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isolation unit. Afterward, when I had won the battle for normal conditions of imprisonment”—Jörg laughed—“so, when prison conditions were normal … the noise was bad. Perhaps you think it’s quiet in prison, but it’s noisy. For every activity iron doors have to be opened and closed and iron passageways and iron steps have to be walked down. By day people shout at one another and at night they shout in their sleep. And then there’s the radio and the peephole, and one person clattering on a typewriter, and someone else banging his dumbbells against the door.” Jörg spoke slowly, haltingly, and with the random, agitated gestures that had startled Christiane in the morning and startled her again now. “You want to know what the worst thing is? That life is elsewhere. That you’re cut off from it and rotting, and the longer you wait for afterward, the less afterward is worth.”
    “Did you ever imagine having to go to prison? Imean, the way an employee imagines being fired or a doctor imagines contracting an illness? A professional risk? Or did you think you’d keep going and end up retiring as a terrorist, in the old terrorists’ home, where young terrorists would look after you? Did you …”
    “Has everyone got something in his glass?” Eberhard had a powerful voice, with which he effortlessly drowned out Ulrich. “I’m the oldest one here at the table, and I’m the one you should ask about retirement and old people’s homes. Jörg is still young, and I raise my glass to the many active and fulfilled years of freedom that he still has ahead of him. To Jörg!”
    “To Jörg!”
    When they had all set their glasses back down, it was a moment before they started talking again. Karin’s husband smilingly remarked to Ulrich’s wife about her stubborn husband. Andreas ironically apologized to Karin; he had actually understood the prayer, he didn’t know what had come over him. Christiane whispered to Jörg: “Talk to Margarete!” and Ilse and Henner asked Ulrich’s daughter about school and what sort of work she planned to do afterward.
    Ulrich wouldn’t let go. “You’re acting as if Jörg has leprosy and you’re not allowed to talk about it. Why shouldn’t I ask him about his life? He chose it—just as you chose yours and I chose mine. I actually think you’re being arrogant.”
    Jörg started speaking again, still slowly, still haltingly. “So … I didn’t think about old age. I didn’t think beyond the end of each action or perhaps to the start of the next one. A journalist once asked me if a life outsidethe law was bad, and he couldn’t understand that it wasn’t bad. I think any life that you live now, in which you’re not somewhere else in your thoughts, is good.”
    Ulrich looked around triumphantly. He nearly said, “Come on!” For a while he let the individual conversations continue. Ilse, who thought she remembered where the pictures on the place markers came from, asked Christiane. Yes, she had cut them from a collection made at Jan’s funeral. Ilse asked Jörg if he remembered Jan, and was confused by the answer, “He’s the best.” Ulrich’s daughter quietly asked Henner if he thought Jörg had turned homosexual in prison, and Henner answered just as quietly that he had no idea, but knew that in boarding schools, camps and prisons there was a kind of pragmatic homosexuality that disappeared again afterward. Christiane whispered to Jörg, who was eating in silence: “Ask Margarete how she found the house!”
    But Ulrich preempted her. “I’m sure you remember your first case and your first sermon.” He nodded to Andreas and Karin. “And Ilse her first lesson and Henner his first article. I will never forget my first bridge; I never put so much time and love into any later work, and learned something from it that has served me for life. What about your first murder, Jörg? Did it give you …”
    “Stop it, Ulrich, please stop it!” his wife