Wordless, Fischbinder took me by the arm and led me to a window. We were evidently on a high floor, facing south and west, and we had a good view of the city. And it was New York, of course, and there were buildings I recognized – the Chrysler building, the Empire State – but there were also plenty of buildings that had not been there the last I looked.

I took it all in in silence, my mind racing yet standing still. I could feel myself struggling to adjust to this new reality. Because that’s what it was – reality. Seeing isn’t necessarily believing, not all the time, but I was seeing and I was believing. It was 1997 – for God’s sake, just three years short of the millennium – and Yugoslavia was five different countries, and I was sixty-four years old. I’d lived a mere thirty-nine years, but I was sixty-four all the same.

I said, “Why?”

“Why?”

“Why me? Well, why anybody, but I’m the person it happened to, and I can’t figure out why. Why did someone think it was a good idea to freeze me like a package of breaded shrimp and hide me away from the world for all these years?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Somebody has to,” I said.

“There was a letter,” he said, “but no one could read it. Then a man from Washington came to collect it. I suppose they found somebody there who could make it out, but they haven’t sent us word as to what it said, and somehow I don’t think they will.”

“Not unless things have changed a lot in the past twenty-five years,” I said.

“But I kept a copy.”

“They let you do that?”

“I’d already made a copy,” he said, “before they turned up, and I kept it. It seems to be some Germanic language, but it’s definitely not German.”