Sven and I met over a game of chess. I had moved to Berlin in the summer of 1986, didn’t know anyone, and spent weekends exploring the city, East and West. One Saturday evening, I happened on some chess players in a beer garden on Lake Müggel, watched the end of a match, and was invited by the winner to play a game. When it got too dark and we had to break off, we made a date to continue the game the following Saturday.

  With your first new acquaintances, a city begins to be home. On the ride back to West Berlin the bleakness of the East was less disheartening, its ugliness less inhospitable. Lighted windows, gaudy with curtains or blue from television, side by side in prefabricated apartments or lonely in firewalls, dimly lit old factories, wide empty streets, occasional places to eat—I watched and imagined Sven living here or there, working in this factory, driving along that street. I even saw myself going in or out of that door, driving along this street, eating in that pub.

  My second new acquaintance in Berlin was a little boy with a schoolbag. One morning as I was about to cross the wide boulevard in front of my building, there he stood beside me. “Will you walk me across the street?” he asked, taking my hand. After that he showed up many mornings as I waited on the curb for the stoplight a few hundred yards on to turn red and bring traffic to a halt. Later, right after the Wall had come down, Sven and Paula took trips like crazy—to Munich, Cologne, Rome, Paris, Brussels, London, always by bus or train and always by night both ways, so that for a two-day stay they would have to pay for only one night’s lodging. When they took trips they left their daughter Julia with me, and she and the little boy became friends. She was still in kindergarten and full of admiration for the first grader. He was a bit embarrassed by the company of the little girl, but also flattered by her admiration. His name was Hans, and he lived a couple of buildings away, where his parents ran a newspaper and tobacco shop.

  2

  THE NEXT Saturday it rained. I took the train through East Berlin, which was grayer and emptier than usual. I walked from the station in Rahnsdorf to the lake; the rain was relentless, it was cold, and the hand I held my umbrella in was numb. From a distance I saw that the beer garden was closed. Then I saw Sven. He was wearing the same blue bib overalls as on the previous Saturday and the same leather cap, and with his round glasses and chubby-cheeked face he had the look of a childlike, naive revolutionary. He was standing in the open door of a shed, chessboard and box of chessmen between his feet. He waved, shrugged, and spread his arms wide in an apologetic gesture that embraced the skies, the rain, the puddles, and the closed beer garden.

  He had come in his car, and he drove me back to his place. His wife and daughter were with the grandparents, would be back this evening, and until then we could play chess without interruption. Then he would have to put his daughter to bed and read her a story for half an hour, as he did every evening. But I could do that too, read her the story, and he would fix us a little something to eat. Did I have children, too? I said I didn’t, and he shook his head and sighed at the misfortune of my childlessness.

  We didn’t finish the game that second Saturday, either. Sven brooded and brooded over each move. I let my eyes wander. There was a homemade bookcase of blond wood, a massive dark china cabinet that matched four dark chairs and a table, its floor-length white cloth embroidered with flowers, the small bamboo table at which we sat in pale wickerwork chairs with black metal frames, and a blackish brown coal stove. On one wall was a blue-and-white tapestry of a dove, with an olive branch in its beak, and a print of van Gogh’s sunflowers. The window, wet with dripping rain, looked out on a large old brick building, a school, according to Sven’s mumbled confirmation of my question. Sometimes a car rattled along the cobblestone street, and at regular intervals a tram squealed around a curve. Otherwise it was silent.

  Later, I got bored with Sven’s long brooding, and we agreed to play by the clock, four-hour games or even blitz matches of seven minutes. And then chess began to bore us in general, and we preferred to take walks with Paula and Julia or meet with friends or play the new games I brought with me—sometimes only on the second try, if the border guards had caught me with them the first time around and turned me back. Or we just talked; we were both thirty-six, interested in theater and films and curious about people and relationships. Sometimes when we had joined other friends, our eyes would meet because some remark, some exchange of words or gestures, caught the attention of us both the same way.

  The room where Sven and I played chess never looked quite the same again as on that first Saturday. It was always a hopeless mess—Julia’s toys and Sven’s and Paula’s papers from work lay strewn about, plus teapots and cups, gnawed apples and open packets of chocolate, often racks hung with drying laundry. The whole of daily life was played out in this one room. The apartment had one tiny bedroom for the parents, an even tinier cubicle for Julia, and a narrow kitchen half its original size, its other half separated off and turned into an equally narrow bath. That first Saturday Sven had tidied up the room. He had also bought pastries. But engrossed in chess, he had forgotten about the pastries and tea; it wasn’t until he heard Paula and Julia at the door that he remembered he was going to offer them to me. He stood up and said, “Oh Lord, I was going to . . . ,” and spread his arms again in a gesture of regret and futility.

