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accent.
    Peter’s father was a German from the worn soles of his Salamander shoes to the crown of his bony head. He had served in an ambulance unit in the First World War. Had been a member of the National German Party, even though he thought the Kaiser was a clown. On an equally hot day in July 1940 he had stood at the radio to hear of France’s capitulation and acknowledged a charge of pride. But in this moment three centuries dissolved. He turned his back on his country and eight months later shambled into the drive, arms raised, to greet an American jeep.
    â€œMy father couldn’t tolerate the thought of his only child growing up in this culture.”
    His childhood wasn’t all dour. There were days on which his life sparkled. His happiest moments were those when his father sat at the kitchen table and called for a spool of thread.
    â€œHe asked me if I wanted anything mended,” she said 17 years later, on the damp grass among the bee orchids. “I thought it was odd, especially from a man. Then he revealed he wanted more than anything to be a surgeon. He was anxious to show me something his father had taught him.”
    They were sitting on the sofa when he lifted his legs from her knees. “Get that other orange. And a needle and thread. And a knife,” he shouted after her.
    He cut the orange in half. It was green and fibrous and good for juice, but not much else. “A grapefruit would be better,” starting to suture together the two pieces.
    She watched his deft fingers zigzag the needle in and out of the pith.
    â€œIn surgery,” he told her, “the knot is everything.”
    Afterwards, he held it up, reciting: “Its feet were tied / With a silken thread of my own hand’s weaving.”
    Because of his father he was forbidden to go to Humboldt University to study medicine. “You come from the class of yesterday,” was the attitude of the authorities. The universities of Halle and Kiev also rejected him as a class enemy.
    After the Soviet 20th Party Congress in 1956 he hoped that greater democracy would come to East Germany. He joined a small demonstration at Humboldt University calling for the Social Democratic Party to be legalised. The leaders were imprisoned for ten years, but he escaped arrest. “Probably because I wasn’t registered as a student.” Thereafter he avoided showing his face in Berlin.
    Without some professional training he could gain no full-time employment. He worked as a messenger for an X-ray lab in Ludwigslust and for a forester whose brother was a border guard in Boizenburg and finally on a pig farm. Within two months his shoes fell to pieces and the farmer lent him another pair, but the hard leather didn’t bend around the toes and he began to walk in the lilting gait of a pack animal. One day a lean snobbish girl visited. She wore a stylish grey dress and busied her fingers in a purse full of cosmetics. After lunch, she walked to where he was feeding the pigs and stood around smoking good cigarettes and the smell of the grey smoke tortured him.
    He decided that his only chance of studying medicine was to escape. Once in the West he hoped to enrol at Hamburg University where his father had a good contact. He told his parents and his father wept and his mother just nodded. They had become lonely in these last years. His father had no more friends while his mother’s circle had shrunk to four women who visited once a week for coffee. He implored his parents to accompany him, but his father declined. He was a doctor. He was old. And he was needed. “I can’t change.”
    Wary of leaving through Berlin, on a cool cloudy day in April he took the train to a village on the border. The guide, a former patient of his father, waited on the platform. Peter held a large cast-iron key from the house as a signal. The man saw it and approached: “Follow me.”
    They walked several kilometres. Wooded hills on