When he walked outside he was swept up in crowds chanting ‘Wir sind eine volk!’, which, as he spoke Afrikaans, he understood to mean ‘We are one people!’ But why should they insist on it? he wondered. What else could they be? Jimfish shouldered his way through the jubilant throngs, left the deserted Stasi Headquarters and walked to the once-imposing Protection Rampart, now torn by gaping holes. A smiling border guard happily helped him to clamber through a gap into the western side of town, where an official greeted him with an envelope stuffed with a hundred German marks. Jimfish understood not a word but his benefactor’s demeanour told him that the cash was ‘welcome money’, a gift to spend in the gigantic street-party that engulfed Berlin. So it was that each day he joined the joyous, tipsy crowds carousing from Karl-Marx-Allee in the East to the Kurfürstendamm in the West, returning in the evening to sleep in his old cell at Stasi Headquarters, barely aware of the days flying by.
