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I think of the shame I would feel sitting opposite Major So-and-So in his office with these intimate things in his fingers. Shame at hearing your words turn into the universal banalities of love in his mouth.

Julia and her boyfriend wrote to one another in English. Major N. had underlined in each letter the words he had not been able to find in his German-English dictionary.

‘He sat there and he—’ Julia stops and takes a sip of tea. It must be cold by now. It goes down the wrong way. She coughs and coughs, but puts her hand out to stop me helping, ‘—and he asked me,’ she says in a choked voice, ‘what they meant.’

The hairs on my forearms stand up. I have stopped looking at Julia now because in this dimness she ceased addressing her words to me some time ago. I am humbled for reasons I cannot at this moment unravel. I am outraged for her, and vaguely guilty about my relative luck in life.

Major N. took his time perfecting his translation. The words that were not in the dictionary were, mostly, the words of their private lovers’ language. He asked her, ‘what is the meaning of this?’ and again, ‘would you mind, please, explaining this term?’ One long forefinger on her handwriting, or her lovers’. ‘What about this?’ he asked, touching the word cocoriza in a letter from her boyfriend.

‘Cocoriza,’ Julia told him, ‘is the Hungarian word for corn.’

‘What does this mean then, Miss Behrend, when your friend writes, “I want my little cocoriza”?’

She had to explain. On their holidays her hair had lightened to the colour of corn. Cocoriza was his pet name for her.

‘Thank you, Miss Behrend.’ Then, in his western suit, with his foreign manners and his exaggerated courtesy, Major N. proceeded through her relationship, one letter at a time.

‘It took quite a while,’ Julia says in a faraway voice. Her eyes are fixed in the middle distance. Major N. was thorough. There was a pile of her letters to the Italian. There was a pile of his letters back to her. This man knew everything. He could see when she had had doubts, he could see by what sweet-talking she had let herself be placated. He could see the Italian boyfriend’s longing laid bare, and his invention, for his own pleasure, of his faraway girl.

N. insinuated he knew—as Julia surely also realised—that the Italian had an image of her that didn’t quite hit the mark. He flattered her. ‘You are more complex, I think Miss Behrend, and much more intelligent than he gives you credit for.’ When he was done reading, pointing, probing, he straightened the two piles of letters and put them back to the side of the desk. ‘Let us discuss your friend for a moment now,’ he said, ‘shall we?’

He started to tell Julia about her boyfriend. ‘They weren’t particularly spectacular things,’ she says. ‘But they were things I could not have known because I couldn’t go to Italy and see for myself.’ Julia assumes that the Stasi had people in Italy. ‘He was even sort of witty about it, drawing me in as if we could both have a chuckle about aspects of my boyfriend’s life, as if we were both on the same side, and it was my friend not I who was the object of observation.’

‘As we know,’ N. said, ‘our friend is in the computer business.’

Julia nodded. ‘I’d never understood much about the sort of business he was in,’ she says, ‘and with my East German mindset not at all! He had told me it was trade in computer components.’

N. specified it for her. ‘He is a sales manager for the regional branch of the firm.’ Then he described the boyfriend’s family house in Umbria. He told her the make of car he drove. When he saw that this meant nothing to Julia, he interpreted it for her: in N’s estimation it was a ‘middle class’ sort of car, ‘so there’s no thinking he’s rich or anything’.

Julia wondered where this was going.

He opened his desk drawer and brought out a thick manila folder which he put, closed, on the desk.

‘Now Miss Behrend,’ he said, ‘we come to you.’

He evaluated her life-in-progress.