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known only too well in person. This house belonged to Horst Mählich, who had believed all his life that Wilhelm was a Soviet master spy, and to the very last had defended the theory that Wilhelm had been murdered; that one was the home of Bunke, a former Stasi man who, after the fall of the Wall, spent a few more years growing vegetables in his garden, and always said a friendly “Good morning,” until he quietly disappeared; Schröter the sports teacher had lived in that house; the doctor who came from the West lived over there; and there, finally, at the end of the street was his grand parents’ house. It had already been “transferred back” to the rightful claimants, and was now the home of the grandchildren of the former owner, a middle-ranking Nazi who had made his fortune manufacturing binocular telescopes for the Wehrmacht. His heirs had renovated and repainted the house. They had restored the magnificent natural stone terrace over which Wilhelm had laid so much concrete that it collapsed. And the conservatory, reglazed and with all kinds of decorative motifs added to the windows, looked so strange that Alexander found it hard to believe he ever really used to sit there with his grandmother Charlotte, listening to her Mexican stories.
    Then they turned into Steinweg, Kurt snuffling and leaning forward, but keeping up. The kids used to roller-skate on the smooth tarmac here, and they had drawn chalk circles on the street. That was where the butcher had been, the one who sold Irina “grab bag” packages put together discreetly in his back room. And that had been the People’s Bookshop, now a travel agency. That was the site of the former state cooperative store, the Konsum, emphasis on the first syllable (and sure enough, it didn’t have much to do with genuine con sump tion), where very long ago—Alexander couldn’t quite remember it now—milk had been available in exchange for ration coupons.
    And there was the post office.
    “The post office,” said Alexander.
    “Yes,” said Kurt.
    After that they said no more.
    They climbed the hill to the old water tower. There was a fine view down to the River Havel from here. They sat on the bench and spent a long time watching the sunset sky as it slowly turned red.

1952
    They had gone to spend a few days on the Pacific coast at New Year. A truck carrying coffee took them from the little airfield to Puerto Ángel. An acquaintance had recommended the place: romantic village, picturesque bay with rocks and fishing boats.
    The bay was indeed picturesque. Apart from the concrete loading ramp for coffee.
    The village itself: twenty or twenty-five little houses, a sleepy post office, and a kiosk selling alcoholic beverages.
    The only place available to rent was a tiny hut (which the landlady, a woman of Spanish origin, called a “bungalow”). At least it had a tiled roof. It contained an iron bedstead under a mosquito net (which the landlady called a “pavilion”) hanging from the ceiling. Two bedside tables. Coat hangers on nails knocked into the posts here and there.
    Outside the bungalow there was a roofed terrace with two rickety deck chairs and a table.
    “Oh, how lovely,” said Charlotte.
    She ignored the bats hanging upside down from the eaves of the roof, and thus in effect right inside the room, since as usual in these parts there was a gap as wide as a hand between wall and roof. She overlooked the large, blotched pig wandering through the garden, churning up earth around the shed that the landlady called a bathroom.
    “Oh, how lovely,” she said. “We’ll have a nice, refreshing rest here.”
    Wilhelm nodded, and dropped into one of the deck chairs, exhausted. The legs of his pants rode up, partly exposing his thin, pale calves. Skinny enough to start with, he had lost another five kilos in the last few weeks. His angular limbs resembled the deck chair in which he was sitting.
    “We’ll have some lovely excursions into the nearby countryside,”