[...] Katharina goes to Hoyerswerda to prepare for a touring engagement, but when they talk on the telephone that night Hans has already forgotten the name of that “dump” as he calls it. At the Writers’ Congress in November, Christoph Hein called for the abolition of censorship, and it didn’t get him arrested. The state has become toothless, a wretched old dog. Does she know what that means? He is remote from her day-to-day concerns, and she from his. Can’t we be like brother and sister? Vadim stands with her on an empty stage by a speaker’s rostrum left over from an event, looks down at the floorboards painted black, and says nothing, just quietly shakes his head. Everything always has two sides, her grandmother in Cologne said back then. Really? Everything? In hat and veil Katharina collects Hans from the Party development meeting, another time she wears a garter belt for him, but the tackle seems to conceal more than it reveals. Hans claims fatigue which he can’t explain, she should just lie down and sleep, he puts her to bed like a doctor and sits down at her bedside, even though she’s neither tired nor unwell. For New Year’s Eve she’s up on a Berlin roof with Sibylle and a few others and staring blindly at the year lying ahead. [...]

Did it take his discovery to open her eyes to the monster she truly is? Would she otherwise have carried on with the relationship in Frankfurt, as Hans claims? She doesn’t believe so, but now that the circumstances have changed, she can’t prove it. A monster? Hans laughed at her name for herself, no, she wasn’t a monster, just someone who takes what she can get. Lowest, meanest, bourgeois hypocrisy is what he called her transgression. But not even he can suffer from it as much as she does. She is disgusted by the person she sees in the mirror, she wishes she could pull off its skin. Meanest bourgeois hypocrisy. Così fan tutte. Will the hair-dryer cable reach far enough? Then she could prove to him that her remorse is genuine. Or would even that just be another — extreme, ultimate — performance? Who is she really? Which of her feelings is genuine, and which does she perform for him — or for herself? What is inside, what is outside? She is endlessly grateful to Hans for not chasing her off immediately and for good. For wanting to help her become another person. Will he ever want to sleep with her again?

At her mother’s, Katharina stands plaintively at the window, then her mother tells her about a boyfriend she had who had treated her badly just after her separation with Katharina’s father. Very badly. Her weight was down to 115 pounds. And what was I doing at the time? You were with me, says her mother. But I didn’t notice anything. That was just as well, her mother says. But for you, I would have killed him and marched jubilantly into prison. But it’s the other way around with me, says Katharina. I’m the one that’s brought him to the brink of despair. There’s no comparing, says her mother. In any case, your Hans is much older, he has more experience. It’s not nice of him not to have simply forgiven you. Doesn’t her mother understand that the greatest gift Hans can give isn’t forgiveness but the thorough inspection of the wreckage? That’s the only way anything new and lasting can begin, hopes Katharina.

[...] He said, what if she just serves up a fresh helping of lies, now that she’s gotten in the habit of deceiving him? She hears the snick of the lighter, then he comes back to bed, and lies down beside her. This morning, while shaving, he felt a little lump on his neck. If this was bad television, that would be the answer. You know, he says to Katharina, and brushes the ash off, even if we’re sometimes fleetingly happy, it doesn’t feel like a new start to me. It just feels like a really long farewell.

Hermann Kant wants to give up the presidency of the Writers’ Union, but it seems better for everyone — they take soundings — that he stay on as titular head, and five deputies do the work, instead of waiting for a new president to be appointed by Erich Honecker. And apropos Honecker, how long will he remain in office? Then which of the other oldsters will take over from him? In breaks between presidium meetings, there is talk of a “leaderless country.” The health minister, someone says — and this is unheard of — has asked to be relieved of his post. A colleague of Hans’s ran into a senior economist in the sauna, who proved to him that the system of state subventions for basic foodstuffs was wholly unsustainable. Supply and demand needed to be brought into alignment if the whole edifice weren’t to come crashing down. Bread rolls are still five pfennigs, but Ingrid recently paid seven hundred marks for a jacket at Exquisit. In the Party group of the Goethe Society there is a debate about evolution versus revolution. Change the system from inside or outside? Do the young have to be taught patience, or the old reminded of their former impatience? The minister provisionally put in charge of universities steps up and says Party decrees must be carried out to the letter, and the fight against “deviationists” conducted with a new ruthlessness. Then in the evening he sits in the hotel bar at the Weimar completely plastered, clutching hold of Hans’s sleeve. Hans runs off to his own room. From time to time, he takes notes of things he’s heard: The words “perestroika” and “glasnost” are no longer to be used. Or: Socialism in the colors of the GDR. Also jokes he picks up in the radio canteen: You never asked — we give you our answers anyway. Or: Why does Honecker not take the U-Bahn anymore? Because when the trains depart, someone calls out: “Step back!” Hans’s former lover Sylvia talks of “pink elephants,” which is her term for sentences and paragraphs she writes into program scripts so that there’s something to remove. [...]

