BERLIN 1991

It is almost midnight and the Wroclaw Central Station is badly lit, parts of it drowning in darkness. The Plexiglas ceiling over the platforms is yellowed, the colour of nicotine stains. The Berlin Lichtenberg train is waiting already.

Anna is a bit teary after the warm goodbyes, the promises to write, to come back more often, but she is also calmer. As she was leaving, her father turned his head away from her to hide his red eyes.

The train is almost empty, so Yan leaves Anna at the platform with the luggage and scouts the compartments to find one with someone in it, and, as he has stressed, someone who is not going to get off before Berlin and leave her alone, an easy target.

When he waves to her from an open window, he is three cars away. He has found a woman in her late fifties, obviously relieved to have someone in the compartment again. Three gentlemen got off in Wroclaw, she says and she was afraid she would be alone. So now there will be two of them, two women travelling together. This is not the best choice, but better than being on her own.

“I’ll be all right,” Anna says, impatient with all this fuss.

“Your brother is right,” the woman says. She is wearing a pair of black pants and a pink angora cardigan. “This is no joke. I have heard they spray sleeping gas into the compartment, and then steal all the luggage.”

They have a berth to lie down and stretch their legs, the woman says. It’s not too bad. She has been taking this train three times a year, for the last five years. “Idzie wytrzyma,” she says. It can be endured.

Before he left, Yan gave Anna a roll of newspapers and magazines to read. My Style again, with its glossy photographs. “Like in the West, see,” he tells her, mockingly. The magazine is the creation of General Jaruzelski’s daughter who, under the martial law her father imposed, smuggled Solidarity leaflets in her father’s chauffered limousine.

“That’s real Poland for you,” Yan says.

In the train Anna leafs through an interview with a Polish actress, photographed in her mansion outside Warsaw, with her two children, her antiques, treasures salvaged from old barns and restored to their shining selves. “My husband travels a lot,” the actress confesses, “and only when he comes back the house is a home again. The children feel it; the dogs feel it. That’s when we are a true family.”

Anna tosses the magazine away from her. It falls on the floor, but she doesn’t pick it up. She opens a newspaper, her eyes stopping on a small note in the corner. Washington has removed Eastern Europe from its list of possible nuclear targets. Perhaps she should have left straight for Montreal. Her mother was right; it’s time to get on with her life. Time to forget.

Anna’s companion clears her throat. Her feet in white nylon slippers look swollen. She stretches them on a brown blanket. Her back hurts, she says. She has been to a few doctors, but they are no good.

“One should not transplant old trees,” she says, staring at the ceiling where a lamp protected by a metal grid is dimmed. She is lonely in Berlin, in her nice apartment. “My sister, all my neighbours are in Katowice. I see them only three times a year, now. Before, I saw them every day. In Germany neighbours don’t want to know you.”

The German route of the Polish exodus, Anna thinks, the hardest of them all. Ethnic Germans returning to their native land, often with just a few words of the Muttersprache, desperately searching for a translator, digging up family documents to find proof, any proof of their German origin. In the 70s and 80s even family shame — a father in the Wehrmacht, a grandfather’s name on the Volksdeutsch list — could become the chance of a lifetime. Old certificates were sewn into underwear or folded and placed inside hollowed heels, hidden from the prying eyes of the Polish border guards. Volkswagendeutsche, their Polish neighbours called them, but the name had an envious ring to it, a dose of bitter understanding.

“I shouldn’t have listened to him,” the woman sighs. “To my son,” she adds for Anna’s benefit.

Anna has heard of weeks spent in German camps, on squeaking beds, six to a room, filling out forms, answering questions, and then, waiting for the verdict on the sufficiency of bloodlines, on the merits of having been born in Schlesien, Pommern, Ostpreussen, Breslau, Osterode, Katowitz. All of it amid whispers about Neo-Nazi attacks, Molotov cocktails thrown into the barracks. Aussiedler aus Polen killed and wounded to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, and to remind them that blood doesn’t lie.

The woman on the train is telling Anna a joke she heard in Berlin. “A Norwegian, a Russian, a German, and a Pole are in a train,” she begins in a flat monotone. She must have repeated the joke many times. “The Norwegian takes out a piece of smoked salmon, takes two bites, opens the window and throws out the rest. ‘Don’t be surprised,’ he says to his companions. ‘It’s really good salmon. But in Norway we have too much of it.’ The Russian takes out a tin of caviar, eats a few spoonfuls, and throws the rest out of the window. ‘It’s wonderful, but we have too much of it at home,’ he says.”

She takes a deep breath and gives Anna a telling look; the ending is coming and Anna would like to shrink, evaporate. “Then,” another suspension of voice, a pause, a deep breath for more effect, “the German opens the window and throws the Pole out.”

She looks at Anna, waiting for her reaction. Neither of them is meant to laugh, that is easy to tell. A nod of the head will suffice. A few moments of silence.

“Why did you leave?” Anna asks what is expected of her.

“Why?” the woman asks. “Why? I listened to my son. He was the first one to emigrate. Then he came to visit and kept telling me to sell everything and go to Germany. Why live like an animal, he said. Why line up for scraps of meat? You will be like a queen in Berlin. You will walk into a store, get whatever you want. Now he is too busy to see me. Work, work, work. Everybody works. Nothing else matters.” The woman gives another big sigh.

“Why are you going to Berlin?” she asks now. It really is an invitation to confess or to explain, but Anna stalls. She says she is only visiting.

“Family?”

“No, a friend.”

“That’s nice,” the woman says, still hopeful that this is just the beginning of a story. She is disappointed when Anna doesn’t continue. “A Polish friend?” she tries to prod her, but Anna closes her eyes and listens to the pounding of the wheels.

When Anna wakes up it is six thirty in the morning, and she is already in Berlin. Her companion has woken up, too, and she is stretching her arms. She must have forgiven Anna the disappointment of the evening for she is smiling now, asking if Anna needs any help getting to her friend’s apartment. “Oh, no,” Anna says, moved by the concern in the woman’s voice. “I’ll manage. Thank you very much.” The woman nods and wishes her a good and safe journey.

Anna has made reservations in an old Jugendstil Hotel-Pension near the Tiergarten thinking that she would prefer the marble entrance and the cobblestone street outside over another Marriott. But whatever pleasure the curved lines of the hotel’s façade give her, dissipates fast. Yes, she should have gone straight home, to Montreal, she thinks. There is still time to get a few courses to teach for September. A friend at Concordia University urged her to apply. In Wroclaw there were moments, more and more frequent, in which she could see flashes of her new life. Not much yet, an ordinary walk along St. Catherine Street, a dinner party, a drive to the Laurentians. She should go back home, to her classes, her friends. To the trunk filled with emigré stories, her hopeless, unfinished quest for the patterns of escape. No, not the patterns, she corrects herself angrily. Justifications. Redeeming insights, epiphanies of flight.

Why spoil it all now, why scratch at the closing wounds?

“You are not running away” she tells herself, in her hotel room with a view of a Berlin street where she could, with great ease, imagine the ruins she has seen in the countless documentaries of the final victory. Soviet tanks rolling through the ruins, a red flag with hammer and sickle perched on the Brandenburg Gate. “Not now, not from here!”

This is the last of Ursula’s letters to William: They were fools, these hard working, silent men from the Sudeten Mountains. The land was poor there, stones and barren soil, and they worked it for centuries, holding to it as they held to their German language. They were fools, for when Hitler came and promised them work and money, paradise on their stony earth, when he told them how they had been abused and neglected, they believed him. “Look at yourselves,” he said. “You who have been driven from your Fatherland only to become the germ from which this nation that now tries to claim you has emerged. Without your sweat and blood nothing would grow here. Look at yourselves. You are not like Slavs and Jews! You do not belong to this small, weak country. Not you, not the Giants of the Sudetenland.”

“Your real fight,” their Führer told them, “is not for some puny parliamentary rights for the German minority, these monstrous children of barren democracies. You and all Germans who live outside the Reich are now the most important part of the German nation. What I want for you is to conquer the land you live in, to rule it as you were always meant to do. Your loyalty is to your nation, not to the country you live in. Protest, demonstrate, riot. Demand to be returned to Fatherland,” he kept saying. “And you will not be forgotten.”

The Sudeten Germans listened. They demonstrated against Prague. They broke windows in Jewish stores and fought in the streets. They cheered when, on the Nuremburg dais, Hitler demanded their right to self-determination. And they were rewarded.

On the 29 of September 1938, at the Munich conference applauded by the deluded Europe, Sudetenland became part of the German Reich and Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten German Party, its Gauleiter. The Giants of Sudetenland. This was the time of rewards, work and money, slave labour from the conquered lands in the East. A few years of prosperity, until the bodies of their dead started coming back from the front.

In 1945 the Czechs did not even wait for the international treaties to take their revenge. “You have to go,” they said. “All of you. You started the war. Your treachery destroyed the Czechoslovak Republic. Why should we allow you to live in a country you helped to kill?”

Revolutionary Guards put on their arm bands and moved into Sudetenland to take their revenge. Well before the allied forces agreed to the expulsion of Germans from the East, “wild deportations” drove away 600,000. The death marches and pogroms that ensued were payment for the delusions of one generation. They were all Germans; they were all guilty; they had to go.

In May of 1945 the people of Sattel gathered in their church for the last mass. It was dark and they lit the candles, but no one was able to say a word. So the priest led their silent prayers and the whole congregation, head touching head, responded in their hearts, without words. A few hours later that priest was killed by the guards; he was trying to smuggle the chalice.

In Weckelsdorf, the guards ordered all Germans to go away. They did. They left their houses, their furniture, their clothes, their china, and went, only to be turned back at the border. Without proper papers, without the international treaties that would give them a place to live, no one wanted them. “Go back where you came from and wait,” they were told. But when they got back to Weckelsdorf, now called Teplitz, their houses were already taken; their clothes and silver divided among those who moved in. So embarrassed the new owners were by this unexpected and unwanted return, that the Revolutionary Guard rounded the Germans up and took them away from the town, to the forest. When the guards got back into Weckelsdorf no one asked them what had happened. No one wanted to know. Only when a few months later relatives from Germany began their search, when through Red Cross they started their frantic inquiries, the mass grave in the forest was unearthed. And when the good judges from Nachod looked at the body of a small girl, crowning the heap of corpses, her stiff hands still raised, still pleading to be spared, they did not know what to say.

The villages of the Sudeten Germans are empty now. There is nothing left there but broken fences. Grass is growing through the floor boards of abandoned houses. Wood, when it is left outside, becomes grey and brittle from the sun and rain. The graves and the fields are overgrown with nettle, wild raspberries, and thyme. Some of the tombstones have crumbled, but you can still make out some names on them. Pohl, Honig, Navottny.

Anna folds the letter back, carefully. This is the day in which she will take things easily. A walk in the Tiergarten, a long, hot bath. She will be kind to herself, gentle. She needs all her strength now. Ursula is waiting for her.

The lower half of the café window is covered by a white lace curtain, suspended on a brass rod. Inside, Anna can see a ceiling fan making its endless rounds, brass lamps on the walls, and her own pale reflection. It is ten o’clock in the morning. She is standing in front of the milky glass doors of the Vamos café, waiting for a whiff of courage to take her in. “The waiter will tell you where I am,” Ursula’s message read. “Just ask to be seated at my table.”

Anna takes a deep breath of the air still moist from the morning rain. Walking has made her blood flow faster, but the residue of a headache is still there, the throbbing pressure in her forehead. At night she slept badly, waking every hour, dozing, waking up again. She was screaming at someone in her dream until her throat hurt. She was pushing at a grey, shapeless body that gave way under her hands, as if she were trying to move air.

