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life. I lived among the enemy during the Nazi time as well.’ He works himself into another little fury. I see Marta watching him, and I wonder whether the medicine is to deal with this, or with its effects. ‘What I can tell you,’ he says, ‘is that as long as the GDR existed no swine in Bonn would have dared start a war!’ He gasps for breath. His hand has formed a fist, but he keeps it in his lap. ‘The GDR would have prevented that by its very existence!’ He means that so long as the Iron Curtain was up, the NATO countries would not have bombed the former Yugoslavia for fear the Russians would have retaliated on behalf of the Serbs.

He’s puffing and cross and, I think, finally stuck. He looks at me and I can see the tiny red veins filigreed across his eyeballs. ‘Full Stop!’ he screams. ‘This…conversation…is…now…over!’

There’s a brief pause.

‘Thank you very much.’ I say.

‘What?’ He shouts back.

‘I said thank you.’

‘Oh. You’re welcome.’

I start collecting my things, and then remember that I have brought him a small gift from Australia. It is an enamel pin of the German and Australian flags crossed over one another.

‘What’s this?’ he asks, taking it from me and holding it far away from his eyes.

‘That’s our flag—for Australia,’ I start, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t find—’

‘Just a moment. Just a moment,’ he says, getting a fix on it. ‘That is not my flag. That’s the Federal Republic’s.’

I think he might scream at me again. ‘I know,’ I say quickly, ‘but I couldn’t find one with the GDR flag at home.’

‘OK,’ he says, suddenly happy enough, ‘I think I have room for that over there,’ and he gestures behind him, to Marx and Lenin and even Stalin.

14

The Worse You Feel

I call Julia and ask her over for lunch. I make salmon pasta with mascarpone, egg yolks and cream—I’m putting as many calories into something as I know how. She rings about the time she’s due, and asks whether it’s OK to be late.

‘Sure,’ I say, ‘About how late?’

‘Half an hour.’

‘See you then.’

I stand at the kitchen window. A man wearing gloves comes into the yard from one of the side wings, carrying a metal bucket of orange coal dust. He opens the hopper and pours it in, particles the consistency of talc, or something cremated. The hopper clangs shut in a burst of orange cloud. This dust is everywhere. When you can’t smell it, it’s still there, in the orange winter air.

When Julia arrives she’s oddly polite, like a person in someone else’s house. I guess she’s used to slipping in when I’m not here. We sit down in the kitchen and I open a beer.

‘Mind if I smoke?’ she asks.

‘Not at all. I didn’t know you smoked.’

‘I just started again,’ she says. She lights a cigarette and smokes half of it before she stubs it out.

We eat and afterwards she lights another, holding it in a practised way in the cleft of her index and middle fingers, moving it around as she talks. She is in the same chair as before, the one with the blind tethered to it. Her back is to the window and her face is in shadow, her eyes shiny and dark. Behind her the sky is the colour of wet wool. I have invited her here for a meal, but we both know there is more of her story to tell.

I begin by asking whether she saw her life unfolding differently after the Wall came down. I wonder what it would have been like to watch the barrier that had held you in disappear and the whole world open up like some strange and new dreamt-of thing.

‘Well, it’s complicated,’ she says, running a hand through her hair. Static from her sleeve raises single strands into the air. ‘I think…I am perhaps.’ She pauses. ‘I notice that I still.’ She breathes in. ‘There are some things for instance…’ She stops. ‘The whole thing really threw me,’ she says, exhaling. ‘Not only that but also afterwards. Lots of things, personal things. I think that the whole Wende in 1989 and everything I went through around it—I think that I experienced it more intensely than others.’

She’s found the old place where the lino is leaving the tabletop and starts to worry it with a fingernail. ‘I’ve been talking about it with my therapist,