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Investitures priest.
So in the end I am forced to agree
, Elmer summarized like a high court judge,
even though he is the only candidate we have and we don’t know where else we could send him…
    Then came a question in crisp green from an unidentified source, addressed to the Zealots. Underneath it yet another very prominent contribution in a thick black marker pen. The answer to the question was signed
Hilda C
. and it magnanimously concluded,
No damage can be done if he’s assigned to Berlin.
    The final entry on the memo was another green-inked line, this one in capitals and addressed to Elmer.
MR. BOROWSKI: BERLIN IS OK. PLEASE ACTION.
    Heywood whistled through his teeth. It was there in all the colours of the rainbow. Nobody wanted Hanbury and nobody, except Hanbury, wanted Berlin. The match was perfect. The Investitures priest looked deeper in the file, but found nothing that corroborated Hanbury’s claim that he spoke the language. This little puzzle, however, was overtaken by a larger one. Who, Heywood dearly wished to know, had been the new consul’s green champion? He searched in vain. He looked in other files too, to try to find more green. Yet nowhere else (and never after) did he find another example of the decisive matchmaking that had instructed Elmer Borowski. All the same, inspired by the succinct elegance of the appearance of the phrase –
BERLIN IS OK
– the Investitures priest decided that, henceforth, he too would promulgate his views in green.

OLD FRIENDS
    Berlin’s delights fade quickly when the summer ends. Autumn’s darkness sets in with a vengeance. Dull skies hang low; storm winds drive the rain. The carefree young families that romped on the sandy shores of the city’s lakes disappear into their dwellings. Will their psychic reserves built up by the summer sun last the winter? They wait anxiously for the first school break, when they trek to the airports, boarding flights to Mallorca, or the Canary Islands, even the Florida Keys. They’re like a tribe on the move then. They seek a hasty, final week of sun, a last opportunity to top up. Light as a holy grail.
    Berliners in middle age are hardier. Until well past the equinox they continue their daily ritual of swimming in the forest-surrounded lakes. Still, at some stage in the year’s decline, even they acknowledge defeat, and the waters are reclaimed by shivering, forlorn, sporadically quacking ducks.
    Not long ago things were different. Communist patrol boats on the Havel provided year-round company for the waterfowl. The guards onthe boats acted like outdoors sportsmen. They shot away happily – not at the ducks – but at people trying to get to West Berlin. Now that the eastern files have opened, it is known they did their casual killing more often than was commonly supposed.
    The autumn’s gloominess never failed to affect Sabine. When daylight began disappearing like water down a funnel, when the skies assumed their dreaded, lead-grey hue, and when the fog crept in to claim the trees and veil the rhododendrons in the city’s inner courtyards, Sabine’s reaction was predictable. She brooded about the inequities of geography. She yearned, not for other places, but for Berlin to have more summer. A twirl of the globe in Werner’s study, with a finger tracing a constant line of latitude, showed Berlin is up there, more or less, with Hudson’s Bay and the Kamchatka Peninsula. She once mentioned this depressing fact to her husband. The heating season had barely started, but the city’s sombreness had already taken on its peculiar force. Werner laughed, not jovially, more dismissively. “Well,” he said, condescendingly, “make sure the sun shines in your heart.”, knowing full well that with her in a brittle mood, this would aggravate. “Personally,” he added, “I like the darkness. It helps me think.”
    The effect of light, or rather,