  3

  FOR JULIA and me it was love at first sight. She was two years old, cheerful, fidgety, talkative, and when occupied with her own activities she would hum to herself. Sometimes she would turn thoughtful and serious, as if she wanted to understand everything, and could. Sometimes she would look, or hold herself or move, in a way that already revealed the woman she would someday be. It was no wonder she enchanted me. The joy of it was the way she greeted me so happily that first evening, as if there was a space free in her heart and I had arrived just in time.

  Paula and I had a difficult time with one another. She was serious and stern with Sven, Julia, and me, as if she disapproved of the fun we had with silliness like building a tower out of chessmen or having Julia’s teddy bears perform a striptease or playing with soap bubbles—with the saucer-sized ring and soap powder that I brought one Saturday and with which we created quite a stir in Treptow Park. She also disapproved of my attempts to charm her. She saw it as flirting, and when I tried being equally serious and stern, though friendly of course, she saw it as merely another variation on flirting. Whenever she could, she ignored me.

  Our relationship improved when we discovered that we both loved Greek. Paula taught it at an Evangelical seminary, and I had learned it in high school and had read texts in Greek ever since—a hobby, the way other people play the sax or buy a telescope to gaze at stars. One day I noticed from the books lying around that Paula was involved with Greek, I asked about it, and she realized that I really was interested and knew something about it. From then on she would strike up a conversation with me, at first only about questions of Greek grammar and syntax, but then about Julia as well, or something that had happened in the course she taught or a book that she was reading.

  It wasn’t until the summer of 1987, when we all went on vacation together to Bulgaria, that she said something about our relationship. How she had considered me too happy-go-lucky and had been afraid I would disappoint Sven’s trust in me. “He was so happy about meeting you that day and making a date for the next Saturday, but was afraid you wouldn’t come, too. He was like that for a long time, happy and afraid. You have no idea what it means to get to know one of you, to know you better and well. It opens up another world, intellectually and—let’s admit it—materially, too, and then there’s the desire to show you off and brag about you and at the same time keep a jealous eye on you. And we’re constantly afraid the exotic charm we have for you will wear off, get used up, and you’ll move on to other things, other people.”

  I could have responded that they opened up another world for me as well. Not an exotic world of middling importance and short-lived charm, but the other half of our world, separated by a wall and an iron curtain. Thanks to them I was at home in all Berlin, almost in all of Germany, almost in the whole world. Instead, I contradicted her. I said I couldn’t handle the idea that their world and my world were so different and that we were exchanging entry into one world for entry into others. Our relationship should be a friendship, not a cultural exchange. I didn’t want to be the guy from the West, and they shouldn’t be the couple from the East. We should simply be human beings.

  “But you can’t behave as if there were no Wall. As if our friendship were like your friendships over there or ours here.”

  We were walking along the beach. Paula and I liked to get up early, early enough to watch the sunrise over the sea. We lived in different hotels—they in one for Eastern tourists, I in one for Westerners, and when it began to grow bright, we would meet at the harbor and walk until it was time to turn around and go back for breakfast. We were barefoot.

  “Look,” she said, setting her foot in wet sand that had just been washed by a wave, and then stepping back, “two, three more waves, and you’ll no longer be able to see it.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  4

  WE DIDN’T TALK about politics for a long time. In the latter half of the eighties the world had settled down. The East was still the East, but it had grown old, tireder, and wiser, and the West, which no longer had anything to fear or prove, was happy and well fed. What was there to say about politics?

  After my exams I had spent three years as an aide for one of the parties in the state legislature in Stuttgart— was at first excited by politics, but soon grew disappointed. In Berlin my political interest went no further than daily, superficial newspaper reading. Insofar as politics was relevant to my job as a judge in welfare court, I got that from periodicals in my field or contacts with colleagues. I knew that Sven and Paula listened to a comprehensive news report every day on West German radio; they didn’t subscribe to a newspaper, and since Julia was supposed to grow up without television, they didn’t have a TV. They weren’t interested in politics, either, I thought, nor did I find that surprising either for her, a teacher of Greek, or him, a translator from the Czech and Bulgarian.

  In the fall of 1987, I noticed that this was not the case. I was skeptical the first time they asked me to pass on a cryptic telephone message to someone in the West and told me a complicated story about friends who were expecting a visitor from the West, whom they wanted to ask for a favor, but because of some mix-up couldn’t get hold of. And when they asked me to do it the second time, I knew the story was fabricated, and they knew that I knew. If that second time had ended the matter, I wouldn’t have said anything. But then came a third request, and I called them on it. I was outraged, not because I was afraid that carrying out these assignments would put me in any danger, but because I expected them to trust me.

  Paula had insisted that I should know nothing. For my own protection, she said. But before she had become a Christian and got involved with the church, she had been active in the Free German Youth and the Communist Party, and the zeal with which she had thrown herself into the cause of the Environmental Library established by the congregation of Zion Church, and her willingness to use me for the cause, both struck me as a heritage from her political past. “The end justifies the means, is that it?”

  “That’s unfair. I’m open about my past in the party, and you use it against me.”

  “I’m not using anything against you. If I’m not allowed to respond to what you tell me, then give me the rules for censorship: This is for the ears of comrades and this is for naive people like me and this . . .”