Before coming here, she went through her clothes carefully, discarding them one by one. The jacket was too formal. The brown sweater too loose. It angered her that she was taking so long. “Does it really matter how you look?” she asked herself in front of the mirror, tossing her hair back, pinning it into a bun. All I want is to see her, she kept thinking. I know everything I want to know. I’m not like Piotr. What has happened, happened. I’ll get over it. To Marie, when she called her from Wroclaw, she even said that she had forgiven William. “He loved both of us,” she said. “At the same time.” It sounded very simple then, but words like these don’t mean much here.

“Just one look at Ursula,” she thinks, “and I’ll go home.”

Finally, she settled for a black wraparound skirt and a salmon-pink blouse with a black embroidered pattern that added warmth to her skin. And Babcia’s coral necklace. She let her hair loose again. It did matter, whether she wanted to admit it or not. It mattered to look her best. Now, as she is straightening her skirt, pulling on her blouse to smooth the front, she catches her own reflection in the glass window. The coral necklace coils around her neck, and she touches the smooth surface with the tip of her finger.

“Come this way, please. Frau Herrlich is waiting for you.” A waiter has a thin-lipped smile. He is swarthy and well built, and he gives Anna a knowing look, as if he guessed more than he was letting on, a thought that Anna dismisses as utter nonsense. Frau Herrlich. A line from one of Ursula’s letters flashes in Anna’s mind. I feel married to you in the most profound sense of the word.

The woman in a red crocheted vest who steps forward to greet her has a bushy mop of greyish curls; her thin face is flushed and drawn. She is rather short, shorter than Anna, even in her high heels. In her late forties, perhaps early fifties. William’s age. There is fatigue in the corner of her lips, a tiredness to her skin. Her mouth is too wide, her lipstick too dark.

“It’s good you’ve come,” she says in a raspy voice, turning away for an instant, to motion for the waiter. Her English is flawless, but Anna can detect a slight undertone of German. Right there, in the vowels that are a fraction too full, too rounded.

William, darling, you once said that only the extraordinary and the exaggerated interest me. That I have ceased to believe in ordinary human beings. Is this why you love me so much?

“So how do I measure up?” Ursula asks. The irony in her voice stings Anna, makes her take another look. There is a shadow of a smile on Ursula’s face, and something else, something intriguing, something that won’t be so easily dismissed. “Plain, but striking,” Anna’s mother would call it, and there would be, in her voice, however strained and reluctant, a layer of admiration for the force that could turn a plain face into a statement. It must be the eyes that do it, Anna thinks, hazel brown, watchful, and slightly haughty. Or the feline intensity that Ursula pours into each of her movements, the self-assured alertness of every turn.

When the waiter comes by, he says something funny, for Ursula laughs, a throaty, warm laugh. Her laughter is a challenge, an overture. The waiter gives her an admiring look. William must have loved that about her, the power to draw looks like his. Anna knows how he liked to have his desires confirmed.

Ursula asks for a coffee and a shot of vodka. “What do you want?” she turns to Anna, and Anna asks for a glass of red wine. It really is much too early for a drink, but she might need it. The edges of her eyelids hurt and when she blinks a thin, foggy veil appears between her and Ursula. She keeps blinking until it goes away.

When the waiter leaves them, silence is broken only by the snap of metal against metal. Ursula opens and then closes the shiny brass lock of her purse. She opens it again and this time she takes out a red packet of Dunhills. She holds a cigarette in her hand without lighting it.

The café has booths with soft upholstered seats; high panelling separates them from people sitting at other tables. The voices that reach Anna’s ears are sharp, decisive. She would like to be able to understand them, but William had always discouraged her whenever she talked of learning German. “It’s French you need here. Look what’s happening around you.”

“I still can’t believe William’s dead.” Ursula tosses her head backwards, looks at the ceiling. Her voice cracks, softens. She is hot; she takes off the red crocheted vest and sits in her black silk blouse, fanning her neck. “You don’t smoke, do you? Do you mind?” she asks, and then lights a cigarette and takes a long, hungry drag, smudging the brown filter with her lipstick.

“No,” Anna says. “I don’t mind.”

The waiter brings a white coffee-pot and a cup on a tray, and makes room for them on the table. Vodka arrives in a short greenish glass, beside a peace of dark pumpernickel bread with butter on a small plate. Ursula drinks her vodka in one gulp and bites into the bread. This is the way men drink in Poland, Anna thinks, with a grimace — a shiver as the burning liquid goes down — followed by a smile of relief. Vodka loosens the tongues, they say. Shows your true nature. The wine Anna ordered has a rich ruby colour, and it slides down her throat with ease she is grateful for.

“I learned to drink vodka in your country,” Ursula laughs. She pours cream into the coffee and stirs it fast. There is a paper doily between the cup and the saucer, and Anna watches as it slowly absorbs the drops of coffee that spill from the sides.

A Polish woman and a refugee, Willi? Isn’t she another one of your atonements?

“I haven’t come here to blame you.”

Anna has rehearsed this sentence a hundred times until she could say it smoothly, without hesitation. This is what she decided on, back in Wroclaw. Earlier, when she was still bitter, she was to say other things, “I have come to understand. I want to know why he lied to me and why you went along with his lies.” But she has changed, now. Unlike Piotr, she has put her past behind her, and she is ready to forget.

There are freckles on Ursula’s hands, light brown spots Anna stares at. She can feel the shape of the chair imprinting itself on her back as she leans backward. She has an uneasy feeling that Ursula is studying her, that with each glance of her hazel eyes she knows her twice as well as she had a minute before, that soon Anna will have nothing to hide.

She can picture them together, this woman who is sitting in front of her, her eyes reddened by strain, and William, in Berlin, Munich, London, the Alps. William in his tweed jacket with suede patches on the elbows, Ursula’s hand brushing hair out of his eyes. They are laughing, drunk on stolen time, on weeks of scheming, imagining what they would say to each other when they meet, going over each precious minute. Weeks brightened by furtive phone calls, notes scribbled fast, lips pressed to pieces of paper before they were slipped into white envelopes. In the Alps Anna can imagine Ursula and William skiing, trying to overtake one another in the powdery plume of snow. Or making love in a wide pine bed, in one of the Bavarian houses with their stained wood balconies, garlands of flowers painted around windows, steep red tiled roofs. William’s hand caressing Ursula’s breasts, her nipple between his fingers. So long; it went on for so long. Marilyn? What was she doing then? What was she thinking? And Julia?

“Why would you want to blame me?” Ursula asks.

With all her rehearsals, Anna hasn’t prepared herself for that. She doesn’t quite know what to say. Ursula raises her voice slightly.

“He made his own decisions. Why would I be responsible?”

“So it didn’t matter to you that he had to lie?” There is an edge to Anna’s voice, now. “First to Marilyn, and then to me.”

“He didn’t have to lie, Anna.” Ursula’s fingers tap on the table when she says it. “I certainly never asked him to. He was a coward. I loved him in spite of it.”

Now she is extinguishing the cigarette stub, pressing it with her thumb to the bottom of the glass ashtray.

This is another disappointment. Somewhere, however unacknowledged the desire, Anna was expecting a reward for what she considers her magnanimity. She has come here promising herself that there will be no more accusations, and now she is being diverted, led back into the apportioning of blame.

“Listen,” Ursula says. “I don’t want to keep hurting you. There is no point.”

She bends down and takes a manila envelope from a plastic bag that was lying on the seat beside her. “This is what he left behind. I meant to mail it to you, but...”

Anna has seen such notebooks before. There are a few of them in William’s study. Some black, some navy-blue. Imported from California. William used to buy them in the small stationery store on St. Catherine Street whose limping owner addressed him as Professor Herzman, accenting the second syllable, making it float. William’s favourite kind for jotting down compositions, notes that mean nothing to her. She can’t read music.

The notebook Ursula has brought with her is almost filled, and Anna leafs through it. There are no words in it, apart from a few titles: Another Dimension, Lament, Sonata for Solo Violin, Foray. Abstract, enigmatic titles William favoured. She puts the notebook back into the envelope and presses her fingers to her cheeks. The fingers are cool, soothing.

“Are you all right?” Ursula asks, leaning toward her.

“Yes,” Anna says, backing away. “I’m fine, perfectly fine,” but she doesn’t like the sound of her own voice, the plaintive note, the quiver. In the silence that follows, she waits for the time until the heaviness of her body lifts, allowing her to take a fuller breath.

“Why can’t you forgive him, Anna?”

This is really too much, Anna thinks. She doesn’t have to sit here and take Ursula’s fatuous comments. She doesn’t need to be preached at.

“And what makes you think I haven’t forgiven him?” Anna says.

It must be the abruptness of Anna’s movements that gives her away, for Ursula extends her hand as if she wanted to stop Anna from leaving. “Because you haven’t,” she says. “That’s not hard to see.”

But Anna has already dug into her purse extracting the plastic bag with Ursula’s letters. She is so clumsy. Her wallet and a packet of tissues fall out. She bends to pick them up from the floor.

“Here, take them,” she says standing up and puts the letters on the table, next to the empty tray. “They are yours.”

She puts a ten-mark note on the table to pay for the wine and rushes out of the café into the street.

“No! Wait,... Anna!” She can hear Ursula’s voice, trailing after her. “Don’t run away like that!”

Only when she is around the corner, Anna slows down and takes a deep breath. She does not go back to the hotel, but walks along the Berlin streets watching her reflection in the shop windows, transparent, ethereal, disappearing when the window ends, reappearing in another one. The walk calms her down, the cool wind soothes her cheeks. It’s done, she tells herself. It’s over. I can go home, now. I have seen her, and now I can go home.

Back in her hotel room she takes a long, warm shower and runs her hands over her naked body. Her skin is still smooth, still supple, and she no longer wants to be alone. She wants to be stroked, kissed. She wants to feel a man’s hot tongue on her thighs, making its way up, leaving a wet trail on her skin. A man, she thinks, crouched in the cooling bathtub, her arms over her breasts, and the word soothes her with its vagueness.

“You are not the whole world, William,” she murmurs. “You can be replaced.”

When the phone rings, she does not move. The phone keeps ringing again and again until it stops at half-ring, like a choke.

Next morning, Anna is out of breath when she reaches the American Express office. The woman behind the counter is trying to help. “Tomorrow is not possible. But I can get you on the one-thirty flight on Saturday. Unless there is a cancellation. Would you like me to call you if there is?”

“Yes,” Anna says. “Please.”

She has already packed all her things, folded her dresses and skirts, cleared her things out of the bathroom.

“Is it an emergency? Are you all right?” The travel agent has a smudge of lipstick on her teeth, and she is truly concerned. “Do you need any help?”

“I’m fine,” Anna says, suddenly embarrassed by the desperation in her voice for which she really has no reason. “No, please, I can wait a few more days. It’s not a problem.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

She does leave the name and the phone number of her hotel, just in case there is a cancellation, and walks back there to change. All she needs is some loose clothes and a pair of walking shoes. In a small kiosk she buys an English language guidebook to Berlin’s sights and a newspaper.

“Too fast,” she thinks, forcing herself to slow down. This agitated rush is irrational, she is trying to convince herself. She can stay in Berlin for a few days. It won’t change anything, for God’s sake. Stop. Take a deep breath, calm down. Another one, she orders herself. The city air carries the whiff of exhaust fumes. She has read somewhere that the first smell here after the Wall came down was the stink of the cheap, leaded gas of East German Trabbis.

