'You say she had a stroke?'

'The hospital gave her tests and said they couldn't be sure.' He put the last piece of bread in his mouth and chewed it. 'But either way she'll have to have a complete rest.'

'Who will arrange about selling the house?' Even as I said it I realized what a big task was involved. There would be meetings with the property agents and with the bank, a lawyer and a tax accountant too, plus all the form-filling and petty bureaucratic rigmarole that makes such simple transactions into a nightmare. 'It would be better if we could persuade Lisl to go away until it's all done. Perhaps we could find a place in Baden-Baden. She's always talked about taking a holiday in Baden one day.'

He looked at me and gave a twisted little smile. 'And which of us is going to explain all this to Lisl?' he asked.

Willi Leuschner came over to the table to clear the plates. 'What are you two having now?' said Willi. 'Bread pudding?' Willi was my age but his head was bald, and the big curly moustache that he'd grown as a joke was grey with age and yellow with nicotine.

He always used the familiar 'du', for all three of us had been to school together, and we understood each other better than we understood our wives. In my case much better than I understood my wife. Certainly Willi knew that Werner and I could eat unlimited amounts of the old wartime recipe that Frau Leuschner had elevated to haute cuisine by the addition of eggs and cream. He didn't wait for an affirmative. He wiped the plastic table with a cloth and balanced the mustard pot and beer glasses on top of the plates and cutlery with a skill of long practice. Willi's father had commanded a forbidding maitre d', a dozen waiters in tail coats and bow ties, with white-jacketed youngsters to assist them. Now Willi and his brother had only a couple of young draft-dodgers to help, and both those helpers were apt to arrive in the morning glassy-eyed and trembling.

'I know what you're thinking, Werner,' I said, once Willi had gone.

'What am I thinking?' He was looking through the big plate glass windows at the almost deserted street. Yesterday's snow had gone but the temperature had dropped, and every Berliner could recognize that low grey sky from which much more snow would come.

'You think it's easy for me to come breezing into town and talk about Lisl, and then I go home leaving you to do the things that have to be done.'

'It's not the same for you, Bernie,' he said. 'Lisl is my problem, not yours.'

'She's only got us,' I said. 'Whatever has to be done, we'll do it together. I'll get leave.' Werner nodded mournfully so I tried to be brisk. 'Selling the house shouldn't be too difficult. But we'll have to arrange somewhere for Lisl to go. Somewhere she'll like,' I added vaguely.

I'm a Jew,' said Werner suddenly. 'I was born in the war. My name is Jacob like my grandfather but they called me Werner because it was more Aryan. Lisl hid my parents. She made no money out of it, my parents had no money. She risked her life. The Nazis put people into camps for much less. I don't know why she took such a risk. Sometimes I ask myself if I'd do the things she did to help comparative strangers. And to tell you the truth I'm not sure. But Lisl hid them and when I was born she hid me. And when my parents died Lisl brought me up as if I was her own child. Now do you understand?'

'We do it together,' I said.

'Do what?'

'Sell the house. Get Lisl into some nice residential home. Klara too.'

'Are you crazy?' said Werner. 'You'd never get her out of that house in a million years.'

I looked at him. He had that inscrutable expression he'd developed as a schoolboy. 'So what are you saying? Are they going to pull the house down around her?'

'I'm going to run the hotel,' said Werner. He stared at me defensively as if expecting strenuous opposition or a burst of laughter.

'Run the hotel?'

He became defensive in the face of my amazement. 'I grew up with her, didn't I? I used to do the accounts. I know enough.'

'She'll not let you change anything,' I warned him.

'I'll run it my way,' he said quietly. It was so easy to forget the hard centre inside that sugar coating. But Werner could be tough too.

'And make it pay?'

'It only has to tick over.'

'And what about the avalizing? What about your own work?'

'I'm winding it up.'

'You'd better think it over, Werner,' I said in alarm as the implications struck me.

'I've made my decision.'

'Where will you live?'

He smiled at my consternation; perhaps that was the only compensation for him, maybe he'd been looking forward to it. 'One of those upstairs rooms, I'm moving out of my apartment.'

'What about Zena?' I asked. I couldn't imagine his young, tough, snobbish wife adapting to one of Lisl's upstairs rooms or even to the suite with the refurbished bathroom of which Lisl was so proud.

'It's difficult for Zena to understand,' said Werner.

'I imagine it is.'

'Zena says she has no debt to Lisl, and in a way she's right,' he said sadly.

'For richer for poorer… with all my worldly debts… Or is it different now there's women's lib?'

'I wish you'd got to know Zena better. She's not selfish. Not as selfish as you think,' he amended, as he realized just what he was claiming.

'So what's Zena going to do?'

'She'll stay in the apartment in Dahlem. It's just as well really when you think of all that furniture we have there. We couldn't move it to Lisl's, could we?'

'It's a big step, Werner.' He was giving up his work, his luxury apartment and, by the sound of it, losing his wife too. He'd lost her before; Zena's constancy to Werner wasn't something the poets wrote sonnets about. Limericks, maybe. I suppose that's why I detested her so much.

'There's no alternative, Bernie. If I did anything less for Lisl I'd never be able to face myself again, would I?'

I looked at him. Werner was a good man. Perhaps he was the only truly good person I'd ever met. What could I say except, 'You're right, Werner. It's the only thing to do.'

'Maybe it will work out very well,' said Werner, trying desperately to see the best side of it. 'If the hotel could get some more holiday bookings, I could pay off the bank loan. I'm going to talk to some of the travel companies.'

He seemed serious about it. Didn't he know that travel companies wanted only cheap bleak 200-room shoe boxes, run by sixteen year-old high school dropouts who don't speak any known language? What would a travel company do with a small comfortable hotel run by humans? 'Good idea, Werner,' I said.

'Of course, I can't wind up my business overnight,' he said. 'I have a few deals outstanding.'

'How often do you go over there nowadays?' I asked. Werner's business required regular visits to DDR government officials in East Berlin. I didn't ask him whether he was still reporting back to our people in Frank's office. It was better that I didn't know.

'Not so often. Nowadays I can sometimes arrange a few of the preliminaries on the phone.'

'Is it getting better?'

'Not better; different. They are better at covering up than they used to be; better too at understanding what upsets the Western press.' It was a harsh verdict coming from Werner, who tried always to be objective in such off-the-cuff remarks about the East.

'How is Normannenstrasse these days?'

'Very happy,' said Werner.

'Tell me more.'

'The East Germans are number one on Moscow 's hit parade. Prague is no longer the centre of Russian penetration of the West and our friends in Normannenstrasse are rubbing their hands in glee.'

'I heard the Stasi was getting a big shake-up over there.'

'One by one the old gang are being got rid of. The same with the administration. It's a smaller and better organization these days.'