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always his business to build things high, wide and deep, but now the forth dimension has caught up with him: time, which is now expelling him from house and home. We won’t be doing any arresting over the weekend, the official said and let him go, meaning that he wasn’t going to be killed, he was just supposed to leave, get out, scram, make himself scarce, go to the devil: In two hours he’ll be sitting in the S-Bahn that will bring him to West Berlin. Five years at least, the official said, for the ton of screws he bought with his own money in the West to be used in the East, a ton of brass screws for the most important building of his life: on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin-Mitte. A building for the state that is now driving him out. He knows much less than he used to.
     
     
    That’s his profession: planning homes, planning a homeland. Four walls around a block of air, wresting a block of air from amid all that burgeoning, billowing matter with claws of stone, pinning it down. Home. A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothing. Homestead. A house made to measure according to the needs of its master. Eating, cooking, sleeping, bathing, defecating, children, guests, car, garden. Calculating all these whethers, all these thises and thats, in wood, stone, glass, straw and iron. Setting out courses for lives, flooring beneath feet for corridors, vistas for eyes, doors for silence. And this here was his house. For the sitting to be done by his wife and himself, he designed the two chairs with leather cushions, for observing the sunset, he made the terrace with its view of the lake, and their shared pleasure at receiving guests had taken shape as a long table in the main room, the chill he and she felt in winter would be combated by the tiled heating stove from Holland, his and her weariness after ice-skating by the bench beside the stove, and finally his drawing at the drafting table was provided for, as it were, by the studio. And now he had to consider himself lucky he was escaping with his life, suffering his third skin to be stripped from him and fleeing, insides glisteningly exposed, to the safety of the West.
     
     
    When over the enemy’s lines never forget your own line of retreat. Even in the first war this was easier said than done. They’d been able to discharge their bombs over Paris, but then the airship was struck and gradually lost altitude until finally it settled on the roof of a stable in a Belgian village, burying its own gondola beneath the huge limp sack. When he and his comrades worked their way out from beneath the cloth, they saw a few chickens pecking at the sand down below in the yard, saw a cat sleeping in the sun, and only when the farmers refrained from shooting at him and his comrades but instead fetched a ladder did they know that the village had already been occupied by the Germans. And so it was pure chance that instead of being shot they were invited to climb down a Belgian ladder back into life. From the airship you gazed down at the world as if at a floor plan, but it wasn’t so easy to see where the front was from so high above. To them, the village they owed their life to was occupied territory; to the Belgians, it was home, and quite possibly the front ran right between the whiskers of the sleeping cat. The lesson he learned that day was never to take a risk on so close a call.
     
     
    He walks around the house to the left, passing the rhododendrons, beneath his feet the gratings with which he covered all the basement windows during the second war. The words “Mannesmann Air Raid Defense” are stamped on these gratings, even now, in the middle of peacetime. By the time the second war came along, he was already too old to be sent into battle, but in his own way he’d expanded his occupied territory. Rule number one for aerial battle: When you attack, keep the sun behind you.
     
     
    In the morning the sunlight grazed the tops of the pine trees before the