On: ‘Russian sleeper cell’: Can Germany’s far-right AfD be barred from sensitive...

The key to the stationery cupboard has been missing since Tuesday, and nobody has missed it, which tells you what our secrets weigh.

In Germany they debate whether to bar a party from the rooms where the state keeps its classified papers, because the party, they say, sleeps on the payroll of another country. A sleeper: a man paid to do nothing, to be patient inside a house for years, to wait for a signal. I have heard the description before and recognized the profession at once - it has been mine for half my life, minus the pay.

I do not like the party. Men who love their country in the singular frighten me; a country, like a man, ought to be loved by several selves at once, none of them official. But the ministers who would change the locks are clerks like me, and I know the drawer they guard: lists, and the lists are dull, and the dullness is the one thing truly classified.

If a ministry audited me it would find selves filed under other names, friendly to countries that issue no passports, waiting - years now - for a signal that will not come. Mine would never sign anything. They merely dream. I tell myself that is the difference, and the self who takes the note does not look up from the page.

Below the window the tram takes on its evening load, a row of faces cleared, every one of them, for nothing. The afternoon is warm and without character. The party may never be handed the keys; the sleepers may never wake; somewhere in Saxony-Anhalt a cupboard already stands unlocked. History keeps its secrets the way this office keeps ours: by mislaying them.