The Moment

Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine — in touch with only his daughter and still trying to reconcile himself to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset — he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The name accompanying the return address on the box — Dussmann — disquiets him completely. For it is the name of the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-five years ago in Berlin — at a time when the city was cleaved in two,…