In a small, outdoor café round the corner from the hotel, Anna sits down to read the morning paper. The International Herald Tribune speculates on the content of the Stasi files. Only a year ago the Stasi headquarters in East Berlin were stormed by protesters and rumours abound. The secret police files are so thick that if they were all stacked up they would reach well over a hundred miles. What experts they were! How busy! The Stasi kept an eye on trash dumps and lending libraries; they tapped the booths of Catholic confessionals and monitored public toilets. For years the army of handlers, with their courses in human psychology and their Marxist-Leninist training, was spying on six million East Germans, half the adult population.

Everything was recorded, Anna reads, the size of your shoes, the smell of your underwear, invaluable in sniffing out the author of a pamphlet found in the street. In your file, if you have one, you might find the exact words you whispered to your lover, the colour of the socks you had on when you last took the garbage out. Every graffiti was photographed, every rumour or joke written down.

Soon, she reads, the files will be opened to public scrutiny. Every German citizen will be able to ask for a copy. A hard decision, the commentator writes since, from what is known already, these files contain bitter revelations. A prominent German dissident has just discovered that among a thousand people who informed on her, the most thorough and damaging were the reports of her own husband who had transcribed their daily conversations. Even the most mundane ones, about the kids, the cat, the laundry.

Marie admitted to her once how she thought life behind the Iron Curtain made people’s lives richer. “At least you had bonds that didn’t easily break,” she said. What would she say now?

Germany will have to brace herself for such revelations, Anna reads. Fathers, sons, lovers, no one is above suspicion. All over East Germany with its scaffolding and construction cranes, wives, husbands, and lovers will have to confront each other, asking the same old question. “How could you have done it?”

“They’ve won the war. I’ve told you.” An insistent whisper from another table catches her attention. A middle-aged American couple talks of the fortunes being made in construction here. The man is wearing an impeccable grey suit, the woman has shoulder-length grey hair. “Shhhh ...” the woman says. “Someone might hear you.”

Anna folds the newspaper and takes a sip of coffee. It has grown cold and she pushes it away.

There is a note for her at the Pension. The waiter, the one with a short dark moustache, delivers it to her room, on a tray, when she is changing. He smiles at Anna as he extends his hand; she has drawn the attention of the staff and they all fuss over her as if she were not an ordinary guest. It all started with the first of Ursula’s messages. With Herr Müller’s bow and a telling look.

Ursula’s handwriting hasn’t changed; it is still hard to decipher. I’ve tried to call you, but you were out. I’ll come by in the afternoon. I really want to talk to you.

Anna doesn’t wait. She has transformed herself into a tourist, in beige pants and a T-shirt. She slips her guidebook into a canvas bag and leaves.

In 1991 East Berlin looks like a deserted city, its wide streets empty; the giant, pompous buildings along Unter den Linden seem abandoned. Grey walls are covered with graffiti: Stasi murderers. Ausländer raus. German workplaces were taken by foreign workers.

With the Wall gone, the subway trains criss-cross the city freely. The eastern ones are grey and shabby, with wide plastic-covered seats. The western ones arrive like rare birds, with their red exteriors and seats that are black and sleek. When she leaves the subway station, Anna rushes past the wide stretches of streets, past empty spaces awaiting construction.

She slows down at the sight of the Brandenburg Gate, with its six rows of columns and a stone chariot perched on top. This is no time to hurry. In the past when she came here from the other, Eastern side, she craned her neck for a glimpse of the West. Through the columns she saw some vast, empty space and a few blurry trees in the distance. Nowhere else was the West so close, so tantalisingly close, so very much within reach, but the Wall, crowned with coils of barbed wire, with pieces of broken glass lining its concrete edge, looked unmoveable. On her side there was none of the jazzy graffiti, the defiant blues, reds, and yellows, no curses or signs of peace. The Wall was guarded by ramrod straight men, their hands resting on polished guns. It was a line that separated all that was ugly from all that was beautiful. On her side there was nothing she wanted to keep, and beyond it, everything was worth having. How she longed to cross this line! How overwhelming the thought was, how it surfaced when she would least expect it!

Frantic surges of hope and envy erupted in her every time she heard of someone who scaled the Wall or got smuggled in a car trunk. “They made it,” she heard. “Escaped.” There was never an official confirmation of success, but all the failed attempts to cross the border were described in the most minute details. For days, the Polish papers glowed over secrets betrayed by best friends, the slip of a hand clinging to a rope, a child’s frightened whimper coming from a car trunk. Now, the graves of those who tried and failed are covered with fresh flowers. Murdered by the Guards, the inscriptions say.

Anna wishes she were here when the Wall fell, hacking the concrete to pieces and then rolling these pieces in her hands, releasing even the smallest of pebbles inside. Instead she saw it on television, the jubilant crowds, the tears and flowers. “Quick,” she called to William, “Hurry up,” and they stood in the living room, leaning over the screen, to see better. He took her hand in his, and handed her a Kleenex for she was crying from joy, tears gathering against the rims of her glasses. It was William who drew her attention to the cello player, his chair propped against the Wall, his eyes closed, the hand holding the bow raising and falling gently, like a crest of a wave.

Ursula was here, then. I know that it won’t last, this jubilation, she wrote to William, in the letter that Anna remembers only too well. I know that we will soon get tired and cynical about it, shrug our shoulders and ask each other if this, indeed, was such a big deal. That we will throw our hands up in despair at the people from there, in their jean shirts, jackets, caps, people from these dark, shabby, lethargic lands. But tonight there is dancing on the rubble, there are tears. No one is talking about the bills that will start coming in. What will we unearth now? What new stories of greed, deception, and blind obedience?

The stories keep flowing. Berlin is getting ready for the trials of the guards who shot at the last two escapees from East Germany; one of them, Chris Gueffroy, newspaper headlines remind, was the last man killed at the Wall. They say they were following orders, Anna has read in the International Herald Tribune, in the chilling echo of the Nuremberg trials.

Among the pictures that Ursula had sent William there was a whole package of the shots of the Wall. These I have taken specially for you, she scribbled on the back of one of the pictures. The grass on the Death Strip is no longer pristine! Weeds and rubble have overrun it, as they have taken over the marble steps of the Zeppelin Field tribune in Nuremberg. By the Reichstag only a lone watchtower, its roof discarded, has survived. The lamps that since 1961 have lit the concrete belt have vanished; empty light poles point into the sky Did you know, darling, that kilometres of this concrete have been crushed into gravel that now paves East German roads?

The uniforms and insignia of the guards, their medals, badges and lapels are sold at wooden stalls at Checkpoint Charlie. For a few dollars Anna can have an East German party badge, a Soviet star, a medal for the conquest of Berlin. The young man who sells these treasures is American, a hippie type with long blond hair, a jean vest. He stoops a bit as he approaches her with a big smile.

“Ain’t it something?” he says. Among the uniforms displayed in the back Anna spots full regalia of a Soviet general, a green coat, stars on epaulets, a stiff cap.

“Where have you got: it from?” she asks, pointing at the uniform.

“From the General himself,” the man smiles. “A bit hard on cash these days. Nice guy, though. Would sell me his nuclear missile if I had enough dough.”

“Oh, come on,” he says when Anna hesitates. “Buy some of this shit. Anything you want.” Pieces of the wall are encased in plastic and have a certificate of authenticity attached. Anna buys a chunk of the wall with a piece of graffiti on it, red, yellow and black lines, mangled, crossing.

“American?” he asks her.

“No,” she says, “Canadian.”

“Visiting, eh?” He laughs softly as he says it.

“Sure,” she smiles, and puts the piece of the Wall into her purse.

As Anna walks slowly toward the Brandenburg Gate, she tries to make out the shapes of the stone sculptures on the top, a horse rushing forward, a robed figure in a chariot. The Gate, her guidebook informs, was designed by a Breslau architect, Carl Gotthard Langhans. It may no longer seem imposing, yet as Anna walks between the stone columns she is moved. For a long while, there is nothing else she wants to do. She just walks underneath the Gate back and forth, unsure if these few steps signify a triumph or just an act of belated defiance.

The thought of Frau Strauss, Käthe’s old friend, comes at the last moment; Anna has nothing but a telephone number and a name. But when she calls the apartment, and introduces herself, Frau Strauss’s daughter insists that she is delighted and that Anna must come over to visit. “Just for tea,” she says, “nothing elaborate. We would so very much like to meet you.”

The woman who opens the white door on the fourth floor of Wildestrasse 24, is slim and petite. She must be in her early fifties, the wrinkles around her mouth cut deep into the skin, but she is still attractive. There is a halo of warmth around her, the warmth of pastel colours and red, parted lips. Her long curly hair is kept in place with two wooden combs.

“Come in, come in. Bitte, bitte,” Monika waves off Anna’s attempt to take off her sandals.

“Doesn’t matter. Please. I’m Monika Schneider. Mutti has been waiting for you all afternoon.”

This is an old Berlin apartment house, with high ceilings, stuccoes, and stoves that are no longer in use but that have never been removed. There is no shortage of space in these rooms. The furniture is old and respectable, a heavy credenza with carved fruit and flowers on the crest, a set of chairs with soft brown cushions, a big leather armchair with head-rests. The dark mahogany table is covered by a lace tablecloth the colour of ivory.

Frau Strauss’s apartment is filled with knickknacks. A pair of milky glass doves kisses on the shelf, a marionette — Pierrot holding a birthday cake with five candles on it — hangs in the entrance to the kitchen. Strings of tiny brass bells decorate the walls. Photographs are everywhere, on the walls, on the bookshelves, on the little rosewood table by the window. In one of them, a woman in a white dress is just about to bury her face in a bouquet of white lilies, in another a young man is squatting next to a small aeroplane. There is a set of playing cards pushed aside to the left of the rosewood table. Frau Strauss must have been playing solitaire.

Anna unfolds her gift, a bouquet of pale yellow roses, tied with a green bow, wrapped in cellophane.

“They are lovely, thank you,” says Monika, who spoke so warmly to her on the phone, and puts the flowers in the middle of the table next to the old photographs of William and Käthe. “But you shouldn’t have bothered.”

Frau Strauss is in her late seventies, and she apologizes that her English is not too good. Her daughter, she says, will help to translate if she is short of words. It was lucky that Moni was visiting her right when Anna called, for she lives a few streets away from here.

“Sit down,” Frau Strauss says. “Please.” A welcoming smile on her broad, wrinkled face.

There is something twinlike about the mother and daughter that goes beyond their kinship, a sense of lightness and the grace of a ballerina. The mother’s hair is braided and twined around the back of her head and she moves fast, with surprising agility for her age. Both women wear dresses, not identical, but differing not so much in design as in the colours of the fabric. The mother’s dress is dark grey, and has a lace collar around the neck, the daughter prefers light blue.

Anna sits down, carefully, and watches the steam rise from the cups, a tiny whirlpool of warm air, the thin slices of Apflestrudel arranged on a Meissen plate, the cotton napkins, pale beige, embroidered in one corner, ironed and impeccably folded. Monika is holding out the plate, waiting for Anna to pick a warm slice of cake. The smell of cinnamon reaches Anna’s nostrils, the smell of the apple pie William warmed the day he died.

She must look pale, for both Monika and Frau Strauss are asking her if she is all right. They offer to open the window, and Anna nods, taking a deep breath that brings some colour back to her cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It must be the travelling. So much is happening. I don’t get much sleep.” She takes a few sips of tea and a bite of cake.

The photographs on the table are small, with fancy jagged edges. “This here is Käthe. And this, this is Willi.” Frau Strauss says. At seven William has short hair and a shy smile. He is wearing knee-high shorts and a knitted vest. In another picture Käthe and Frau Strauss, in berets, their trench coats tightly wrapped around their waists, are standing together, arms linked. Two young, smiling faces.

