'Werner will get it for me. It is not important,' said Lisl.

Klara brought a tray with a jug of coffee and the best cups and saucers, the ones with the sunflower pattern, and some Kipfel on a silver platter. Klara knew that the little crescent shaped shortcakes were Werner's favourite.

A man in a smart brown-leather jacket and grey slacks came into the dining room and deposited his shoulder bag on a chair. It was at the table where the linen napkins had been arranged. He smiled at Lisl and left without speaking.

'Westies,' explained Lisl, using the Berlin word for tourists from West Germany. 'They eat lunch here every day.'

The family with the grown-up sons; I saw them in the lobby,' said Werner. Even without hearing an accent, Berliners were always able to recognize such visitors, and yet it was hard to say in what way they were any different from Berliners. The faces were more or less the same, the clothing equally so, but there was something in the manner that distinguished them from 'Islanders', as the West Berliners referred to themselves.

'They hate us,' said Lisl, who was always prone to exaggerate.

'Westies hate us? Don't be silly,' said Werner. He looked at his watch again and drank some coffee.

'They hate us. They blame us for everything bad that happens.'

'They blame you for their high taxes,' I said. 'A lot of West Germans begrudge the subsidies needed to keep Berlin solvent. But all over the world big cities are funded from central government.'

'There is more to it than that,' said Lisl. 'Even the word " Berlin " is disliked and avoided in the Bundesrepublik. If they want a name for a soap or a scent or a radio or a motorcar, they might name such things "New York" or "Rio" or "Paris", but the word "Berlin" is the universal turnoff, the name that no one wants.'

'They don't hate us,' said Werner. 'But they blame us for everything that happens in the cold war. No matter that Bonn and Moscow are making the decisions – Berlin takes the blame.' Werner was diplomat enough to take Lisl's side.

'I don't know about that,' I said. ' Bonn gets more than its fair share of knocks and pays out more than its fair share of money.'

'Does it?' said Lisl. She was unconvinced. She hated to pay her taxes.

I said, 'Conveniently for the DDR, there is only one Germany when someone wants German money. Reparations to Israel didn't come from both halves of Germany – only from the West half. After the war the debts incurred by Hitler's Third Reich were not shared – only the West half settled them. And now, whenever the DDR offers to set free political prisoners in exchange for money, it's the West half that pays the ransoms to the East half. But when anyone anywhere in the world wants to express their prejudice about Germans, they don't tell you how much they hate those Germans in the East – who suffer enough already – all anti-German feeling is directed against the overtaxed, overworked Westies who prop up the overpaid, incompetent bureaucrats of the Common Market and finance its ever-increasing surplus so it can sell more and more bargain-priced wine and butter to the Russians.'

'Bernard has become a Westie,' said Lisl. It was a joke, but there was not much humour there. Werner gobbled the last Kipfel and got up and said goodbye to her. Lisl didn't respond to our arguments or to our kisses. She didn't like Westies even when they had lunch every day.

With Werner, I walked along Kantstrasse to Zoo station. The rain had stopped, but the trees dripped disconsolately. There was more rain in the air. The station was busy as usual, the forecourt crowded, a group of Japanese tourists taking photos of each other, a man and woman – both in ankle-length fur coats – buying picture postcards, a boy and girl with stiff dyed hair and shiny leather trousers singing tunelessly to the strumming of a guitar, French soldiers loaded with equipment climbing into a truck, two arty-looking girls selling pictures made from beads, an old man with a pony collecting money for animal welfare, a young bearded man asleep in a doorway, an expensively dressed mother holding a small child at arm's length while it vomited in the gutter, and two young policemen not noticing anything. It was the usual mix for Zoo station. This was the middle of the Old World. Here were Berlin 's commuter trains and here too were trains that had come direct from Paris and went on to Warsaw and Moscow.

I went inside with Werner and bought a ticket so that I could accompany him up to the platform. The S-Bahn is Berlin 's ancient elevated railway network and the simplest way to get from the centre of West Berlin (Zoo) to the heart of East Berlin (Friedrichstrasse). It was chilly up there on the platform; the trains rattled through, bringing a swirl of damp air and a stirring of wastepaper. The stations are like huge glass aircraft hangars, and like the tracks themselves they are propped up above street level on ornate cast-iron supports.

'Don't worry about Lisl's eyebrow pencil,' I told Werner. 'I'll get that for her on the way back.'

'Do you know the colour she wants?'

'Of course I do. You're always forgetting to get them.'

'I hope you're wrong about Stinnes,' said Werner.

'You forget about all that,' I said. 'You get over there and get your papers signed and get back. Forget about me and the Department. Forget all that stuff until you get back.'

'I think I might stay the night,' said Werner. 'There's someone I must see in the morning, and there are long lines at the passport control if I come through when everyone's coming back from the operas.'

A Friedrichstrasse train came in, but Werner let it go. I had the feeling that he didn't want to go over. That was unusual for Werner; he might get jumpy, but he never seemed to mind going over there. Sometimes I had the feeling that he liked the break it made for him. He got away from Zena and lived his own bachelor life in the comfortable apartment he'd created over a truck garage. Now he lingered. It was a perfect chance for me to tell him how Fiona had gone to Holland and talked to Tessa about having the children with her. But I didn't tell him.

'Where will you eat tonight?' I said, as my contribution to the kind of conversation that takes place on railway stations and airports.

'There are some people I know in Pankow,' said Werner. 'They've invited me.'

'Do I know them?' I said.

'No,' said Werner. 'You don't know them.'

'What time tomorrow?'

'Don't fuss, Bernie. Sometimes you're worse than Lisl.'

The train arrived. 'Take care,' I said as he stepped into it.

'It's all legit, Bernie.'

'But maybe they don't know that,' I said.

Werner grinned and then the doors closed and the train pulled away. It felt very very cold on the platform after the train had departed, but that might just have been my imagination.