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'It is Sami…'

He heard the silence, then a gasp, then a hiss of shock, then something clattered in his ear as if she had dropped a cup or a plate that she carried, then the silence. The first time he had rung, from the Hauptbahnhof, the phone had not been picked up. He had walked for many hours, first doing great circles round the square in front of the station, ever increasing, then taken the S-Bahn through the docks area and over the river. He had left it at the Wilhelmsburg stop.

There, he had rung again, and the coin had dropped when the phone was answered, and the crisp voice had answered, 'Yes, this is Else. Who is that?' He had given the name she would know, from five years before. He imagined her standing with the phone at her ear, eyes wide, mouth gaping.

'We should meet.'

A pause of many seconds, then a choke, then, 'I don't know i f.. . '

The voice – each cadence the same as he had known it – faded. She was, in his adolescent and adult life, the only woman he had loved. In all the years since he had been in Hamburg, he had remembered the telephone number of the apartment high in the concrete block. At first, when he had left, the memory of her had been in his mind each day and each night, but the years had tripped on and the memory had slipped to once a week, but was always there. Of course, if a recruit given to him to mould to the state of grace, readied to wear a martyr's belt, had made such a contact with old life and old love, he would have castigated him, rejected him and exorcized him from what he planned. But she was Else Borchardt, and he had come back to her city: she was his weakness.

'No – everything is possible. We should meet.'

'Where are you? I don't think…'

'I am close. I will come.'

He put down the phone. The wind thrashed around him. Cigarette packets, empty and discarded, scattered in front of its force. He thought the wind came over the flat lands from Bremerhaven and Buxtehude to the west, or from Luneburg to the south.

When it reached the blocks of Wilhelmsburg, the concrete towers, it eddied in their shelter or was funnelled between them. He had many names. His given name at birth in the Egyptian city of Alexandria was but the first. To those he served, he was Abu Khaled. On the passports he had used on his journey, each carried a different name. For the German documentation shown at the crossing between Liberec and Zgorzelec, with his place of birth listed as Colombo in Sri Lanka, he was Mahela Zoysa. In Hamburg, eighteen months as a student, he was Sami to his lecturers, his friends and his lover. She was sharp in his mind: five years after he had slipped from her bed, gone into a dawn and left her asleep, everything of her face and body was clear to him.

It was where they had lived. He passed an arcade of shops with nameplates in Arabic or Turkish characters, and from them they had bought their food.

He stopped to watch the football game on a dirt surface enclosed with mesh wire, where he had played and she had watched him. He walked on.

Ahead was the statue. Made from weather-darkened bronze, the figure showed a diving 'keeper – what he did on the dirt surface behind the wire – horizontal but with a groping arm and a ball that hugged the fingertips. Nothing had changed in Wilhelmsburg in the five years since he had gone. She would not have changed.

He came to the doorway.

The blocks were where the city put immigrants and students and those without work, far from its wealth, distanced from its prosperity by the Elbe river. She had said, 'I don't know i f… ' on the phone, and had said, 'I don't think… ' He could not believe that Else Borchardt's love for him was lost, but he hesitated in front of the bank of names and bells, and he scanned the list but did not find her name. Within, perhaps, two minutes, a child elbowed past him and rang a bell and there was the click of the closed door being unlatched. He followed the child inside. She was on the twelfth floor of fourteen. He took the stairs. At each landing, as the breath spurted in his lungs, the certainty that had brought him to Wilhelmsburg diminished, a fraction of confidence at each flight, but he pressed on. When he came to the door on the twelfth floor, when his finger hovered over the bell button, he saw that the name typed on paper in the slot beside it was not Borchardt. It was five years since he had closed that door on his back, quietly so that she should not wake. He killed the doubts, pressed the button, kept his finger on it and heard the bell ring out.

She stood in front of him.

He saw no welcome, but fear.

She was heavier than the image of her he had carried in his mind, thicker at the hips, and her waist sagged on the belt of her jeans. There were lines at her mouth and eyes where there had been none, and she wore lipstick that before she had despised. Her hair hung loose and was not kept tight against her scalp by the scarlet bandanna of protest she had always worn.

He had thought, climbing the stairs, that she would gasp, then melt, then hold out her arms to grasp him, as she had always done, but the arms were across her chest and folded tight over her blouse, not the T-shirt of Guevara's face that she had worn each and every day. Past her shoulder an electric fire burned and in front of it was a rack on which a baby's clothes dried.

He looked above the fire and saw the print of a watercolour view, popular, of the castle at Heidelberg, and the same print had been in a corridor off the entrance to the college where he had been enrolled and where she had studied to be a teacher, and which all of them had regarded with derision. Five years back, there had been in that place above the fire, a poster to com-memorate the sacrifices of the Palestinian people.

Everything he saw, he thought was betrayal.

There was a chest beside the fire.

A framed photograph was on the chest.

In the photograph she stood with her baby and a uniformed man – Caucasian white – was beside her, an arm round her shoulder.

She said, 'We have been married for three years. He is from Krakow, but now he has citizenship. He is a good man and a good father. It was a long time ago, Sami.'

'What does he do?' The question had an innocence.

'He is on the Bahn-Wacht – sometimes he works at the Hauptbahnhof, sometimes on the U-Bahn, sometimes at the Dammtor. In two years he hopes to join the city's police, it is his ambition… It was too long ago, Sami. We change. It was the old life, we were young – everything is changed. You went, I cried for a week. I thought you would come back, I promised myself that you would come back… Then the planes hit the towers, and everything changed.'

His voice was a whisper: 'Did you ever speak of it?'

'Of who we knew? No. Whom we met? No… But I changed my life and hid what had been.' She looked into his face. 'Did you change, Sami, move on? Or do you still belong to the struggle? Have you left them or are you a part of them?'

He should not have come, and he knew it. It played in his mind. The man from Krakow returned in the evening from his work shift, pulled off his tie, loosened his uniform tunic, waited for food to be set before him, had his baby sit on his knee and asked if she had had a good day. And he had ambition to be a policeman. How better to achieve ambition? She would tell him that a man, from her past, had arrived at the door without warning and who he was and who his associates had been at the college. And he would telephone to the police or the BfV – and ambition would be realized for an immigrant from Krakow… and he knew also that his weakness must be covered.

The baby had begun to cry and she turned to go to it. He stepped inside the room and reached out.

She recoiled when his fingers found her neck. He remembered the softness of the skin, where his fingers had played patterns. Then she had snuggled closer to him, had slipped undone the belt of her jeans and lifted up the T-shirt with the face of Guevara. He tightened his fingers and no scream came from her throat, just a choke. He pressed harder. When she no longer struggled, when she was limp and he supported her weight, he dragged her into the bedroom. He left her on the bed, beside the cot where the baby cried.