Maybe we shouldn't have saved him after all. Maybe we should have just handed him and that spy over. Our East German friends would have been very grateful, he said, trying to catch the smoke that was creeping up to the ceiling with his gaze. But maybe we can still correct our mistake. The child grows up during the Cold War in an Eastern European country, bullied by classmates and harassed by the state. There is much that the child cannot understand and should not understand. To cope with this, it retreats into its own language, which includes only itself and its mother. It turns everything into stories, transforming the threatening into something interesting, and the uncertain into the familiar. Over time, the child gains more and more confidence in its stories and thus.