The government reacted forcefully to the commotion, but at least no shots were fired, thinks Katharina. Could it be because the so-called counterrevolutionaries reminded the ancients in power of themselves when they were young idealists? The passage of time. Strange, she thinks, that a crime is called a trespass.

Then she goes back into the kitchen to chop some herbs, Katharina leans on the doorjamb, can I help, no no, it’s fine. Rosa chops and talks and in between looks across at Katharina, then stops, Katharina sees the knife in Rosa’s hand, and Rosa looks at Katharina. Katharina takes a couple of steps to her friend, stops in front of her, looks at her expressionlessly, and Rosa looks at her, neither of them speaks, eye to eye, Katharina takes the knife from her friend’s hand and lays it aside, lowers her head into the hollow between neck and shoulder, blows out a little puff of breath, before she bites her friend, but her friend takes her by the hair, pulls her head up, and says: You know, I hate you sometimes for still being with Hans. Yes, says Katharina, I know. And then they fall down together. They sprawl in the corridor, then stagger into the bedroom, the referee counts to fifty thousand, but neither of them wants to end this fight which has no winner and no loser. All night, to breathe and to feel the other’s breath against her skin, or whose breath and whose skin is it? Running her tongue along the other’s teeth as against a friendly fence, feel out with her hands, her lips, her tongue what is dark and moist, listen all night to the sounds of the other, or are they her own? To know the other as herself. One being of flesh and blood joined to another, as by a key. To be one.

[...] Only when they’re drinking coffee does she notice that Hans is down. The radio station is being “restructured” as they’re calling it, but Hans doesn’t want to discuss it. He looks at her soberly, she looks soberly back. Are we finished as lovers, then? Why shouldn’t she look serious? When he told her lately, When I’m under pressure, I need tenderness from you, she shook her head at him in amusement, and that offended him. When all she meant to indicate was that she too had a right to independence and will. Are we finished as lovers? She looks at his ravaged face in January, in February, but she can’t help him. Sometimes he brushes the hair out of his eyes repeatedly in the wrong direction, without noticing. At the greengrocer’s he spends half an hour in search of frozen kale, they don’t have it here, don’t you see. But he absolutely must have his frozen kale now. He wanders around the tiny shop three more times. Are we finished as lovers?

She returns to Berlin with her sketchbook full. Welcome home, says her mother, who collects her at the station and has supper ready for her in Reinhardtstrasse. Home? Coca-Cola, she’s noticed, is now on sale in the eastern half of Friedrichstrasse station, also in Pankow in the little store where she always shops, Coca-Cola same as in New York or Munich. Coca-Cola has succeeded, where Marxist philosophy has failed, at uniting the proletarians of all nations under its banner. Is this home?

[...] Katharina and her friends drink it in the KDW department store and are mean enough to walk out without paying. Half their money and their parents’ money has been vaporized in the course of the historical reform, so are they expected on top of that to shell out as much for a piece of cake as they did once for Kant’s Eternal Peace? Do the Wessies really believe in money as a measure of worth? think the young things, and shake their heads, and their long, dangling hair worn loose shakes along, adding to the expression of their puzzlement. We’re young, let’s be beautiful too, they say, what’s the point of a lace bra when we’re old and wrinkled. Who knows if we’ll even live that long. The important thing is no sign of guilt on the face. Catch the eye of the salesperson, while the hands are busy elsewhere. And — because there is honor among thieves, and principles among shoplifters — don’t steal from small stores, where the goods and prices might mean something to the owner. But supermarkets, drugstores, chains, they’re all fair game.

If I leave my family, Hans says to Katharina, you have to promise you’ll always be with me.

If you want to be with me, then be with me. But it’s not a trade.

I don’t know what’ll happen.

You have to want it.

I can’t go into a void.

What void?

The silence lasts just one second in which at midnight between 1991 and 1992 the East German frequencies give up the ghost. Hans is sitting in front of the radio at Katharina’s and takes in the very short silence with which his past life is lopped off. It was a little like that moment in La bohème where Mimì dies, and none of her friends notices. It is his first time celebrating New Year’s with Katharina, because Ingrid has to keep company with her mother, who is poorly. Katharina is in jeans and slippers. But at least she’s sprinkled some confetti on the table and poured some Rotkäppchen. It just happens so casually, says Hans. Because dying isn’t much really. It’s just something ceasing to be.