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‘Hello?’

‘Miriam, Miriam, it’s Anna Funder here. I’m—’

‘Anna! Where are you calling from? Are you back in Berlin?’

‘I’m—I’m actually in Leipzig,’ I say. ‘I thought of you, and thought I’d just call to say hi while I’m here. I didn’t know if you still had the same number. I’ve been in Nuremberg, and I’m on my way back to Berlin. I just—’

‘I’ll come and get you,’ she says. ‘Where are you?’

‘Near the station, I think.’

‘OK. I’ll be at the side entrance in ten minutes.’

I see her come towards me. She is dressed entirely in white: loose pants and a flowing top. She is my height, though finely built; when she hugs me I feel the wing-bones of her shoulder blades beneath my hands. She lifts her sunglasses and her eyes are the same blue. But the lines in her face are much more deeply drawn.

‘I’ve moved house since you were last here,’ she explains. We drive over cobbled streets from the station, under elms and plane trees and tram wires.

Miriam’s is a corner building, beautifully restored. Hand-painted flowers curl up the walls of the grand stairway, and at the back a discreet steel-and-glass lift takes us up. Once more, her apartment is on the top level. The living room straddles the corner and all the windows are open. I move to the sill. Across the street there’s another fine building with a glass atrium on its roof, and behind it a field of grass and trees, stretching as far as I can see.

‘That’s the Leipzig heath,’ she says behind me. ‘It’s lovely for a walk. We can go there later, if you like. The Leipzig zoo is there too, which is worth a look.’

‘What’s that smell?’ I ask.

‘It could be the big cat enclosure,’ she chuckles.

‘No, it’s sweet.’

‘Oh, that’s the acacias.’ She joins me at the window and points to the top of the glorious trees right below us. Cream flowers dangle in bunches like grapes. ‘It’s a beautiful perfume, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘More beautiful, at any rate, than the lions.’ She laughs and touches my arm.

Miriam makes tea and we sit to talk. She doesn’t seem surprised by my arrival, or not as surprised as I am to find myself with her. It is as if she always expected us to see one another again, almost like friends. What are a few missed phone calls between friends?

The scented air moves gently around us. The apartment has a parquetry floor, pale walls and a new kitchen at one end of this room. The adjoining room is a large space covered with a deep chalk-coloured carpet. It is lined with books and plants and there’s a computer in the corner, the screensaver on clouds. Everything is white and light and comfortable.

I tell Miriam about my travels, about Stasi men and Julia’s schoolgirl ordeal, about kidnappings and babies left on the wrong side of the Wall, about Renft and Professor Mushroom. I tell her I’ve just come from Nuremberg where I spoke with the puzzle women, who turned out to be men as well; a few dozen people doing something that will take a very long time. I find I can’t say, ‘Three hundred and seventy-five years.’

‘Everything in this place,’ she says, ‘takes a very long time.’ We are sitting at a glass-topped cane table. Miriam slips her sandals off and rests her feet on its supports. Her hair is still cropped short, but it is now dyed, a deep chestnut-brown. She wears the same small round eyeglasses and smiles the same kind and sudden smile, the shadows between her teeth overdefined by nicotine. ‘A very…long…time,’ she says again, lighting a cigarette. A breeze comes through, pushing her clothes against skin, revealing again for an instant how slight she is underneath—something I forget because of her magnificent voice.

Miriam works at a public radio station. Recently, she was asked to make a program on Ostalgie parties—where if you show an East German ID you get in for free, everyone calls one another ‘Comrade’ and the beer is only DM 1.30.

She says, ‘Things like this feed into a crazy nostalgia for the GDR—as if it had been a harmless welfare state that looked after people’s needs. Most