“You can have these,” Monika says. “Please take them. For Käthe. We have doubles.”

“Käthe will be very happy,” Anna says, “Danke. Danke schön”

“How is she?” Frau Strauss asks. A gift for Käthe is waiting on the armchair. It is carefully wrapped up in red paper and tied with a golden ribbon.

“Frail,” Anna says. “But she’ll be all right. She doesn’t give up.”

Frau Strauss nods slowly, with approval, as if she expected nothing less from her friend.

“It’s terrible about Willi” she says. “I still can’t believe it. He always had so much life in him. He was still so young!” Frau Strauss says, wiping tears off her cheeks. “The last time he was here, he showed us a musical box he had just bought. A really old Austrian one, with bells. My father had a similar one in Breslau. But Willi! It was as if he were a little child again. He wound it up and we all listened. Lorelei waltz.”

In one of the photographs on the table William is surrounded by children, two girls and a boy, showing them something, for they all lean forward, enraptured. He is slimmer than Anna has ever seen him and he has no beard. Clean shaven, his face looks younger, but also less familiar. These are Monika’s children, Anna learns, and William is showing them a boomerang. Right before the picture was taken he had told them that this bent piece of stick would come back when they learned to throw it the right way. Kurt, Monika’s oldest son, wouldn’t believe him, so William took them all to the field, threw the boomerang, and it came back.

“You should have seen Kurt’s face then,” Monika says. “He can still remember it.”

“That’s Willi,” Frau Strauss says, “That’s how I remember him.”

In the story that Monika sometimes helps to translate in her clear, though accented English, William is still Willi, a little German boy, crying for the red telephone he had to leave behind. When they were told to flee, Frau Strauss explains, the children were only allowed one toy, and Willi took his tambourine. But, choices like that are never final, nicht wahr? Here, in Berlin, it was the lost telephone he craved, the ring it made, the shine of its chrome dial. He was so silent and polite, then, a bit frightened, watching people for a long time before he would say anything. He took a long time to decide whom to trust. Frau Strauss remembers giving him cigarette cards that he lined up on the table and arranged in different ways. He could play like that for hours.

“But we mustn’t be sad,” Frau Strauss says, waving her hand as if she were fighting off an annoying fly. “We must be grateful for what we have.”

“Käthe wrote that you were from Breslau, too. I thought it was quite incredible, really, that you and Willi met.” It’s Monika who says that, shaking her head. The thought seems to please her, like a completed circle, a missing piece of a puzzle.

At the sound of the word Breslau, Frau Strauss rises and rushes into another room from which she emerges with albums of old postcards, photographs, and newspaper clippings. “Look,” she says, with girlish excitement. “Look here!” She points to the sights Anna can immediately recognise, but only as their later, tarnished and incomplete selves. “Jahrhundrethalle,” she says, “designed by Max Berg. Bigger than the Pantheon, Vati always said. Blücherplatz, my father took me there. Mit Gott, für König una Vaterland, that’s what it said, on the monument... Stadttheater, a stepping stone to Berlin. Such excellent actors! Liebichshöhe with such beautiful flowers and fountains, and the glorietta tower from which you got a view of the whole of Breslau. There was such a fine furniture store on the ground level, Innen Dekoration W. Quintern & Co. I remember! We used to go there with Käthe.”

“Now, it’s called Partisans’ Hill,” Anna says. She wants to say that the glorietta tower was blown up by the German defence, in 1945, but Frau Strauss is not listening.

Frau Strauss recalls a restaurant on the Oder and a big metal rooster that stood there. With thick black lines where the feathers should be. She used to put a 10 pfennig coin into a slot in the rooster’s back and a metal egg would fall from the rooster’s belly. Inside there were bonbons. Lemon, cherry, strawberry.

“Oh Mutti,” Monika interrupts, laughing softly. “Now, she will never stop,” she says turning to Anna.

“My daughter can never understand,” Frau Strauss says with mock exasperation, “But what can be expected? She was born in Berlin.”

This must be an old family joke, for Monika smiles and pats her mother’s hand.

“Do you know this?” Frau Strauss breaks into a song, a joyful, vivid rhyme, from which Anna can only understand one word, Liebe.

“Silesian lieder,” she says. “You know them, don’t you.” The song sounds lively, cheeky almost. Frau Strauss’s lips twist mischievously, and Anna smiles, amused. Käthe could have sung such songs, but Käthe never speaks of the past. “What’s gone is gone,” is all she has ever said in response to Anna’s curiosity. “I want nothing from there.”

Frau Strauss points to the photograph with St. Dorothy’s church and the Monopol Hotel, its art nouveau windows gleaming in the sun.

“Here,” she says, pointing to the hotel. “I danced. At my wedding. We were married in Dorotheenkirche.” She is smiling at the memory. “When I tried to talk to Käthe about Breslau, she would call me a silly goose. ’It was just a city,’ she said. ’What you miss is your Johann, she kept teasing me. The way he looked at you then.”

“The hotel is still there,” Anna says, softly. “You can still see it.”

“No,” Frau Strauss says, the liveliness in her voice dying away. “I don’t want to see how it has changed. What you don’t know doesn’t hurt you, nicht wahr?”

She is silent for a while, before she turns to Anna, fixing her eyes on hers. “You understand?” she asks and waits for Anna to answer.

“Yes,” Anna says. “I do.”

Frau Strauss smoothes the lace tablecloth, straightening the starched pattern with her hand. Her voice swerves a bit, falters, and she switches back into German, letting Monika translate.

“We were good friends with Käthe. Good, good friends. She — Ulrike, Käthe, and Mitzi. We went to school together, rode horses. My Vati was a doctor. He kept such beautiful Arabians in Breslau. ’Look at the curve of their necks,’ he kept telling me. He said they moved like dancers, but they were bred for swiftness and endurance of desert treks.”

Frau Strauss points to a photograph in a small, leather-bound album. Käthe is there, her hair tied at the back. The frills of her white blouse are freshly ironed. In the corner, in old German script, an inscription Frau Strauss translates: “To my best friend, Ulrike. With loving thoughts, Käthe Herzmann.” The photograph was taken in the atelier of the Barasch brothers, the stamp on the back of the picture says.

“We were so silly then. So very young. Käthe and Mitzi were good at German composition and at sports. I was good at mathematics, but sports was more important then. Even the nuns thought so. Gemeinschaft. You know that word, nein? The feeling of being together. The trips the young people made into the mountains, into the woods, in groups, together,... picnics on the meadows. The songs. Having something to live for. Having ideals.

“The three of us, how we laughed. Mitzi’s father had a clothing store, on Gartenstrasse, in Breslau. He had a black Chrysler and a driver in uniform who would take us for drives to Krummhübl, to the Scheitniger Park. We leaned out of the window, to feel the wind in our hair. We liked to skate together, too, on the frozen moat by Liebichshöhe. The officers used to come there. So tall and handsome in their uniforms, polished boots. We thought they were like gods.

“How little life means ... be ready at any hour, they sang. We didn’t know any better,” Frau Strauss says, softly. “It was still before the war! Before it all went so very, very wrong.”

The photographs of Breslau spread on the table may account for the ease with which Anna imagines Käthe and Ulrike together. Young girls dreaming of caresses. Of strong arms that could defy danger. Sneaking glances at the muscular thighs of German heroes, at their stone penises. Giggling at the erect neck of a swan settling between Leda’s legs. Walking hand in hand, swinging their purses, aware of admiring looks of passing soldiers.

“Is that when Käthe met William’s father?” Anna asks.

“Helmut?” Frau Strauss says and nods.

Helmut. Helmut Rust. In Anna’s mind, William’s father begins his existence as a shining torso of a demigod, beautiful in his iron, unmoveable presence.

“It was Mitzi’s brother, Bernd who brought Helmut over. My Johann was drafted then, and I missed him so much. Helmut and Bernd were both in uniforms. Tall, ramrod straight. So handsome. So very handsome.”

In Frau Strauss’s story the invasion of Poland is called the Polish Campaign. “The summer before the Polish Campaign,” she says. The time when Willi was conceived. “Oh, Mitzi had her eye on Helmut, but she didn’t want to stand in Käthe’s way. They even broke up for a while, until Mitzi went to the Baltic sea, for her holidays and wrote to Käthe wishing her and Helmut all the best. Wrote such a funny postcard. About sailors who sway their hips when they walk. Asking Käthe if Helmut was everything she had wished for.”

The summer of 1939, filled with incessant talk on the radio about the Polish corridor, the indignities suffered by the Volk. Such a hot summer, unusually beautiful. Käthe and Helmut together among the yarrow, blue chicory, mugworth, shepherd’s purse. It just happened. They were young. They were in love. He was to leave soon.

“Did they have time to get married? Do you have his picture?” Anna asks. She is curious to see if she could spot William’s shadow in his father’s face. “What did her parents say?”

But Frau Strauss has no pictures of Helmut. None. They all perished. Left in Breslau. No, Käthe did not marry Helmut. There was a quarrel. There was a big, big quarrel. When Willi was born Helmut was no longer in Breslau. He never came back, never even saw his son.

“Why did they quarrel? Was it because of Mitzi? Was Helmut unfaithful to her?” Anna’s questions are prompted by her own hurt.

“Who knows what happens between two people,” Frau Strauss answers with a question, shaking her head. Käthe didn’t want to speak of Helmut so she didn’t ask. Maybe it was Mitzi. Maybe not. They were all too young. They didn’t know what was coming. This is not what she wants to tell Anna. No, not that part of the story. There are other things Anna should know about. More important. Things about Käthe.

“Bombenkeller des Reiches, that’s what we called Silesia. Air shelter for the Reich. Rich and blessed, and safe. The fortress of the German East.

“We never stopped to think what it all meant,” Frau Strauss continues. Not until the first refugees began coming. ‘We are safe here,’ women whispered in stores, on park benches, glancing at the skies. The Breslau cellars were filled with food, jars of preserves in even rows. You had to sort out the potatoes, though, cut out the eyes and sprouting leaf-buds, remove the rotting parts. Sift the flour, to keep it free of bugs. Make sure the bags of sugar were dry.

“By 1944 there were food shortages, of course. Röschen kaffee, we called our coffee, for the brew was so weak that you could see through it, see the little red roses in the bottom of the cup. But that was nothing. Nothing. You know what we used to say then? Enjoy the war — peace is going to be terrible.

“They lied to us. The Gauleiter Hanke, the papers. They all lied. Destruction of the Soviet Armies Almost Complete. Combat in East Proceeds According to Plan. That’s what we read in the Schlesische Tageszeitung. Even at Christmas time, 1944. People were leaving, if they could find a good reason, for you couldn’t just leave. That was called ‘spreading defeatism and panic’ Punishable by death. We were sure everyone watched everyone else. Your servants could turn you in, but you didn’t dare dismiss them.

“At the street corners the Gauleiter’s voice beamed from the loudspeakers: ‘Festung Breslau has sworn its loyalty to the Führer. We will not forget our sacred oath.’ The refugees who came from the east sneered at our cellars and preserves and paid in gold coins for sturdy shoes and strong rucksacks. To the Poles and Russians we were nothing but ‘Hitlerist cannibals,’ they said. There was no mercy for us in the East.

“Mitzi knew she would die. Her mother had bought enough cyanide vials for the entire family, promised to swallow them before the Russians came. All they will find she said, is my stiff body. Mitzi’s father would set fire to his store and shoot himself in the mouth before the flames got to him. I asked Mitzi what she would do. She didn’t know. “They won’t get me, though,” she said. She was wearing her cyanide vial in a small pouch, around her neck.

