Chapter Five
Once is Not Enough
He lived in what had been East Berlin, in a labyrinthine apartment that had clearly had a long and complicated history.
He’d nodded.
“Yes, a wealthy family owned the building; the Communists carved it into—what is it you say?—a rabbit warren of tiny apartments; when the wall fell, I was lucky to have the cash on hand to buy the entire floor, before prices on this side became simply insane.”
Lucky isn’t necessarily the right word.
I’d learned—I’d been explicitly told—before coming to Germany that Questions About the Past, among other things, could be very “sensitive,” family history something of a pick-and-choose matter. Poke too insistently on “there was a little money in the family” and you had to be prepared for a bookcase of information to tip over
