He’s sitting in the bar of the Berolina, getting drunk. Ingrid didn’t want to talk to him tonight, which was maybe for the best, but what was he going to do by himself in his one-room box. He didn’t want to take a single step without Katharina. The kid has optimism for two, she needs to, and she sweeps him along. A creature of the new age. Unbroken, hale, well-raised. Somehow pure. If she were otherwise, he would hardly desire her as he did. And not in that way. She uses B for belt in her diary on those days. Table + B. Her shame shows, even through the abbreviation. She’s ashamed but goes on sticking her bottom out to him. She knows how beautiful she is. A human being, doesn’t that sound splendid. Maxim Gorky wrote. And he, Hans, pulls off his belt, and brings it down with a hiss on her behind. And when she’s not there, he gets tight in the bar of the Hotel Berolina. When the moment comes for you to die, and you wonder: what are you dying for? Then suddenly with shocking clarity, a gaping black void will open before you, Bukharin had said to the court that had just sentenced him. There is nothing here to die for, only death full of regrets. Bukharin, Lenin’s comrade in arms, darling of the Party, shot by a firing squad of his own people in 1938. Gorky’s sentence and Bukharin’s last words as the two poles of the Soviet system. That’s what he would like to write his novel about, only no one would print it in the East. And in the West no one would understand it.