frontiers. A world of prisons. And one filled with dreams …

“Guess what masterpiece I saw last night,” says Oleg, rolling his eyes. He tells her about his visit to Max Pfister and The Red-Blooded Tsarina … “A very athletic scenario: the sex was filmed like a bout between two wrestlers. And then, that horse!”

He speaks with heavy sarcasm, portraying Pfister as a sexual obsessive, a bitter old man who rails against Tarkovsky, the persecuted genius.

“I nearly acted in one of Max’s films …,” Eva says softly, glancing out of the window.

“Oh dear, not his Red-Blooded Tsarina!” exclaims Oleg, feigning prudish alarm.

“No. It was much later. Already after the Wall came down. A scenario based on my father’s life. I told you about his past as a soldier: aerial reconnaissance over Leningrad … Pfister struggled hard to find a producer … But they thought the subject was out of date …”

Oleg suddenly grasps what it was the previous evening that had surprised him about Pfister. Yes, this out-of-date aspect of him. A West German, Max really belongs to the period of the war, of the Wall, a generation ultimately very close to Eva …

He no longer seeks to be ironic.

“And since then have you done more acting? I imagine a lot of walls have come down in the world of film as well …”

Eva lays the table—he has not noticed that lunchtime has arrived. Pasta, peppers, olives, and a bottle of Italian wine.

“Yes … As a good, disciplined German, I’ve made every effort to become integrated into the cinema now proclaiming its victory over totalitarianism. After reunification they offered us well-defined roles: those of poor idiots from the East who, on arrival in the paradise of the West, commit all kinds of blunders because, for example, they’ve never eaten pasta like this, or drunk Chianti. Poor relations, at whom Germans from the other side of the Wall laugh heartily … I had to earn my crust so I acted in three or four of those turkeys. And then …”

She gets up, switches on a lamp above the table. The afternoon is gray, it is raining, the snow is melting and leaving patches of earth that swallow up the light.

“And then this cinema, liberated from the totalitarian fetters, began to get interested in the last war and we’ve seen films in which Hitler seemed almost lovable, especially around the time when the Third Reich was collapsing. As a result, it was the Russians who became more and more appalling. They bombed, killed, pillaged. It was so cunningly devised that audiences began to ask themselves: ‘But what on earth did these barbarians come to Berlin for?’ I was offered a part: a woman of Berlin raped by a Russian soldier. Rapes have been committed by all the armies in the world. But the USSR had just collapsed and the filmmakers, like good whores, saw which way the wind was blowing and started to rewrite history. Now this was all they were showing: the Russians coming, crushing the German army’s heroic resistance, violating everything that moved … I turned down that part and then another in the same vein. They pigeonholed me as one of the people nostalgic for the Wall and forgot about me …”

She falls silent, her gaze fixed on the shadows parading past in her mind, hinted at only by the trembling of her eyelashes. Oleg attempts a soothing platitude: “It’s the price you have to pay for freedom, Eva. People say whatever comes into their heads. Sometimes it’s totally crazy: all those Russians obsessed with fornication instead of fighting. It makes you wonder how they ever got from Stalingrad to Berlin. But it’s better to have this craziness than Soviet censorship. I know a bit about that.”

He sips his wine, adopting the air of a veteran of film in the days of dictatorship. Eva gives him a weary, mocking glance.

“The problem, my dear Oleg, is that, despite your terrifying Soviet censorship, you managed to make a short film about your father’s life. I’ve seen it, your Return in a Dream. A very fine film! Whereas we, Pfister and I, despite the freedom of the West, were not able to make ours. About my father. It’s a paradox, isn’t it? As for Tarkovsky, he wouldn’t have been given a single mark to produce his early films in the West. About that, Max is absolutely right.”

The meal is over, they are drinking their coffee, gazing at the window, already dark, streaked by damp snow. Oleg realizes he cannot possibly leave on this note. He adopts a cheerful tone, as if to evoke a memory, a shared passion.

“You know, I haven’t abandoned that idea of writing something about Catherine and Lanskoy. I’ve often talked to a historian, an old specialist on the Catherine century, Luria. He’s put his finger on a very little known fact: under cover of making a coin collection, Lanskoy was accumulating foreign currency for their traveling expenses …”

Eva has risen to her feet and is now standing with her back against the shelves of a bookcase. The shadow enlarges her eyes, and once again Oleg tells himself that a trace of youth lights up her slightly angular face. She speaks without hiding her bitterness.

“Your historian ought to talk to you about Lanskoy’s death … Yes, I know, there are two possible versions: poison administered by Potemkin’s agents or else an excessive consumption of aphrodisiacs. But what’s even more tragic is what happens after his burial. Catherine is shattered, very close to suicide—for the first time in her life. A woman of fifty-five, incredibly youthful and energetic for her years, she sinks into premature old age. And at this moment they find Lanskoy’s tomb, desecrated. His body dragged out onto the ground, stripped naked. Butchery: his face slashed, his stomach open, his genitalia ripped off … Historians say ‘Macabre’ and hold their noses. And yet here we are touching on the very essence of society. It keeps a vigilant watch on those who try to step aside from the game. Even if we’re talking about a tsarina in love, who no longer wants to play. Such imprudent people are hounded right into their graves … A trip to Italy, you say? It was a dream. Like our wanderings in Leningrad. We believed that the world was going to change, thanks to our films and the way they outwitted the censorship, thanks to the fall of the Wall. But the world is a film set, the parts are allocated, the script is always the same, and the director loathes anyone walking off the set without permission …”

She smiles, puts down her cup, switches on a computer that stands on a long table piled high with books.

“Don’t hold that metaphysical digression against me. It’s our German specialty, as you well know. For me, it’s time to get back to the role that keeps me alive. I’m a translator. The Russian that Catherine used to speak is very useful to me, too. She and Lanskoy used to translate from one language into another. Sometimes from Swedish, Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams. ‘I was walking through a town that seemed so familiar to me. Suddenly I grasped that this was an unknown town …’ That must have been how they pictured the towns on their future journey. Now then. Safe home. I’m so sorry I’m no longer the Catherine of the old days …”