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Miriam thought if it wasn’t cards in her letterbox summoning her to clarify circumstances they were giving her wake-up calls. She had had a late night. She slept some more, then got up and had a shower, made the first cup of tea.

At midday the doorbell sounded. A Stasi man, Division of the Interior. ‘Why are you still here?’ he said.

‘This is my home.’

‘You are required to report immediately to the ministry, and bring your identity papers with you.’

‘There’s plenty of time. The day is still long, my friend.’

He stationed himself outside her door.

She went down to the offices. An official took her ID papers, and said she was to go to a photographer, and that after that she had an appointment with a public notary. Then, she was to come back to collect her travel authority. ‘You are on a train tonight,’ he said.

‘That was when I understood,’ Miriam says. ‘I was in shock. I said to them, “It’s been eleven years since we lodged the application to leave, and now I can’t even say goodbye to my friends?”’

‘Mrs Weber, the travel authority you have been issued is valid until midnight tonight. If you are found to be on GDR territory after that time, you will be here illegally, and you will be arrested. I would remind you,’ he said holding them up to her in his hand, ‘that you no longer have any identity papers for this country.’

The train that night was crammed full of people being expelled from the GDR. It was as though anyone who might catch the glasnost virus had to be put over the Wall. Miriam had a small carrybag with two changes of clothes in it, and she was leaving her life behind. Her friends were going to pack up her apartment for her. For all she knew, she would never be back. No-one had any idea that the Wall would fall that November.

‘Essentially, the deportation came eleven years too late,’ she says, ‘and six months too early.’

Night has fallen, and the city lights are spread out beneath us. In the dark, this could be any city, in any normal place.

Some people are comfortable talking about their lives, as if they can make sense of the progression of random events that made them what they are. This involves a kind of forward-looking faith in life; a conviction that cause and effect are linked, and that they are themselves more than the sum of their past. For Miriam, the past stopped when Charlie died. Her memories of picnics or cooking meals or holidays, her real life, are memories where ‘she’ is a ‘we’ and those are the things she and Charlie did together. It is as if the time after his death doesn’t count; it has been a non-time, laying down non-history. She is brave and strong and broken all at once. As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was.

‘Why did you come back to Leipzig?’ I ask.

‘Well, in this matter I’ve got going at the moment, it is better that I am here. It only takes me an hour to get to the offices of the investigators in Dresden,’ she smiles. ‘And I am hoping,’ she says, and I see that under the smile she is fighting back tears, ‘I am really hoping that the puzzle women in Nuremberg find out something about Charlie in all those pieces of files.’

Miriam wants Charlie’s body exhumed, so she can know for sure what happened to him.

I look out at the lights. She continues, ‘I don’t believe he would have killed himself. I don’t think he did. Of the two of us, he was always more worried it’d be me who would crack under all that pressure.’

Not knowing what happened to Charlie is so hard, because if it was suicide, she was abandoned. I wonder what will happen to her when they dig up the coffin. If he was cremated, there will be nothing there, or someone else’s remains. If it’s Charlie what could that tell her? Will she be released into a new life? Or will the current one lose its purpose?

Miriam can’t afford to have the exhumation performed privately, so she hopes it will be done in the course of the criminal investigation into his death that is now, apparently,