But even then, when we couldn’t possibly know that it would someday get pulled down and interred in a lead mine in Ekaterinberg, that Europe Central’s Bolshevized courtyards of rubble, skulls and boarded-up palaces would either be taken over by crypto-Fascist separatists (among whom I regretfully include the West German NIKA, who compromised Trotskyite organizations from 1951 until he was neutralized in 1974), or else fall into the clutches of the Hotel Astoria, where happy American tourists carried lacework, wooden dolls, absinthe and prewar folios up to their rooms, I could sense that the Iron Curtain would not be eternal. And I freely admit that this saddened me. A pyramid of flame (to pick a familiar wartime example) possesses a specific shape at any given instant, and a general shape over time; we call it a pyramid only for convenience; it’s writhing upward, getting nowhere in particular, doomed to subsidence. But an Iron Curtain, if it only lasted, would give us something to navigate us from good to evil and back again, even if we disagreed as to which was which! Well, it’s vanished now, it really has, like the prewar icon shops of Saint Petersburg, and I’m now going to tell you exactly how it happened.
But first it’s necessary to mention that when I came tunneling back into my own zone, yawning and rubbing my eyes, it was blinding daylight, and so they saw me and the sirens went off.
They took me by taxi, not by Green Minna, thank God, to the Gehlen Organization to be interrogated; and in a room without windows, a pale, pale man who wore dark glasses said to me: You’ve absorbed the Russian mentality.
How can you tell?
There’s something of the Russian soul in you, that emotional, sentimental, immeasurable something…
He opened a black folder which bore the red-and-white label 
, and he showed me that my name had been deleted from the list of persons to be trusted. I need not claim that he terrified me even ten percent as much as the the East German border official had done; all the same, whenever authority’s representatives define my soul, I can’t help but wonder if that clicking sound I hear in the basement is the firing squad cocking triggers; so I asked him, wanting to gain as much information as possible: What do I need to do to be trusted again?
Kill someone.
And then?
We’ll forget that you concerned us. We might even pay you.
The desk drawer sprang open, and shoving aside two long heavy pistols and a pair of spurs like silver sun-wheels (they must have belonged to the prewar Polish cavalry), he fished out a brand-new Walther and a box of ammunition: Geco, 7.65 millimeter.
They’re special, he said with a strangely shy smile, and I knew then that he had cast the bullets himself. (Those sunken eyes in that pale, puffy face, that even voice; whom did he remind me of?)
I opened the box. The casings were brass, but each projectile was solid silver.
You see, he explained, they’re vampires over there. You can only kill a Slav with one of these.
Knowing now that I would betray him for the sake of the beautiful woman who’d kissed me, I said: That’s all very well, but how can I stay awake?
Do you swear to uphold the “watertight bulkhead” system of the Gehlen Organization?
Naturally. I mean, I…
Yes or no?
I do.
Swallow this pill. You’ll never sleep again.
You mean I won’t be able to dream?
Dreams are for cowards. Swallow it, and be quick about it, or else I’ll have to press this button.
Do you have any liquid to wash it down with?
Liquid’s for cowards.
I see, I said, pretending to swallow the capsule. Actually it lay beneath my tongue. Now I really needed to get out of there, because it was starting to dissolve. With every moment, I would sleep a little worse.
Excuse me, I said, but now I need to piss.
Take this pill. You’ll never—
But I sometimes enjoy pissing—
You do? I’ll note that in your file. All right. Go down the hall, but don’t forget that we’re watching you. Can you guess what I miss most?
No, I said, fidgeting urgently.
The beech forests of Lower Saxony. They’re locked away in Dreamland now. Did you by any chance see them?
No.
Answer just for me. This isn’t official at all. You know, there’s a certain long line of trees beneath long lines of mist, with the sky between them cut off, strangled you might say, and my father’s house stands straight ahead; it has an exceptionally steep roof and it’s made of stone. Have you been there?
I go farther east.
Farther east! You really are a natural! he said proudly. You’ve been codenamed HINDEMITH. Don’t worry. We’re going to make a man out of you.
Rushing out of his office, I found the lavatory, bolted myself inside a stall, removed the pill, wrapped it up in toilet paper and hid it inside the porcelain tank. Fortunately, it floated. I was already feeling more wide awake than I’d been in years.
Good, he said when I’d returned. This is the one you’re going to kill.
He showed me a photograph of a pallid, balding man with thick glasses: the Soviet composer Shostakovich.
He said to me: He’s the one behind all this.
Then he said: The birds in the Tiergarten, the green summer light in the Tiergarten, we’re going to get all that back.
Why yes, said Shostakovich with an inconstant attempt at a witty smile, even in Leningrad, even this far, so to speak, north, we did hear something about a, an interruption I guess one ought to call it; I don’t know for certain whether it was a war exactly…
Of course, I said.
They made my little Galisha play the Butterfly Game at school, and that Sunday there was supposed to be a Dynamos match when… You think I eat moon mushrooms for breakfast, no?
I unbuckled my Walther and fired a silver bullet into his face. Screeching, he shriveled into a pile of charred music-paper. Then I woke up. I was still in West Germany, with two hours left before they inserted me into my mission zone.
It was a hot afternoon of stinking ruins. Three boys were taking turns swinging from the barrel of a broken antiaircraft gun. The Iron Curtain sullied the horizon with its leaden fog. I walked slowly through the flatness of bomber-cleared lots, wondering what on earth I really ought to be or do.