‘All right. By the way, what are you reading?’

‘For the last two hours, I’ve been asleep, sitting on a fashionable novel. It’s the only part of the body you can read it with.’ She closed her eyes, then opened them again. ‘Look at that . . . that woman! Isn’t she misogynist!’

‘Isn’t she what?’

‘Misogynist . . . doesn’t that mean stunted? No, I mixed it up with pygmies; they are those people who live up trees, aren’t they?’ After this performance, she dropped off again, and we travelled for a long, long time. As far as Warnemünde.

There was ‘the River’. That’s what they called the Warne here. Or didn’t it have another name . . . Peene, Swine, Dievenow? It didn’t say. For the sake of simplicity, Karlchen, Jakopp and I had decided to endow every town with a river of the corresponding name: Gleiwitz on the Gleiwe, Bitterfeld on the Bitter, and so on.

There was a group of almost identical little houses down by the River, with the wind blowing round them, and looking so cosy. The masts of sailboats pierced the grey air, and loaded barges wallowed in the still water.

‘Look, here’s Warnemünde!’

‘Now, I reckon I know a whole lot more about it than you do. Good Lord! That’s the River, that’s where I grew up, so to speak! Karl Düsig lives there, and old Wiesendörpsch, and that nice little house, that’s where Kröger the decorator lives, such a nice man, there isn’t a nicer man in the whole world. And that’s Senator Egger’s house, “Three Limes”. And look – that old house with the pretty baroque gables – that one’s haunted!’

‘In Platt?’ I asked.

‘You’re a cynic, aren’t you! Do you suppose the Warnemünde ghosts go around with High German accents? No, there has to be propriety and order, even in the fourth dimension . . .! And . . .’ Crash! The train gave a jolt. We fell on top of one another. She went on, and told me about every single house on the River, as far as you could see.