“We stayed in Breslau and waited. Stayed until the rumble of artillery never stopped, closer and closer with each hour. Until heat was scarce and we were shivering all the time. In December 1944, Käthe decided to sign up as a Red Cross nurse. I went along. It was better than sitting at home, worrying. Johann was at the Eastern front. I wondered if I would ever see him again.

“They trained us for twenty hours. Schwester Käthe and Schwester Ulrike. We had blue striped uniforms. All we were allowed to do was to make beds, bring bed pans, wash the patients. Nothing glorious. Sometimes we were allowed to hold a limb or a bowl for discarded cotton swabs. Most of the wounded were men over fifty or under eighteen. Volkssturm, the last hope of the Reich.

“Trains were leaving Breslau for the West. Filled, we heard, filled to the brim. At the All Souls Hospital we assisted with the X-rays, took down Dr. Tolk’s orders. We had to run after him as he walked, stopping by the beds for a few seconds, writing down his verdict. We wrote it all down, into their records, trying not to look at their faces. It gave them too much hope if we did.

“In the evening there were lectures in the cellar, ‘Nursing at the current stage of the war.’ We walked down slowly, past the long, tiled corridor with metal lamps, past the laundry with its smell of boiling cotton. ‘This is not the time for compassion,’ Dr. Tolk said. ‘Remember. These soldiers are needed at the front. Our Gauleiter, Karl Hanke, said that we will fight to the last man. There will be no surrender!’ We were warned to look for signs of marauding, for undue attention drawn to themselves. ‘Don’t try to save them,’ he said. A few days before, a nurse who gave one of the men an injection that kept him from being released was sentenced to ten years by the political tribunal. I prayed that if my Johann were wounded, he would be lucky to find a nurse that brave.

“There were bodies swinging from lampposts, when we were returning home. Hundreds a day. Executed by the SS. We were not to pity them. They were traitors.

Wir werden weiter marschieren
Bis alles in Scherben fällt
Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland
Und morgen die ganze Welt...

“I sang this song,” Frau Strauss continues. “So many times, with Käthe, at school Only when we sang it we didn’t really know what it meant.”

We will continue marching
Until everything is in pieces
Because today we own Germany
And tomorrow the whole world

Some of the wounded men lay with their eyes closed, breathing hard. Some trailed us with their eyes as we walked through the ward. They begged us for anaesthetics.”

Johann Erben. Frau Strauss can still remember his name. Their first serious case. It was obvious by then that there were not enough nurses and even the Red Cross volunteers were allowed to do more than they should have. Two legs crushed, pieces of bones still popping out of his massacred flesh. Tibia and fibula, they had learned the names of the bones only the day before. The matron cast a suspicious glance at their white hands, their breasts that would not flatten under the apron. She, Ulrike, felt faint, but Käthe took a pair of tweezers and began taking the shreds of bone out, piece by piece. The matron thought Käthe, too, would become queasy, that she would not stand it. But Käthe could concentrate on the hard pieces of bones. Her hands deftly picked up the shreds, fast, efficient. When she had finished, the matron didn’t say anything, but gave her a long look, and from that time on she would put Käthe on duty with the badly wounded.

“Not me,” Frau Strauss says. “I was still emptying bedpans.”

So many of the soldiers didn’t even know they were dying. They just stared at the ceiling, or at the window. Those who knew it was the end cried for their mothers, girlfriends. They cried for their wives, for God. “We gave them champagne and special food if they requested it — and if we had any.”

“Then,” Frau Strauss says. “The hospital was bombed. It was still burning when I arrived in the morning, flames shooting out of the windows. I could smell gas everywhere and the air was filled with heavy black smoke. You could hang an axe in this air. “But I work there,” I said, stupidly, and the Kommando guard shrugged his shoulders. “Not any more.”

“We left Breslau together. Käthe, Greta — her nanny — and Willi. For Hauptbahnhof. I just closed the door of my house, where I thought I would live with Johann, and put the key under the mat. We all had sturdy rucksacks with wide straps. Willi had one, too. With sweaters and clean underwear. Food, as much as we could carry. Käthe told me to bake cakes with all the flour and eggs I still had. They came out hard, but good to chew on the way. We sewed money and jewellery into the linings of our clothes. Anything that was small and could be sold or exchanged for food and shelter. Willi was so awkward then, in his coat and sweaters. Poor thing. He kept saying he was too hot.

“The Hauptbahnhof was so crowded we couldn’t even get to the platform. There were people everywhere, spilling into the hall, the side tunnels. People said there would be no more trains. I remember a woman with a baby, screaming, ‘Where can we go?’ The guard told her to go to Opperau-Kanth. ‘Trains are waiting there,’ he said. ‘There will be enough space for everybody.’ He kept saying we should all go there. That it was safer for the trains. ‘Mothers don’t forget to take Spiritus cookers to boil the milk for your children,’ that’s what we heard from the loudspeakers.

“We didn’t go to Kanth. A good thing we didn’t. Later, I heard it called ‘Kanth Death March.’ Eighteen thousand women and children, they said, froze to death. Minus twenty Celsius and icy, bone freezing wind. Babies wrapped up in pillows and blankets. Mothers were afraid to look, afraid to check if the children were still alive. And in the end there were no trains.

“I don’t know what happened to Greta. She was separated from us right at the start, swallowed by a wave of refugees. Käthe never found her. She wrote to Red Cross, to refugee camps. Nothing, not a word. Most of the women and children from Breslau went to Dresden we were told. That’s where they died, in the bombings. Mitzi went there, too, Käthe found out, from her father’s old driver. She just disappeared in the ruins. Burnt to cinders.”

Frau Strauss tells Anna of a succession of cold school gyms, peasant barns. Of cabbage soup so hot she could hardly swallow it. A woman let them sleep in her bed. “It’s still warm,” she said. “Go fast.” Of Willi’s dirty face streaked with tears. Ditches everywhere were filled with belongings, cast off, too heavy to carry. Books, china, cutlery, plates, Frau Strauss even saw a pair of brass candelabras. Ditches littered with clothes, bundles of clothes. Käthe dug into these bundles like a fiend to find clean underwear for Willi.

“There were so many children. Children with frightened faces, running noses, hands clinging to the handles of sledges and prams. The young and the old always die first, nein? The bodies of the dead joined the cast off possessions, frozen until the spring would free them from ice.”

Frau Strauss is clearing her throat. She wants Anna to know about Käthe. The way she really was then, in these horrible times. Fate itself willed it that Anna should know everything. “If I don’t tell you,” she says, “Käthe will take her pain with her, to her grave. Let me tell you about revenge.”

“The cellars are dark and damp, and when you huddle in them time stands still. The bodies around you shake, like aspen leaves in the wind. You think of different things. Silly things. How you used to swipe sweet dough from the bowl with your finger in the kitchen. How a mouse hid in a cardboard box and the farmer hit it with a stick and then threw it by the tail into the compost heap. How you heard that the Russians steal watches and wedding rings, and how all will be fine for you don’t have any.

“The door of the cellar opens. You can see that the men who stand at the entrance are drunk and they smell of tobacco and vodka and something else, something sharp, acidic, but you don’t know what it is. They are Russian, they are Polish. They have bulls-eye lanterns and they cry loud, Davai suda! and Woman come!

“It all becomes very simple then. You are German or Russian or Polish; you are a man, a woman or a child. There are no other choices. German men are hit in the head with a rifle butt. Children are taken somewhere, but you don’t know where.

Women? Women are raped. You have been with them in the same room. You already know their names, Marie, Erika, Ilschen, Frau Neumann. Some of them scream, some cry. What’s going to happen to us, they ask. Oh God, Oh God, why is this happening?

“I was taken to a big house and told to wait. I thought I heard Käthe’s scream. From another room. Such an unnatural scream. Later, only later, I learned that before these soldiers have been let loose in this village, they have been taken to a concentration camp, to see piles of bodies, heaps of glasses, of hair. That they have been reminded by big white signs on wooden scaffolds. Soldiers! Auschwitz does not forgive. Take revenge without mercy!

“The first one gave me vodka to drink from his field flask and then a piece of greasy sausage to eat. He laughed and pinched my cheek and I thought: Thank you, God! He will let me go! Then he hit me. Down, you German whore, he yelled, and I closed my eyes and lay down.

“I stopped counting how many times I was raped. The soldiers lined up. Some spit on me or hit me in the face. I closed my eyes. I didn’t care if I lived or died. My throat was swollen, for one of them tried to strangle me, and others pulled him away. Another one pressed a pistol against my chest, and I prayed that he would fire.

“I must have fainted, for when I woke up I had no clothes on. I groped in the dark, in the blood and vomit. There was a wardrobe in the room, and a dress on a hanger. But it was too small. I had to leave the back unfastened, to make it fit. I climbed through the window. There was a church in this village, and I wanted to hide there.

“The church was dark and empty. There was a big cross at the altar. There was a body on the cross. A woman’s dead body. Naked, pinned down to the wood by her hands and feet. They had torn away the figure of Christ to make room for her. Her face was swollen and blue, her hair entangled. Her mouth was opened as if she were still trying to say something.

“Käthe, I saw a few hours later. With Willi. Her face and legs were bruised and swollen, but she said she fell down the stairs, Nothing happened,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’ I knew she was lying, but it was just as well. I didn’t want to hear the truth. I wanted to forget. She said a Russian, Captain Zeneyev, helped her and Willi. ‘A good man,’ she said. ‘Isn’t he a good man, Willi?’ And Willi said, ‘Yes, Mutti.’ He was playing with an aeroplane made out of a Russian army bulletin.

“This Russian Captain let us stay in his quarters for a few days. He sent us a Russian nurse. Gave us food. Said he had a boy at home, the same age. Before we left, we saw carts with Polish refugees coming to this village. They moved into empty houses. Their children ran around the yard with hoops, climbed the trees, pretended to shoot at each other with sticks. On Sunday morning, the women, their heads tied in flowery kerchiefs, went to pray in the church.

“Moni, my daughter, she knows all this. I told her all about it, and she says we have to bear our punishment. Perhaps she is right. Johann was a prisoner in Russia, but he was released in 1947. He, too, didn’t want to speak about what he had seen. He said we had to be grateful for what we had. Käthe made me promise I would never tell Willi. I never did. But I want you to know. You were his wife, after all. You should know.”

“Mutti” Monika says, softly. “Mutti, it’s all right.”

Frau Strauss begins to fold the Breslau albums. Her eyes narrow and her lips fold inward.

“It’s good Käthe is in Canada,” she says slowly. “This is a cursed land. People are afraid of the past here, afraid to love their country, afraid to be proud of it. No matter what the young ones do, the world will never forgive the German people. Käthe was right to go away with Willi. Please, tell Käthe I said that. She will know what I mean.”

Frau Strauss shakes her head as she says it and looks up to the stuccoed ceiling, to the rosettes and meanders of white plaster ornaments.

Anna has underestimated Ursula’s persistence. Next evening, by the time she is back at the hotel, her feet aching and swollen from the march through the city, Frau Herrlich has already chatted with the proprietor of the pension, and he has brought her cappuccino to the lounge, to the low table by the marble fireplace. He is now motioning to Anna to hurry there, to meet her distinguished guest. “Four times,” he says. “Frau Herrlich has been here four times. I saw her on television just a few days ago. But you never left a message for her, did you?”

“No,” Anna says. “I didn’t.”

Ursula rises from her chair, points to the coffee cup, and waves to Herr Müller, a thank-you he acknowledges with a beaming smile. She has tied her hair in the back, straightening the grey curls. Only one unruly strand keeps falling over her eye. Without lipstick her mouth looks smaller and pale, but the lines cutting into her lips are deeper.

