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symbol. Martin, Gregor’s best friend, gets up to give him a big embrace, slapping him on the back.
    ‘What kept you?’ he asks in a friendly way. ‘We’ve been working here for hours.’
    ‘Sure. I believe you,’ Gregor returns.
    ‘Gregor has collected all these wild mushrooms for the dinner,’ Mara says. She whips away some of the crumbs from the table and sets out a new place, pours coffee. There is a basket of fresh bread in the middle. One or two wasps hover around the jam.
    ‘You haven’t really started already?’ Gregor asks.
    ‘They were up at six in the morning,’ Mara says, nodding towards Thorsten and Katia.
    ‘We were delayed,’ Thorsten says. ‘There was a young deer lost in the orchard when we came to start in the morning. Running in every direction, completely frantic. We had to leave the ladders for a while and disappear until it found its way back out through the gate. Otherwise, it would have run itself against the fence all the time.’
    Beyond the orchard wall, Gregor can see the outline of a tall ladder leaning into one of the trees. He wants to tellthem about the bomb crater in the forest, but instead he tells them how the forests are full of mushrooms. Mara seems happy that he has arrived. She tells him that Daniel is on his way, with his girlfriend.
    He finds himself wondering if he would ever manage alone in the wild without other people. What if the new catastrophe really does come? All those survival skills taught to him by his father seem to be of little use now, sitting here around the table. And how long could you survive mentally, that was the question? Living alone in the city is sometimes a struggle in itself, but there is a comfort in the anonymity and belonging that he finds there. He needs the reassurance of the streets, the clustering of people, the quiet feeling of support provided by their numbers. Even those moments of aggression experienced in the city bring some kind of odd confirmation of life. He needs to be able to sit in a bar, without speaking, just knowing that other people are around him. He is afraid of emptiness. After all that training by his father, he thinks he may be useless in situations of great calamity. When the next great disaster approaches and people are running in all directions again, Gregor feels he might end up being a coward. Who knows, he may not even realise how bad things are and keep going on in some naive delusion that everything is fine. In distress, he might make all the wrong decisions, pick the wrong mushrooms. Ultimately, he may have ended up exactly the same as all the other hopelessly interdependent people living in the city, unable to live without cups and spoons and takeaway coffee. Helpless without newspapers and the Internet and public transport and places to congregate. Helpless without the city’s memory coming up everywhere through the streets. Helpless without the shelter of history.

Five
    Gregor Liedmann grew up thinking that he had been preserved, like a dead animal. He had reasons to suspect that he was not the biological son of his parents. There were certain discoveries he had made which convinced him that he was, in fact, an orphan and that he was Jewish. At some point he decided to run away from home and eventually ended up in Berlin in the late sixties, a city full of peeling facades and people on the run from something or another. Whenever he was asked, he would explain that he had been found as a three-year-old boy among refugees during the last days of the war and that he had replaced a child of the same age who had been lost in the bombing. In other words, he had stepped into the shoes of a dead German boy. He had taken on his identity, his name, his date of birth, his religion, his entire existence. He had grown up in the south of Germany, in the suburbs of Nuremberg, the only son in a Catholic family. His parents had revealed nothing to him, but he had come across some evidence which suggested that he was a