The Christmas Card, by Lionel Shriver

After a single letter is lost in the post, a love story stretches across six decades

AT NINETEEN, every new infatuation (an unkind word, a retroactive word, and so a lying word) seems the only chance at romantic happiness that will ever present itself. Thus, throughout December of 1953, Marion Martinson was distraught. For weeks, she’d loitered in the vestibule with an eye on the letterbox, conspicuously trying to look inconspicuous. Now that the holidays had descended, deliveries were suspended. The cruelty of a certain young man desisting from communication during this, of all seasons, defied everything she thought she knew about the boy.

Finally her mother insisted she explain why she was so mopey and cross. Private if not secretive, and leery of fielding her parents’ hostility to Germans, Marion had fobbed off Ekhard’s letters as pen-pal correspondence organised by their church – thus portraying the exchange as a tiresome, dutiful exercise in compassion. Besides, she dreaded an adult’s insulting sense of proportion (‘Hard to believe now, but you’ll get over this kid in no time…!’), turning the most momentous experience of her life into a passing craze, like Coronation Chicken.

So Marion claimed to be upset that, despite the Tories having come to power with all their promises, throughout yet another Christmas, rationing was still in place, and she’d had her heart set on baking a butterkuchen. (Indeed, Ekhard had sent his mother’s recipe in mid-november, the last time he’d written, in a missive already soft from smoothings and refoldings. He’d warned that if you substituted vegetable oil from the big aid tins from America, the cake was ekelhaftes – disgusting.) Her mother admonished her to be grateful for the peace and bounty God had granted them, and to stop being such a pill.

Despite strenuous parental objections – technically, West Germany was still occupied – the previous summer Marion had taken part in a UN reconciliation camp, in which young people from Allied countries pitched in with their defeated counterparts to help clear remaining rubble and sow vegetation. Only eleven when the war ended, and exiled from London while it lasted, Marion had felt left out, only grasping in later life that sometimes exclusion made you lucky. She’d leapt at the adventure.

In cultivating cross-cultural sympathies, the camp was a resounding success. From the start of her eight weeks in Leipzig, Ekhard Weber attracted her attention. Some of the Germans were defiant and standoffish, others unpleasantly