“I’ve been trying to find you,” she says.

The anger that seized Anna when she rushed out of the café, ignoring Ursula’s plea, has evaporated.

“I’ve been sightseeing,” Anna says. “My flight doesn’t leave until Saturday.”

“Good,” Ursula smiles. “I want to show you something, too.”

Anna hesitates.

“Please,” Ursula says. “We shouldn’t part like this. I want you to see it.”

Ursula walks fast, her heels clicking on the pavement, and Anna follows, each step an effort for her swollen feet.

Ursula’s car is parked nearby, a red BMW with a black interior, and Anna sits down with relief, stretching her legs as far as they will go.

“You can move the seat all the way back,” Ursula says. “It’ll give you more room.”

She drives fast, taking sharp turns and stopping with a screech of tires, and Anna leans back in the seat. “I know how it must hurt you,” Ursula says. “I’ve thought about it. It was such a terrible time to find out. When you can’t grab him by the collar and scream. And William cannot explain, cannot mend anything.”

There is so much intensity in Ursula’s voice. So much passion. Is she defending William, pleading for him? Her hands are clasped tight on the steering wheel. Anna can see the muscles hardening, stretching under the skin.

“William is dead,” she says.

“But he is still hurting you,” Ursula says.

“It’ll pass. I’ll forget.”

They drive by the streets, empty but for cleaners who sweep away the discarded fliers, confetti, and cigarette butts.

“When the Wall fell, the longest line-ups were in front of porno shops,” Ursula says quietly. “The bouquets of flowers we greeted the Ossis with did not last. A few days later you could hear the first jokes: Why should we envy the Chinese? — They still have their wall!”

They drive out of the city, past long rows of one storey prefab buildings, empty at this hour. It is getting dark fast. Anna watches it all, silent.

“You won’t forget,” Ursula says. “I won’t either.”

The car pulls up to what seems to Anna like the end of the road, but is only a lowering of the terrain, a big empty lot where she sees a herd of small cars, parked all over the place. When the engine stops, Ursula leaves the lights on and blinks them three times. Slowly, one by one, the little cars light up, doors open, and men come out, disentangling themselves from their sleeping bags. Soon a whole group of them circles the car, and Anna is uneasy. She would have locked the car doors, driven away, but Ursula waves her hand.

“Hi, guys,” she says. “Is Andrzej around?”

“Tomorrow,” a tall, heavy man says in German. “Jutro” he repeats in Polish. It is only then that Anna realises that all of these men are Polish. She should have guessed it from their faces, broad and tanned, from their moustached lips. Or from the shape of the small Polish Fiats, with their steel shells filled to the brim with soft human bodies.

The men give Ursula quick, suspicious looks, and exchange a few words among themselves. She has opened the doors of the BMW, and is standing up, her foot resting on the chassis. They seem nervous, unsure of themselves, their hands awkwardly looking for something to do. One of them, the heaviest, with short greying hair, lets a load of saliva gather in his mouth and spits it on the ground with a swishing sound. He is calmer than the rest; he has obviously seen Ursula before.

“Your friend,” the man asks, pointing at Anna. “She too, looking for workers?”

“You can ask her yourself,” Ursula says. “She speaks your language.”

The man slowly turns to Anna, and she sees in his look a mixture of embarrassment and anger.

“You speak Polish?” he asks. The question is not a polite inquiry. The man does not call her Pani, but uses a direct form, “Mówisz po polsku?” Anna does not like his directness, the unwanted familiarity, the underpinning of contempt.

“Tak,” Anna says. The sound of this one word gives her away, tells him that she does not merely speak the language, but is Polish.

“From Warsaw?” he keeps asking.

“No,” she says quickly. “From Wroclaw.”

He gives her a questioning look. What is she doing here, then, with this German woman in her tight black dress, her red vest, the air of some actress?

“You work with her?”

“No,” Anna says. “Just visiting.”

“Ah,” he says and leans on the BMW, toward her. “Enjoying the sights?” The contempt in his voice makes Anna blush. “Checking us out?” He gives a loud, piercing whistle and Anna, quickly, turns her head away.

“Can we go now?” she asks Ursula.

The men are beginning to leave, one by one. They have already decided that their prospects of getting a job from these two women are slim, not worth giving up a few hours of sleep. Only three of them are still standing around the car, stepping from one foot to another, waiting for something to happen.

Ursula takes out a piece of paper with directions. “I need five for next week,” she says. Five, she signals with her palm. The heavy man grabs the paper before she has the time to extend her hand and stuffs it into his pocket.

“Ya, ya,” he says. “You German whore,” he mutters in Polish, loud enough for Anna to hear him. “Danke schön. We come.”

“Gut!” Ursula says, gets into the car and starts the engine. “Auf Wiedersehen!”

In the headlights the men seem weightless, dancing in the beams of light, like moths. They look back as they walk away, their white faces distorted and suddenly, Anna notices it now, drawn from exertion.

“They hate your guts,” she tells Ursula.

“What else is new,” Ursula says. “At least they don’t hide it.”

“Why are you doing it?”

“What?”

“Coming here, like this, to hire them. It’s not legal, is it?”

“Maybe it’s my atonement?” Ursula says. The car is speeding again and Anna clutches at the handle above the window. “They need money. I have an assignment. Lots of heavy stuff to drag around. Andrzej tells me they need the money to buy apartments in Poland, to start a business. Their families send them here. That’s the only way to end the life of five to a room, or chasing jobs that pay next to nothing and threaten to disappear.”

“Andrzej?”

“A guy who brought me here first, a filmmaker from Wroclaw. He used to sleep here with them, in his car. He has a good eye,” she laughs. “We might do a film together.”

Anna is relieved when they enter the city, when empty suburban streets with their lambent glows are left behind. The car turns into a tree-lined street and stops in front of a heavy, brownish building. Ursula turns her head to Anna, a slight twist, a half-turn.

“Come upstairs, to my place. I don’t want you to leave like that.”

“Please,” she adds, seeing that Anna lingers. “Do come!”

They climb the wide stairs with metal lace in between the steps. The stairs William climbed, Anna reminds herself as she follows Ursula past a spotless landing with its palm tree in a brown terra-cotta pot. But curiosity has already taken over, softened her.

The ceiling in Ursula’s apartment is high, stuccoed, like the Wroclaw apartment of Anna’s parents; but, here in West Berlin, there was no lack of money to care for it. “You know how Marx’s Capital got divided?” she remembers her father’s old joke, “The West got capital, we got Marx.” There are no cracks, no crude coats of paint over hardwood, the passage of time is camouflaged, muted. In Ursula’s living room, magazines and papers cover wide leather sofas. Ursula kicks off her shoes and walks into the long, narrow kitchen in which Anna glimpses the brown surface of wood cabinets and black tiles.

“Make us some room on the sofas,” Ursula says and Anna folds a newspaper, stacks a few magazines, enough to clear two spots, one for herself and one for Ursula who is moving swiftly, amid the clinking of glass.

This is a large room with walls almost empty but for two enormous photographs placed on the opposite ends of the room. One is a picture of a treetop, its green leaves dappled by the setting sun, its trunk hiding behind a concrete fence, behind the coils of barbed wire. On the opposite wall a carved quotation: So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

There is not much of the furniture here apart from two sofas, just a few shelves, a wooden chest of drawers and a big television set — black, taking up the whole corner. Ursula comes in with a tray on which she has placed a green teapot in the shape of a pear, two cups, two glasses and a black bottle of Courvoisier.

“William,” Ursula says, “couldn’t look at it. I could see he always sat in such a way that he wouldn’t have to face it.”

“The quote? It is from Revelations, isn’t it?” Anna asks, looking at the picture of the carving, but even now she is wrong about him.

“The other one.” Ursula points to the one of the treetop. “I took it in Auschwitz,” she says. “From inside.”

Ursula settles cross-legged on the spot Anna has cleared for her, with her feet bare. Her toenails are painted bright red. She pours brandy into big glasses for both of them. A Yoga posture, Anna thinks. The beginning of all moves. She fixes her eyes on Ursula’s small frame, muscles stirring under the skin as she bends over to hand Anna the brandy. Gaze like that makes people uncomfortable, but Ursula seems oblivious to it, lighting a cigarette, drawing the smoke in, exhaling. Anna cannot stop thinking about the men in the parking lot, their eyes filled with contempt. One of them had a tiny gap between his two front teeth, just like Ursula’s. They still make her uneasy, the way they spat behind them as they walked back to their cars.

“Look here.” Leaning over the low coffee table Ursula spreads a pile of photographs that were lying on the side, black and white shots of pale, angry faces, raised fists with chains wound up around them.

“This is Görlitz,” Ursula points to the shots of the demonstrators. “And Zgorzelec.” She pronounces the Polish name flawlessly, Anna thinks. Andrzej must be a good teacher.

A city split in half she tells Anna, by the post-war borders. When it was divided, the Germans got the town hall, the station, all municipal buildings, the zoo, the theatre, and main churches. The Poles got Oberlausitzer Gedenkhalle and the gas station. Tram tracks that led through bridges were poured over with concrete.

“I got a hint that that’s where World War III was brewing. When Poland opened its borders, four thousand ultra-right German youths descended on Görlitz. The plan was to light the German ‘fires of warning,’ and then cross the border with the flames and light the fires in front of the Gedenkhalle. The German side was blocked with armoured cars and antiterrorist squads. They couldn’t get through,” Ursula says. “I went there with Andrzej. We filmed the whole scene. I tried to talk to them. It was like talking to ghosts. ‘German blood has been spilt into this land,’ the guy in a black shirt screamed right into my face. His chin was shaking.”

The young men in the photographs have clean-shaven faces and short blond hair.

“William thought I shouldn’t have filmed them. I was only giving them free publicity, he said. It was better to let shit like that die out on its own.”

She waits until the smoke has formed a curl and vanishes into the air. She sniffs her brandy before taking a sip. William’s favourite drink, Anna thinks, the one she has never learned to enjoy. There is a bottle just like it in her living room in Montreal.

“Do you also think I’m obsessed? That I should stop watching?” Ursula has stubbed her cigarette half-finished, but there is still enough smoke in the air; it irritates Anna’s eyes.

“No,” Anna says. “I don’t think you should stop.” How could she say anything else? These are her own obsessions, too. Here, in this part of the world, they have all been marked for life.

When Ursula talks, pointing to more faces in the pictures, Anna takes a sip of brandy, and then another one. It burns her throat but it warms her, too. She closes her eyes and thinks that she is tired. She has been chasing her ghosts, hoping for epiphanies. This has been an impossible mission; she has hoped for too much. “It’s just round the corner,” her father used to coax her on their walks together when she was little and refused to go on. “A few more minutes. We are almost there.” That’s how he kept her going. You can get a child go a long way on false hopes.

Anna closes her eyes and lets Ursula’s voice float. The faces of hatred are all the same, she thinks. Thoughts pulsate in her head, feverish snitches of all the stories she has heard, Polish, German. Käthe’s bruised face, her silence. Black spots on Babcia’s lips. Ruins.

Her head swims. She has had too much to drink, and the room is circling around her head, sometimes taking off all together. Her eyes sting; Ursula’s face and the photograph on the wall split into two separate selves, begin to swirl and rotate, before she wills them to become one again.

“Excuse me,” she says and staggers as she walks to the bathroom, trying to keep steady. Inside she washes her face and her eyes with cold water. The pink seashells on the tiles blur and swirl. Ursula’s mother chose them, she recalls, and finds it all suddenly hilarious. But the hilarity passes as quickly as it comes. To steady herself, she leans against the cool tiles. The hot, sour lump in her stomach is rising up to her throat, and she begins to vomit, clutching the white toilet seat with her hands, until her stomach feels empty, wrung out from all that lay there. When it’s over her throat feels burnt and sore, so she drinks some water from the tap the way she used to do it a long time ago, at school, her fingers interlocking, palms down, to make a trough.

