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sliced open to view. There were three-walled rooms hanging in the air, with light switches, fireplaces, wallpaper still intact. In one there was a rusted bed frame; in another a door opened onto empty space. Further along, only one wall of a room survived, a giant postage stamp of weather-stained floral paper on raised plaster, stuck onto wet brick. Next to it was a patch of white bathroom tiles intersected by the scars of waste pipes. On an end wall was the sawtooth impression of a staircase zigzagging five storeys up. What survived best were the chimney breasts, plunging through the rooms, making a community out of fireplaces that had once pretended to be unique.
    Only the ground floors were occupied. An expertly painted board raised high on two posts and set by the edge of thepavement announced each shop. Well-traveled footpaths curved between rubble and regular stacks of bricks to entrances sheltering under the hanging rooms. The shops were well lit, almost prosperous, with as good a selection as any corner store in Tottenham. In each shop there was a small queue. Only instant coffee was unavailable. He was offered ground coffee. The lady in the
Lebensmittelladen
would only let him have two hundred grams. She explained why and Leonard nodded as though he had understood.
    On the way home he had bockwurst and Coca-Cola at a pavement stall. He was back at Platanenallee, waiting for the lift, when two men in white coveralls passed him and began to climb the stairs. They were carrying paintcans, ladders and brushes. He met their glances, and there were mumbled
Guten Tag
’s as they edged past him. He was outside his own front door, searching for his key, when he heard the men talking on the landing below. The voices were distorted by the concrete steps and the glossy walls of the stairwell. The actual words were lost, but the rhythm, the lilt, was unmistakably London English.
    Leonard left his shopping by his door and called down: “Hello …” At the sound of his own voice he recognized just how lonely he felt. One of the men had set down his ladder and was staring up. “Hello, hello?”
    “You’re English, then,” Leonard said as he came down.
    The second man had appeared from the apartment directly below Leonard’s. “We thought you was a Kraut,” he explained.
    “I thought you were too.” Now that Leonard was standing in front of the men, he wasn’t sure what he wanted. They looked at him, neither friendly nor hostile.
    The first man picked up his ladder again and carried it into the apartment. “Live here, do you?” he said over his shoulder.
    It seemed all right to follow him in. “Just arrived,” Leonard said.
    This was a far grander place than his own. The ceilings were higher, and the hallway was a wide open space, where his own was little more than a corridor.
    The second man was carrying in a pile of dustsheets. “Mostly they contract out to the Krauts. But we’ve got to do this one ourselves.”
    Leonard followed them into a large living room empty of furniture. He watched them spread their dustsheets over the polished wooden floor. They seemed happy to talk about themselves. They were in the Royal Army Service Corps, national servicemen who were in no particular hurry to go back home. They liked the beer and the sausages, and the girls. They were settling to their work, rubbing down the woodwork with sandpaper wrapped round rubber blocks.
    The first man, who was from Walthamstow, said, “These girls—as long as you’re not a Russian, you can’t go wrong.”
    His friend, from Lewisham, agreed. “They hate the Russians. When they came in here, May ’45, they behaved like animals, fucking animals. All these girls, now, see, they all got older sisters, or mums, or even their fucking grannies, raped, knifed. They all know someone, they all remember.”
    The first man was kneeling down to the baseboards. “We got mates who were here in ’53, they were on duty down by Potsdamerplatz when they