He discovers how some of his close friends are prejudiced and intolerant – unwilling to take up his cause. Richard can empathise with their involuntary dislocation – he also felt displaced when suddenly he was ‘a citizen of another country’ after the fall of the Berlin wall. He is attracted to the beautiful Ethiopian teacher – an unrequited infatuation. He reads up and also learns directly from them about their countries, their histories, their religion. The lake is often referred to, as well as the mystery of the drowned diver who lies somewhere in its depths – an allegory for the ‘invisible people’ in his country or buried, unwanted memories? Richard develops friendships with these men and takes up their cause. From his closed-in state, we witness Richard breaking away from his solitary rituals and thawing like the frozen lake close to his home. With a light touch, yet penetrating insight, the author reflects on human themes including loss, displacement, prejudice, companionship, betrayal, fortitude.

After an interview with an owl-like lawyer, he concludes that the lawyer has “flapped his way from some previous century into the twenty-first, this new and yet already so old century with its endless streams of people who, having survived the passage across a real-life sea, are now drowning in rivers and oceans of paper.” Logical and practical, Richard cannot understand the insuperable and absurd barriers preventing them from working, even when they possess high level skills needed in Germany. We witness the crushing of their aspirations and ambitions as they face the grinding indifference and Kafkaesque bureaucracy of a state determined to keep them out. They want to live and work in Germany, but they are kept in limbo, living in squalid, functional accommodation, unable to work, their hopes and energies sapped, leading to many of them languishing in their dormitory beds, closed off from the external world. Their stories of escape are harrowing (and I suspect true). In sparse and subtle prose, we follow Richard, a recently retired East German Professor and childless widower, clearly lonely and rather adrift, who becomes curious, then fully engaged with a group of African asylum seekers whom he first notices in a square, camped in makeshift tents and on hunger strike. …the displaced here, whilst also fleeing war and violence, are from non-European countries, and seem to be given a less welcoming reception…

Go went gone