“Are you all right?” she hears Ursula’s voice.

“Fine,” Anna says. She is feeling better, much better. The water tastes sweet.

“I’d better make us some coffee” Ursula says.

In the bathroom mirror Anna s eyes are reddened, her skin pale. With a cotton wad she puts on some of Ursula’s makeup, a blusher on her cheeks, a dab of powder on her nose. She can hear the music, from behind the bathroom doors, Tristan und Isolde, the Furtwängler recording, one of William’s favourites. He kept it right beside Beethoven’s Fifth. “Auden was right. Wagner was an absolute shit,” he would say, finger in the air, “but this is all I care about.”

There is a residue in this memory of William. Of disappointment she has learned to stifle. A memory of disappointment. William’s grant applications were routinely rejected. “Too abstract,” one of the reviewers wrote, “too derivative.”

When he stopped applying altogether, she said he was giving up too easily.

“I have all I want, Anna. What is there to fight for?”

“Recognition,” she said. “Respect.”

“It’s so convoluted. It’s politics and fashion. I’m tired of it.”

Excuses, she thought. But she didn’t tell him that. She was there to heal him, not to scratch his wounds. How often did he tell her that he had enough of it from Marilyn. From her, he wanted peace.

“As if it mattered one bit,” he would also say. Why would anyone care if he ever wrote another damn note.

“I would.”

“Why?”

What could she say to that? That she wanted to see him happy? “I am happy,” he would say, raising his head over his musical boxes, all their metal parts dismantled, spread in neat rows on a linen tea towel, sanded pieces of wood slowly absorbing the stain. “I’m happy with you. I don’t want anything else.”

“You must be hungry,” Ursula says. “It’s getting late.” Her bare feet make soft, muted pats on the floor as she moves.

While Anna was in the bathroom, Ursula has warmed up slices of pita bread, and emptied containers from a Mediterranean restaurant — tahini dip, roasted red peppers in oil, eggplant purée — into small ceramic bowls, with their shapes of fish, shells, and seahorses. Yellow, green, blue. The carrots, sliced thinly, are mixed with yoghurt, and Ursula adds a handful of fresh mint that she has chopped up and thrown into the bowl.

Ursula is right. Anna is hungry. She can feel it as soon as her teeth close on the warm slice of pita. The old feeling that Ursula’s gaze can read right through her comes back, but it no longer frightens her or makes her uneasy. It may be the brandy or the strange, impossible configuration of fate that does it, the sheer improbability of the two of them sitting across each other at a table. Or it may be something deeper, like the slow but steady pace of a mountain hike that rewards her with a stupendous view of the valley she has already passed.

“Where did you meet William?” she asks Ursula.

Ursula hesitates for a moment, but only for a short moment. “Here, in Berlin, at a concert in the Conservatory,” she says quickly, as if speeding through the past could help. “In 1976, at the end of his sabbatical, when he was getting ready to go back home. I walked up to him, asked if I could take his picture. I thought he had an interesting face, something of a sulking child, hungry for attention, but at the same time disgusted with this hunger, above it. I told him that I’ve always been drawn to contradictions.

“’Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Shoot!’ Her lips twist when she talks about this moment that took place almost fifteen years ago. It still pleases her to remember William’s amused consternation.

“The light was rotten and I knew it, but I still took a few shots. I’ll have to repeat them, I said. But this will give me an idea, if I’m interested. I called him the next day to get him to come to the studio. I’m still interested, I said and he laughed. He said he was leaving the next day, that he really had no time. So we went out for a drink, instead, and I knew then that we wouldn’t let each other alone that easily.”

“Why?” Anna asks.

“One of my black hunches,” Ursula laughs softly. “He wasn’t an easy man to leave. It took him longer to know what was happening,” she continues. “He always wanted to believe he could be in charge, that things could be controlled, ordered to stop or to go on. Ours was to be just a passing affair, his last night in Berlin, an unexpected treat. One of those nights when you talk and make love, and then talk some more, happy to be alive. A long night, but not without end.

“He called me two weeks later, from Montreal. He said he saw me everywhere, could not stop thinking about me. ‘You are right under my skin,’ he said. ‘Are you still interested?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He came back to Berlin a month later.”

Anna is listening. She is mesmerised by the soft timbre of Ursula’s voice, the warmth of her laughter.

“We always quarrelled. We were too different, too stubborn, but maybe that’s what kept us together. We made each other alive,” Ursula says.

“You didn’t want to live with him!”

“We would’ve killed each other if we did. I’m not good at compromises. He wasn’t, either. It was no use. We both knew it.”

The coffee maker is sputtering steam. Anna rises to pour coffee into their cups. She opens the fridge to find milk. Ursula is swinging on her stool, back and forth. She didn’t like his latest music, she says, and William knew it. He knew she thought it too abstract, too detached. They were like that with each other. Honest, even if it hurt. He could count on her with criticism like that. “I wouldn’t make a good wife,” she laughs.

How she still likes talking about him, Anna thinks. How he still excites her.

“How did Marilyn find out about you?”

“He told her. He said she was suspecting something anyway, and he didn’t want to lie to her.”

“He didn’t tell me,” Anna says.

“Is this really such a surprise?”

Anna takes a sip of coffee. It is so hot that it burns her tongue. No, it is not a surprise.

“Last time I saw William, it was in August,” Ursula says. “I took him to Berchtesgaden. I was still filming for the documentary. He kept telling me that I should move on, do other things. That there was no point in this constant blame, in dragging the ghosts out.”

In Ursula s story August is rainy and cold in the Alps. “There was a long line-up of cars on the wet, slippery road to Berchtesgaden. The last two kilometres took us twenty minutes,” Ursula continues. “We found a small hotel on the hill, with its stuffed grouse, little hats with flower wreaths around them, and painted boxes on the windowsill. Gemütlich, we laughed. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I was there to photograph the ruins of Obersalzberg, with its maze of underground tunnels, the empty lots where once guards kept watch over the Berghof with its giant picture window. I wanted to go to Kehlsteinhaus, the Eagle’s Nest, a present from Germany for Hitler’s 50th birthday, his mountain retreat.

“That’s where we drove in the morning, an eerie drive, past walls of old bunkers rotting in the damp air, half hidden under green moss. Past these small villages, churches with black steeples, cascades of red geraniums in all windows. The Alpine meadows. Cows roaming free, brass bells ringing wherever they go.

“By the Hotel Türken, where crowds used to gather for a glimpse of the Führer, there was a sign, “This is a private object. Photography forbidden.” I took the picture of the sign. In Obersalzberg we took a bus to Kehlsteinhaus, along a steep mountain road. An engineering marvel, more than five thousand feet above sea level, a taped voice described the origin of the house and the road, completed in twelve months in the years 1937/38. The bus stopped at the feet of the summit, and we took an elevator to the terrace of the Eagle’s Nest. On the terrace of Kehlsteinhaus waiters offered us beer and tea.

“We hiked the steep loop trail of limestone rocks, caught a sight of the blue waters of Königssee, and the progress of a giant misty cloud, slowly coming our way. I took pictures of the tourists on the trail, the tables shaped like giant HB Weissbier bottles, a face of a hooded maiden watching us without a smile, the giant fireplace in the main hall.

“’There is nothing here for you,’ William said, ‘Let’s go.’ He was getting impatient, edgy. Fanned his face and frowned. This was an old quarrel over what should be remembered and what should be forgotten. When we got down to the terrace, we found out that we couldn’t leave right away. We had to wait for the bus we were registered for. There were too many visitors, the driver explained, they had to keep order.

“’He is right,’ William said, before I had the time to say anything.

“In Berchtesgaden it was raining again, and there were no mountains to be seen, but we decided to go for a walk. On the way we passed a small cemetery. Climbed the low steps and walked by the ivy-covered graves, by long rows of names underneath pale oval photographs with smiling, hopeful faces. Gefallen 7.7. 1944 bei Stalino, 1943 bei Kursk, im Osten. I’m just checking the collective pulse, I told him. Someone has to watch all the time.

“William said, ’Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same thing. St. Paul said that to the Romans. An old priest from around here told me that once.’

’The Church has its own sins to mind,’ I snapped. ‘They were not exactly without blame.’ I hated when he took on a tone like that.

“The rain had stopped and we could see a giant rainbow over the mountains, touching the Eagle’s Nest. Eerie, I thought. The shops in Berchtesgaden were closed, but we peeked inside, at the felt hats, the full Bavarian skirts, puffed sleeves, embroidered woollen vests. That’s what I want, I said, pointing at a dark green hat with a feather. And you will wear this one, I pointed hat with a Gamsbart, a sign of a hunter.

“There was a small Biergarten where we took a seat on the wooden chairs under a tree and ordered beer. William was playing with the beer coaster, spinning it on the side. An old man with flaming red cheeks, a few yellowed teeth, a crew cut of grey hair walked in and sat down at an empty table. ‘ Grüss Gott,’ he chatted us up.

“‘Grüss Gott,’ I said. Asked him about hunting, the weather. I made William buy us a round of beer. I listened to the band, nodded my head in the rhythm of the music.

“‘My name is Kurt Macht,’ the man said.

“‘Ursula Herrlich,’ I said. ‘My friend from Breslau,’ I introduced William. He was staring at the plastic tablecloth, at a swarm of red ladybugs on a white background.

“Herr Macht took a deep breath. ‘Ah! Breslau! Such a beautiful city. It’s all lost, now. Damn Commies.’ He leaned forward, ‘But nobody is blaming them!’

“The Schnapps woman passed by with a small wooden barrel hanging over her neck. She poured the yellow Schnapps into a tin decanter and offered it to William who drank it all in one gulp. She wiped the decanter with a linen cloth and poured another drink for Herr Macht.

“‘You don’t believe a word they say do you? You are too young to remember. Wasn’t the way they tell you it was,’ Herr Macht went on. ‘There would be a different song, if we had won.’ He nodded his head, staring into the distance.

“‘There is too much dirt on this earth, son. Someone has to clean it up.’

“This is when William turned to me and said that he was leaving. He said it in English.

That did it. Herr Macht, red faced, filled with beer, stood up, shaking on his legs. He stared at William, chewing his words, picking them up carefully. ‘Traitors like you should be shot,’ he said at last, and then he spit. The blob of spit landed at William’s feet. ‘Put against the wall and shot.’

I laughed. ‘See,’ I said. ‘I’m right after all. The shit is still here.’

“William took me by the hand and dragged me out of the Biergarten, before I had the time to say anything else. ‘Why don’t you say something, William?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you think I’m right?’ He let go of my hand and walked away. ‘Why don’t you quote your priest, now?’ I shouted after him. By the time I got to the hotel he was gone. He didn’t even leave a note.

Ursula is fanning her face with a napkin. Her cheeks are flushed.

“But he called you in December,” Anna says. “Quite a few times. I found the bill.”

“Yes,” Ursula says, smiling. “We were good at reconciliations. Most of the time. He liked to forgive me. It made him feel good. But I never saw him again.”

She raises to gather the plates, rinse them under the tap before placing them in the dishwasher. Anna scrapes the leftover tahini dip back into the plastic container, covers the rest of the dishes with a plastic wrap. She hands the ceramic bowls to Ursula and they work together, in silence, clearing the kitchen table, wiping its surface, putting things back in the fridge.

“He was better off with you,” Ursula says when they are finished. “With you he didn’t have to fight. Or forgive.”