  “Oh cut the self-righteousness and self-pity. Yes, we should have talked with you right off. But we’re talking with you now. And trust isn’t all that easy in this country.”

  She was leaning against the china cabinet, staring at me, her face flushed, her eyes flashing. I had never seen her look so beautiful. Why, I thought, does she always wear her hair in a bun instead of letting it down?

  The request to pass on another message became a request to establish permanent contact with a journalist. Until the fall of 1989, I reported to him about repressive measures taken against the Environmental Library, about searches and arrests among sympathizers, about the activities of Paula and her friends, who were determined to exploit the law to the full, but not to overstep its bounds. I wondered if the State Security didn’t suspect me, if I was being watched. But I wasn’t searched or interrogated any more often or thoroughly at the border. I never carried written matter with me in any case.

  Once, in the spring of 1988, Paula and Sven took me along to Zion Church. The topics of peace, ecology, and human rights were addressed, but otherwise it seemed to me a church service like any other. But Paula insisted that I had been noticed and should stay clear of her political activities. “And you’d best do the same.”

  “What?” Sven stared at her, flabbergasted.

  “You’re there only because of me. If something were ever to happen to me, nothing should happen to you, too. Think of Julia.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  “You can’t know that for sure, can you?” She challenged him with a look, and he gave in.

  5

  THEN CAME the big change. Paula spoke at demonstrations in Alexander Platz, joined the Social Democrats, became involved in preparations for a new constitution, and was almost elected a member of the GDR’s last Volkskammer. Sven was a member of a group that concerned itself with the files of the Ministry for State Security and published the first book about its organization, activities, and collaborators. They were both drunk on politics for a few months.

  Paula woke up even before reunification, rousing Sven out of his dream of founding a political party and a publishing house, and they set about reshaping their lives. He applied successfully for a position as a lecturer at the Free University, and she was hired as an instructor at Humboldt University. They could afford to move from Schneller Strasse to Prenzlauer Berg. Their new, large apartment, their new jobs, and getting Julia started in school all made for a full life for them both. They had no nostalgic memories of the defunct GDR. “The change was good to us,” they said in amazement now and then, as if they actually ought to have ended up like so many who saw themselves deprived of the fruits of their accommodation or resistance, first by the changes and then by the reunification that followed the destruction of the Wall.

  For a while Sven was overwhelmed by his opportunities as a consumer. He bought a big car, wore Armani suits, and dressed Julia up like a princess. Paula disapproved of his extravagance. “Our wanting-to-have was never any better than your having, and it stinks just as much now.” But she changed as well, in less obvious ways. She continued to wear her gray or brown dresses and suits, but they became more elegant, her shoes had higher heels, and new glasses with thin frames gave her face an almost haughty look. Her voice changed too, became more powerful and self-assured. Sven tried to get her to wear her hair down. That disappointed her—as if her hair were a secret she shared only with him and that he had now betrayed to fashion.

  Even when Sven’s and Paula’s delight in short trips had passed, Julia sometimes came to stay overnight with me. After school she would get on the subway just around the corner and get off just around the corner from me, meet Hans there, and phone me from his parents’ shop to say she was staying with me and would wait for me there. She had become quite an independent little girl.

  In the spring of 1992 we took another vacation together, traveling this time by way of Tuscany and Umbria to the beach at Ancona. Once again, Paula and I would get up early and take our dawn walk by the sea. I told her I no longer saw anything of their old friends, who had become mine as well.

  “We still see only two or three of them ourselves. Too many things are too different.”

  “Is that because of the Gauck Authority and the files?”

  She shrugged. “We decided not to worry about our files. We agreed that we all knew one another and didn’t want to start with all that—no mistrust, no faith in files.”

  “Who agreed?”

  “Hans and Ute, Dirk and Tatjana, the Thiessens and the four from the orchestra. When we were all together one last time on October third, 1990. Don’t be angry that we didn’t ask you. We had the feeling that it’s our problem, not yours.”

  I was angry. I had expected my friends not to define and separate things into their problems and my problems without at least asking me.

  She noticed, without my having said a word. “You’re right, we should’ve discussed it with you. It’s your problem, too. All I can say is that the subject came up and we talked till everyone was hot under the collar. In the end we had the feeling that we couldn’t just leave it at talk. We wanted to do something with consequences, and that’s how we came to our decision.”

  “Unanimous?”

  “No, Hans and Tatjana were against it, and Tatjana also refused to be bound by the decision. She wanted to see her files.”

  “Did she?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve lost contact.”

  I had asked myself more than once if any of our friends might have been unofficial collaborators. Now I wanted to know. I was still angry. “I want to see my files, too.”

  6

  THAT FALL Sven got a tenured contract. He had been hoping for it for so long that he’d finally given up. Now the head of his department unexpectedly handed him the papers.

  He called me at my office at court. “Join us this evening. We’re celebrating.”