North Sea, which she loved, and to the countryside, and it was no big deal crossing through East Germany except for being frisked at border crossings and forced to exchange West for East marks at par. She took Berlin to be her home, took it as factual and not tragic that Russian and American symbols were all over the city, and only lamented sometimes that she lived in a suburb—not of course in the North American sense, but in the European sense, where the dwellings are four- and five-storey row houses fronting directly on the street. Her family travelled to West Germany as well, via the railway corridor that sealed them off from the East German republic.

Earlier in the day we had walked through Treptow Park and viewedthe massive Soviet monument to the defeat of Fascism and the liberation of Berlin, rendered in the monu­men­talist style of socialist realism, a good six storeys high. It depicts a youthful Russian soldier holding a child with one arm and a gigantic sword in the other hand, which he points down toward the shattered swastika beneath his enormous boot. The plinth is as high as a house. The statue is larger than anything you’d want to have in your town and larger than what few cities besides Berlin could contain without embarrassment or a severe sense of oppression. Ilonka explained that Berliners in general see little problem with such monuments: Soviet President Gorbachev had insisted, as part of the agreement to open the Wall, that the monuments be