Anna doesn’t say anything, but she is no longer fooled by her own magnanimity. She knows that it is only because William is dead that she can be here and listen to Ursula. It is only because William can never come here again, touch either of them, make love to them, that she can even consider liking Ursula, thinking that this woman who moves with such assurance is anything but a rival.

“How did it happen?” Ursula asks. She means the last moments of William’s life, the part of the story she must have wondered about. Julia didn’t know enough, then, to answer her questions. “Did he suffer much? Did he know what was happening?”

“He was alone. He was already ... gone when I came in,” Anna begins. “The doctor told me that to him it must have seemed like a stroke of lightning.”

This is her William she is talking about, now. The husband she lived with for ten years, the husband who died and whom she will never see again. The husband she misses so badly at times that she wants to bite her hands and howl. It is still January 26, and she is back in her Montreal kitchen, with its scent of a baked apple pie. The door to William’s study is still closed and she opens it slowly. She is so slow, so damn slow.

“But why? What did the doctor say?” Ursula has sat down in front of her. She has closed her eyes, but Anna can see that her eyelids are swelling with tears. For a moment, when Anna sees Ursula’s tears, for a brief but palpable moment, it seems to her that William might appear, that seeing the two of them, together, would be too much to keep him away.

“Heart failure. The doctor said it could be hereditary. Asked if I knew how his father died.”

On the floor of his study, Anna can see William’s body, his grey hair tousled, glued together with sweat. She can see herself, too, bending over him, dropping her purse, feeling if there is still any warmth left in his face. This other Anna still doesn’t register what has happened, cannot believe her own eyes. Why isn’t she calling the ambulance? What is she waiting for?

“So sudden? Without any warning?” Ursula asks.

“The doctor said it couldn’t have been the first one. There was scar tissue on his heart.”

“He never said anything? Never complained?”

“No,” Anna says, but here she hesitates. “Not to me.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Ursula says. They both know what they are talking about. He was not willing to admit that his body, this wonderful strong body he was so proud of would fail him. Not William.

Anna can feel the cold panic touching the soles of her feet, making its way up, to her heart. It is the same panic that paralysed her then when she was kneeling beside William, stroking his face, feeling the chill set in. She was always too eager to believe him, to let him dispel her fears. For this she has never forgiven herself.

“I should’ve known,” she tells Ursula, now. “He must have thought the pain would go away. He didn’t mention anything to his doctor. There was no record of chest pains in his file ... But I should’ve known.”

She can see herself talking to him in the morning, still groggy from sleep. William is sitting in bed massaging his left arm. Does it hurt? she asks him. It is a stupid question, he tells her. Of course it hurts. Have you talked to your doctor? she asks. What for? he asks in return. He is already impatient with her, tells her she is always coming up with these thoughts of impending doom. Your murky Polish soul, he laughs and tousles her hair. His left arm hurts and there is a perfectly good reason for it. He has been playing the violin for too long. The last thing he needs now is to have her panic.

“If only I hadn’t listened to him,” Anna’s voice is breaking when she says it. “If I only I insisted ...”

“NO!”

The bang of steel on the marble tiles startles them both. Ursula must have pushed a knife off the table, as she leaned forward. “No! Anna, don’t do that? Don’t go this way?”

Anna breathes hard. She mustn’t cry, she tells herself. She must stop the choking feeling in her throat.

“Anna, look at me,” Ursula says. “He loved you.” She takes Anna in her arms and rocks her gently. Her freckled hand is smoothing Anna’s hair, gently stroking her forehead, her cheeks.

For a split-second Anna is thinking of beach sand, flowing between her fingers. Ursula’s touch is surprisingly soothing, and Anna will remember it for a long time, the touch of her hot, dry hand, and the sound of her own voice, murmuring her consent.

On Saturday morning a telephone ring wakes Anna up. “I’m sorry,” Ursula says. “But I’ve just learned something. It’s rather urgent.”

It is Anna’s last day in Berlin. The day before Ursula promised to take her to Potsdam. Schloss Sanssouci, she said. Sounds exactly what we both need.

“My friend, Lothar,” Ursula says on the phone, “has been nosing about the Stasi archives. He has just called me. Said I should come right away. It has something to do with Willi’s grandfather. Can you be ready in half an hour?”

An hour later they are on Normannenstrasse in the Lichtenberg district, Ursula leading the way among the maze of brown concrete buildings. In the lobby of what used to be Stasi headquarters, still decorated with the statues of Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinski, Lothar is already waiting for them. He is a tall, thin man, with an ascetic face. “You’ll have to be quick,” he says, shaking Anna’s hand and giving Ursula a quick hug. “This is still not quite legal, but someone here owes me a big favour.”

Lothar takes them upstairs, into a small room with padded doors. The room is furnished with a shabby table and three hard wooden chairs. The file on the table is an old-fashioned one, with marble coloured cardboard flaps, tied with a grey ribbon. On the white label, in the old German script, a name. Claus Herzmann.

“Go ahead” Ursula says, when Anna hesitates. “You open it. I’ll translate.”

Anna’s hands tremble slightly when she unties the ribbon. William once said he was relieved to know his grandfather was executed by the Nazis. Not a bad thing to know, he said, if you were German. Inside, pinned to a long typewritten report there are prison shots of a man in his fifties, blank eyes staring into space, stubble on his cheeks.

“That’s him,” Ursula says, glancing at the report. “Professor Claus Herzmann of the University of Breslau. Executed on May 2, 1945. For high treason.”

“What did he do?” Anna asks, overcome by curiosity. She is looking for a shadow of William in his grandfather’s face, but it is not there. “Does it say?”

Ursula picks up the documents from the file. Typewritten reports from interrogations, testimony of witnesses. Photographs. From her purse she takes out her reading glasses and begins to translate.

“Professor Herzmann ... research declared essential for war effort. Address, 7 Gerhart-Hauptmann-Weg, Breslau. Wife, Catholic. One child, Käthe Herzmann, daughter. Member of the National Socialist party from January 1939. Maid, Frieda Gottwald, reported that Professor Herzmann did not purge all the forbidden books from his library and tried to fire her after she became pregnant. She wants it recorded that the father of her child was of pure blood and that she got pregnant in response to the order of her Führer.”

Ursula flips through the files, translating what she glances through. “Professor Herzman’s wife frequents Jewish businesses. Dated October 1938. The same Frieda says that her mistress told her to lower the radio volume during the Führer’s speech. Professor Herzmann is also alleged to have a Swiss bank account.”

There is an envelope among the papers and Anna opens it to find a studio portrait of Herr Professor and Frau Professor Herzmann. In this picture William’s grandfather’s face is handsome and distinguished looking. Clean shaven, hair parted, smoothed with brilliantine. Frau Professor is wearing a small round hat, the muslin veil draped over her forehead.

“Listen to this,” Ursula stands up and paces around the table, neatly typed pages in her hands: I have told Fraulein Herzmann that Germany will be reborn. We have suffered for a long time, but we shall suffer no longer. Our Fuhrerhas shown us the way. I told her that we are building autobahns. We are planting trees and forests. We’ve given men work, and with it we have given them their dignity and their honour. But we are such a tiny part of this earth. We have to work hard to conquer our imperfections. I told her that what stops us in this work are old rules and old morality. We have to forget what we, with our limited minds, think is right. We have to let the strong lead us, be ruthless if need be!

I have told her that we have to guard the purity of our blood. Bad blood weakens, dilutes the will. The weak are like disease that has to be contained, like a branch that has to be cut off, so that the tree will grow stronger.

I expressed my disapproval of the school she went to; it was run by the nuns. I told her I didn’t like to think of my fiancee kneeling in front of this crucified Jew! I pointed out to her that her father, a scientist, a professor at the University of Breslau should not remain blind to the laws of nature.

When we found out that my fiancee was pregnant, I declared my desire to marry her. I went to her father’s home the next evening. Professor Herzmann was celebrating his birthday and there were many people in the room. All of them can be asked to bear witness to what has happened.

Professor and Frau Herzmann were in the living room, where my fiancee took me promptly. She had not told her parents about our plans, wishing me to be the one who would break the news to them. It was in front of these witnesses that I asked for the hand of Fraulein Herzmann in marriage.

Here goes a list of names: Herr und Frau Stein... Hanemann, Bauer... Strauss.

“She will go with you if that’s what she wants, but she’ll not have our permission.” These are Frau Herzmann’s exact words. “Not that you care for it, not you with your own laws. But whatever you do I want you to know that it is not with my permission that my daughter will marry a heathen”

I want to report that I was taken aback by Frau Herzmann’s statement but I was also absolutely convinced Professor Herzmann would react to it with the severity it demanded. I was quite prepared to recognize that Frau Herzmann was only a high-strung woman, too weak to withstand such a moment. I want it recorded, however, that Professor Herzmann never said a word to his wife and never offered any apology for what had transpired.

Then I turned to my fiancee and I told her that she knew where to find me. I also made it plain to Fraulein Herzmann that I would marry her, but that I would not stay a minute longer under her father’s roof. I had reminded her that the rotten branches have to be cut off. Only sacrifice will bring rebirth. I waited two days. When she didn’t contact me, I refused to see her or the child again. Signed: Helmut Rust, SS-Sturmbannführer.

“SS?” Anna asks. “Are you sure?” The chill of the concrete walls makes her shiver.

Ursula shows her the report. Helmut Rust’s signature takes an entire line. A strong, determined script, each letter perfectly legible. There can be no doubt.

“Kadavergehorsam, cadaver obedience,” Ursula says. “They, the SS were above all judgement. In their schools, stripped to the waist, they were taught to fight off attack dogs with their bare hands. If they took flight, they were shot. They tore cats’ eyes out, learning not to feel sorrow. They marched in the heat for hours, without a drop of water to drink, crawled through tunnels, ran over obstacle courses, until there was nothing left in them but rage. When they rose from this rage, they believed they were invincible. That they could achieve anything they put their will to. Walk unmoved over corpses, deaf to cries and pleas. Incorruptible.”

“She said Helmut Rust was an officer,” Anna says, meaning Frau Strauss. “That he and Käthe were in love. That they quarrelled. She never mentioned why.” Quickly she tells Ursula of what she had learned that afternoon, just days before. The trek from Breslau. The horrendous story of escape.

Ursula is not surprised. “Lebenslüge,” she says. “This is what you get here, in this country. A lie you live with for so long that it transforms your life. But also,” she adds after a moment, “a lie that enables you to live.”

“Käthe didn’t lie,” Anna says.

“Here is more. Some Wolfgang Hildebrand, the Dean of Chemistry at the University of Breslau, reports” — Ursula keeps translating what she reads — “that Frau Professor Herzmann came to see him. Frau Professor was dressed in black and asked for intercession on her husband’s behalf. Which Herr Professor Hildebrand says here he is not going to do. Then some Jürgen Stein reports that Frau Professor Herzmann came to see the rector of the University, asking for his support. The Rector tried to give her money, but she refused to take it... Frau Professor’s Berlin address. Her letter to her husband, parts of it blackened with ink. A grandson, Wilhelm Herzmann, born in 1940. Claus Herzmann was executed in the yard of Plötzensee prison, April 13, 1945. No last words were recorded. The widow was not allowed to see the body.”

Ursula leafs through the last of the documents and leans back on the chair, closing her eyes. They sit silently for a while in this dreary room with its faint reek of cheap cigarette smoke. Lighter rectangular patches on the wall reveal the places from which pictures have been removed. Anna puts the papers and photographs back into the file and carefully ties the grey ribbon. When she is finished, Ursula places her hand on hers and squeezes it gently. Not a sound reaches them through the padded door.