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decided our fate. It was scary like a fairy tale, but in the end stupid Ivanushka 25 got his treasure.
    Had we known prior to the trip just what was at stake, we probably wouldn’t have waited for Michaela to make up her mind, which she didn’t do until the night before and first had to ring Aunt Trockel’s doorbell the next morning and ask her to look after Robert.
    We had only a little under six hours left for a seven-and-a-half-hour drive—just one more than Jan Steen needs to travel the same distance in his sports job. Michaela claimed the navigator’s position and, laying Robert’s school atlas across her knees, acted as if Jörg and Georg weren’t in the backseat and Jan Steen hadn’t given us directions. All the same I was glad she had come along.
    I had to open the trunk at the border in Schleiz. The customs agent reached for the shoebox full of flyers and issues of
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26 —Michaela had insisted we bring them along. The agent held the “printed matter” between his gloved hands and read, or at least pretended to, while car after car rolled past us. What was this stuff? he asked. “What it says it is,” I replied, “a call for a demo once the State Security’s villa is taken over.”
    When he went to put it back, the stack of flyers had shifted and no longer fit in the shoebox. He crammed the papers back in, gave me a wave of his hand that could have meant anything, and shuffled off—the morning sun reflected softly in the shine of his boots. I drove very slowly across the bridge so that we could see the clear-cut path through the woods.
    My three passengers soon nodded off, but I was savoring it all—the pink winter morning, the odd fluttery sound of tires against pavement, the expansive curves, the speed, the music, the traffic bulletins, the semis and the cars hurtling past, the fields and villages and hills. To my eyes even the snow had a Western look that morning.
    Our only stop was just after Nuremberg. The gas station and rest stop were bustling with our fellow countrymen, some of whom were picnicking on bagged sandwiches and thermos coffee behind rolled-down windows. You could have spotted them just from their restless eyes and the eager way they chewed. Once I had found a parking place and opened the trunk, Michaela rebelled. There was a restaurant here, and no way was she going to be the dog left outside the door. She offered to pay.
    While Georg, Jörg, and I slowly dithered past the glass cases with their displays of food, Michaela’s tray was already stacked high with fruit salad on top of sandwiches, rote grütze and vanilla sauce on top of apple strudel. She ordered scrambled eggs for us all and told us we only needed to bother about our coffee and tea.
    Even Jörg, who as I first noticed when we sat down had brought his own sandwich in, capitulated before this magic banquet, smearing butter on his D-mark kaiser roll and piling it high with scrambled eggs and ham.
    Georg went back for a plate of white sausages with sweet mustard. Michaela discovered cucumber salad—cucumber salad in winter!
    We filled our tank from one of our gas cans, and drove downhill in the passing lane. The names that began to pop up on signs delighted me: Heilbronn, Karlsruhe, Strasbourg, Freiburg, Basel, Milan. It wouldn’t have amazed me to find ourselves suddenly whizzing along under palm trees.
    We pulled into Offenburg a little before noon, found the Ratskeller—and right on time, there we stood opposite Steen, who was sitting having a beer with Wolfgang the Hulk. Michaela was the center of attention. Steen invited her to ride with him, Georg and Jörg were packed into the backseat, and I put-putted along behind with Wolfgang.
    He had greeted me with a hug and silence, but was now chatting my ear off about how important it had been for us to show up on time. We’d pulled it off with pizzazz, real pizzazz. Steen thought a