“The ship slipped her lines and a tug nudged her into mid-river, where she stalled briefly, waiting to see that everything that lay before her on the course below was clear. Then Hamburg, and Europe, and all her empires, all I had ever known – the only ground that up until then had fed me, the only well from which I had drunk – receded in slow swaths of wash and sky as we surrendered to the outgoing tide on the Elbe.”
