I had been expecting to be met by an old man and was worrying whether he would still have wits enough to understand my questions; what I found was a man of indeterminate age wearing a curious getup, his belly swollen and distended, his face as mottled and pockmarked as that of even the most dedicated alcoholic. His flies were gaping open but he clearly didn’t care. He was sitting outside in a tiny garden full of flaking, peeling junk – a handkerchief-sized wasteland. He sat at a rickety metal table on which stood a bottle of Schnapps; there was a chipped glass which barely existed, fused as it was to the table, half-filled with an oily liquid on which floated leaves, pine needles and dead flies; and there was an improbable ashtray buried under a mound of ashes, cigarette butts and cremated insects. The man stared straight in front of him, saying nothing. He did not even see me arrive.

I felt a surge of pity. Here was a human wreck on the brink of extinction. An image flashed into my mind and I was convinced that this was what would happen: the man would die here, covered in lichen, glued to his chair, the bottle within easy reach, thinking nothing, saying nothing, seeing nothing of what was around him. I found it difficult to imagine Papa – a picture of austerity, a very German austerity – being friends with such a man. But a lot of time had passed, I thought, and maybe this man had had his day in the sun. However, a little mental arithmetic persuaded me that he and Papa did not know – could not have known – each other. It was a matter of age and circumstance. Papa hadn’t set foot outside Algeria since 1962, at which point this man would have been playing cowboys and Indians with the dirty little village pigs or playing hide-and-seek in the bushes with the sheep before he and his Kameraden discovered alcohol. Now, the man was about fifty years old – clearly fifty years too many – but a far cry from seventy-six, the age my father had been when he died. I didn’t want to even consider the possibility that he had been to Algeria and had met my father there. They don’t stand for any bullshit in Algeria, they have a border, they have fearsome guards and draconian laws, no one is allowed to visit and there is no question of making exceptions. There are places like that, places where you are not allowed to enter, to leave, or to know why. Perhaps alcohol had preserved him, or prematurely aged him, or maybe it had given him the means to become a different person. There was obviously something I didn’t understand.