Sometimes, she says, I think that what Hans calls truth doesn’t even exist anymore.

Or it’s just not in the place where he’s looking, says Rosa.

Maybe, says Katharina.

I’m wondering, says Katharina, if I even know what I want. If I want anything anymore. If I exist. Isn’t that how you tell a person, by what they want?

Do you want to kiss me?

Yes.

There, you see, says Rosa, and pulls Katharina close.

Why don’t you leave him, she asks.

I love him.

Still?

Yes.

In the middle of April, Hans collects Katharina from a performance at the Volksbühne, The Drunken Ship, a play about Rimbaud. A Castorf production, but he didn’t want to see it with her, only afterwards does he tell her why not. You remember: My heart by the bow must vomit. The Rimbaud quote appears in one of his first letters after the revelation of her deception. My heart by the bow must vomit, he says, and takes her in his arms. And Katharina leans against his shoulder and says perfectly calmly that she doesn’t think he loves her anymore. All at once, that seems more savage than anything she’s ever said to him in the course of their differences. The next day he has an event in Dresden, a reading from an unpublished manuscript, for the first time he has pulled out those pages he wrote in the spring two years ago, in the high-rise cube, when everything was good, with the sleeping Katharina behind him. She didn’t think he loved her anymore, she said last night, and leaned against him and cried until his whole sleeve was sodden. To the Dresden public he reads what he wrote when there was happiness, and line by line he thinks: If Katharina were sitting there, and were proud of him, then it would be something else. She proud of him, he proud of her, that once kept them together. My heart by the bow must vomit. She thought he had no more feelings for her, is what she said. And said it as coolly as he had ever heard her say anything, not as though she were waiting for him to contradict her, but as if from some place beyond their relationship. Following the reading he has to stay in Dresden for another two days, there are recordings of rehearsals at the Semper Opera to be done for the radio. He’s away from Katharina for three days, for three days he can imagine what a life would be like without her.

Only now has spring properly sprung. Did Katharina ever desire Hans like this? She dances around her apartment, drinks wine in the middle of the day, sketches, paints, glues collages — and loves Hans whenever he comes by, and mixed in with the pictures of love that are happening are thoughts of women’s backs and breasts, Katharina is happy from top to bottom and right to left. Mozart is back on the playlist, and Bach as well, Hans personally gave her a recording of the Goldberg Variations. Before long she will put forward her favorite pieces from the past year at art school, every student gets a wall to him- or herself, Hans spends days mulling over the selection with her. Everything is the way it was before, and everything is also different. [...]

For you everything was emotional froth: your fling in Frankfurt, and unfortunately also what you had with me. On each occasion, it wasn’t anything to do with the conditions, it lay in your nature. You needed an atmosphere of adventure, of conspiracy, to excite you. Our early days satisfied that, but as soon as a certain consolidation loomed, you made use of your freedom to scratch your itch elsewhere. Anyone capable of manipulating their feelings that way is emotionally not to be trusted. The fact that you left that piece of paper lying around I am certain has nothing to do with your wish to be honest — as you like to claim — rather, as in some corny TV drama, you were engineering the catastrophe.

A week later, Katharina is standing next to Rosa in a field, slicing off the heads of cauliflowers. It’s nice that they’re all together again for harvest duty, just as in their first year, in foundation. Katharina, Rosa, Uta as well, who wants to be an industrial designer, and Robert, the sculptor. Somehow it’s ridiculous, says Robert, us chopping cauliflowers, while in Berlin people are being arrested. And clack, another head goes on the conveyor belt. After the incidents of October 7 and 8, the political economy lecturer brought up the protests and spoke of “counterrevolution,” and Katharina and eight or nine others got up and walked out in the middle of the lecture. Their names are bound to be on some list now. Half an hour later, she had a lump in her throat — so moved was she by her own indignation. Clack, another one gone. Are heroic feelings just a form of vanity? And does it take death or some severe punishment to eliminate it? Clack, another one. Was Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya vain? Or Julius Fučík? We lived for joy, we went into battle for the sake of joy, and we will die for it. Please do not associate our names with sadness. No, the only vain one is she. Head after cauliflower head lands on the conveyor belt that has been rigged up on the field, towards a truck. Anyone who is capable of manipulating their feelings that way is emotionally not to be trusted, Hans said to her lately, on the cassette.