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about this one, Miller felt, that told you she wouldn’t be staying too long.
    ‘You may enter now,’ Frau Siedel told Miller.
    Miller thanked her, went into the Director’s office.
    Helmut Hartheim’s chair was, as usual, pushed well back from his desk to accommodate his huge stomach. Like his secretary, he left Miller waiting for some internally measured interval before lifting his head from the paper in his hands. Maybe he counts, Miller thought, or maybe he’s one of those people you read about, men with metronomes pulsing away inside their heads.
    ‘Ah, Herr Miller!’ As thoughsurprised to see somebody standing in front of his desk. ‘It’s good of you to come.’
    The big, round head nodded Miller towards the chair on the other side of the clutter-free desk. Hartheim laid the sheet of paper down carefully – upside-down – on the desk, moving the box of pens a fraction to the left, in line with something that Miller could neither see nor imagine.
    Tune in
. Hartheim was asking about the English language edition of the nineteenth-century farm labourer’s diary.
    ‘Everything is in order, Herr Direktor. I’ve cleared the final page proofs and you yourself have approved the cover design.’
You could at least read photographs
.
    ‘Good.’ A ponderous lifting of the basketball head. ‘And you are satisfied that the language adequately conveys the socialist spirit of the original?’
    Miller nodded. ‘Most faithfully.’ Although why a minor university in Western Australia should choose to publish a translation of a nineteenth-century farmhand’s memoir of life under upper-crust Prussian landlords was beyond Miller. The print run was agreed at 500 copies; Miller reckoned that at least 400 of them would finish up in remainder bins. ‘It’s an excellent translation, sir,’ he added with extra conviction.
    Hartheim’s was a corner office; two windowed walls looked out over the rooftops on to the tree-lined stretch of Unter den Linden. Over the Director’s shoulder Miller could see, through the glass, the slow-moving traffic on the wide thoroughfare. Most of the traffic was heading east, or swinging on to Friedrichstrasse; westward lay only the barricaded columns of the Brandenburg Gate, at the heart of the Berlin Wall.
    ‘We are fortunate,’ Hartheim was saying, ‘to have a distinguished writer – a native speaker – to help us with these English translations.’
    ‘It’s mygood fortune to be here, sir.’ In the beginning Miller had been inclined to swallow such compliments. ‘And the cause is greater than any of us.’ Although after seven years of life in East Berlin, Miller wasn’t sure if he was still a believer.
    ‘Still, it was an unusual event, your arriving here like that, Herr Miller.’
    Miller nodded.
And more unusual than you ever found out, not even after all the interrogations
.
    He spread his hands, smiled. ‘The struggle is ongoing, Herr Direktor, but it is worthwhile.’
And you sound like a page from a textbook. Even after seven years you still have an itch to tell the truth, no matter what the bastards in Pall Mall might say
.
    ‘It’s a pity those fuckers in Budapest don’t feel the same.’ With unexpected grace Hartheim got to his feet and moved towards the small television on a corner table.
    The hum of the TV set filled the office. The black-and-white pictures fashioned themselves into focus; the sound of a helicopter rotored from the small set.
    ‘The fuckers are still at it.’
    It was impossible to tell where Hartheim’s venom was directed: at the camera operators in the unseen helicopter or at the shirt-sleeved crowd waving up at the helicopter from the grounds of the West German embassy in Budapest.
    ‘Cunts.’ Hartheim had resumed his seat. ‘We should drop a bomb on them.’ His whole body turned as he looked west through the window. ‘And another one on the cunts over there.’
    All summer long, since the Hungarians had opened their border with