The secretary thanked him, then asked the students to join him in a pledge that no one in the room would listen to western radio. After everyone had repeated the oath, the secretary turned to the teacher and apologised for disturbing him, and the group left the room.

Hannes, sitting two rows in front, turned round and looked at him with an expression that combined deep sadness with anger.

When the lecture was over Hannes beat a hasty retreat, so he ran after him, grabbed him and asked quite brashly if everything was all right.

“All right?” Hannes repeated. “Do you think what happened in there just now was all right? Did you see that poor bloke?”

“Just now,” he said, “no, I… but, of course… we need—”

“Leave me alone,” Hannes interrupted. “Just leave me alone.”

“Why didn’t you come round for Christmas dinner? The others think you’re rather full of yourself,” he said.

“That’s bollocks,” Hannes said, quickening his pace as if wanting to shake him off.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why are you acting like this? What’s happened? What have we done to you?”

Hannes stopped in the corridor.

“Nothing. You haven’t done anything to me,” he said. “I just want to be left alone. I’ll graduate in the spring and then it’s over. That’s it. I’ll go back to Iceland and it’s over. This farce. Didn’t you see it? Didn’t you see how they treated that bloke? Is that what you want in Iceland?”

Then he strutted away.

“Tomas,” he heard a voice calling from behind him. He turned round and saw Ilona waving. He smiled at her. They were planning to meet up after the lecture. She had been to the dormitory to ask for him the day after the feast. From then on they met regularly. On this day they went for a long walk around the city and sat down outside Thomaskirche. He told her stories about the two Icelandic writer friends who had once stayed in Leipzig and had sat where they were sitting now. One died of tuberculosis. The other became the greatest writer his nation had ever produced.

“You’re always so sad when you talk about those Icelanders of yours,” she said with a smile.

“I just think it’s a brilliant story. Them walking the same streets as me in this city. Two Icelandic poets.”

By the church, he had noticed that she was uneasy and seemed on her guard. She glanced around as if looking for someone.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“There’s a man…”

She stopped.

“What man?”

“That man over there,” Ilona said. “Don’t look, don’t turn your head, I saw him yesterday too. I just can’t remember where.”

“Who is he? Do you know him?”

“I’d never seen him before, but now I’ve seen him twice in two days.”

“Is he from the university?”

“No, I don’t think so. He’s older.”

“Do you think he’s watching you?”

“No, it’s nothing. Come on.”

Instead of living on campus, Ilona rented a room in the city, and they went there. He tried to be sure whether the man from Thomaskirche was tracking them, but could not see him anywhere.

The room was in a little flat belonging to a widow who worked in a printshop. Ilona said she was very kindly and allowed her to waltz around the flat as she pleased. The woman had lost her husband and two sons in the war. He saw photographs of them on the walls. The two sons wore German army uniforms.

In Ilona’s room were stacks of books and German and Hungarian newspapers and magazines, a dilapidated portable typewriter on the desk and a futon. While she went into the kitchen he browsed through her books and struck a few keys on the typewriter. On the wall above the futon were photographs of people he presumed were her relatives.

Ilona returned with two cups of tea and kicked the door to with her heel. She set the cups down carefully beside the typewriter. The tea was piping hot.

“It’ll be just right by the time we’ve finished,” she said.

Then she walked over to him and gave him a long, deep kiss. Overcoming his surprise, he hugged her and kissed her passionately until they fell onto the futon and she began hitching up his sweater and undoing his belt. He was very inexperienced. He had had sex before, the first time after the school’s farewell dance and once after that at the party paper’s annual get-together, but those had been fairly clumsy efforts. He was not particularly skilled, but she seemed to be and he gladly let her take control.

She was right. When he slumped down beside her and she smothered a long groan the tea was just the right temperature.

Two days later in the Auerbachkeller they talked politics and argued for the first and only time. She began by describing how the Russian revolution had spawned a dictatorship, and that dictatorships were always dangerous no matter what form they took.

He did not want to argue with her although he knew perfectly well that she was wrong.

“It was thanks to Stalin’s programme of industrialisation that the Nazis were defeated,” he said.

“He also made a pact with Hitler,” she said. “Dictatorship fosters fear and servility. We’re bearing the brunt of that in Hungary now. We’re not a free nation. They’ve systematically established a communist state under Soviet control. No one asked us, the nation, what we wanted. We want to govern our own affairs but can’t. Young people are thrown in prison. Some disappear. It’s said that they’re sent to the Soviet Union. You have an American army in your country. How would you feel if it ran everything by its military might?”

He shook his head.

“Look at the elections here,” she said. “They call them free, but there’s only one real party standing. What’s free about that? If you think differently you’re thrown in prison. What’s that? Is that socialism? What else are people supposed to vote for in these free elections? Has everyone forgotten the uprising here the year before last that the Soviets crushed by shooting civilians on the streets, people who wanted change!”

“Ilona…”

“And interactive surveillance,” Ilona continued, seriously agitated. “They say it’s to help us. We’re supposed to spy on our friends and family and inform on antisocialist attitudes. If you know that one of your fellow students listens to western radio you’re supposed to report him, and he’s dragged from one lecture to the next to confess his crime. Children are encouraged to inform on their parents.”

“The party needs time to adapt,” he said.

When the novelty of being in Leipzig had worn off and reality confronted them, the Icelanders had discussed the situation. He had reached a firm conclusion on the surveillance society, about what was called “interactive surveillance’, whereby every citizen kept an eye on everyone else. Also on the dictatorship of the communist party, prohibition of freedom of speech and the press, and compulsory attendance at meetings and marches. He felt that instead of being secretive about the methods it employed, the party should admit that certain methods were needed during this phase of the transformation to a socialist state. They were justifiable if they were only temporary. In the course of time such methods would cease to be necessary. People would realise that socialism was the most appropriate system.

“People are scared,” Ilona said.

He shook his head and they started arguing. He had not heard much about events in Hungary and she was hurt when he doubted her word. He tried to employ arguments from the party meetings in Reykjavik, from the party leadership and youth movement and from the works of Marx and Engels, all to no avail. She just looked at him and said over and again: “You mustn’t close your eyes to this.”

“You let western imperialist propaganda turn you against the Soviet Union,” he said. “They want to break the solidarity of the communist countries because they fear them.”

“That’s wrong,” she said.

They fell silent. They had finished their glasses of beer. He was angry with her. He had never heard or seen anyone describe the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries in such terms, apart from the conservative press in Iceland. He knew about the strength of the western powers” propaganda machine, which worked well in Iceland, and he admitted that it was one reason for needing to restrict freedom of speech and press freedom too in Eastern Europe. This he could understand while socialist states were being constructed in the aftermath of the war. He did not regard it as repression.