Karlchen was still exactly as he had been a year ago, two years ago, three years ago: as he had always been. He was just raising his head and sniffing a little suspiciously at the air.

‘There is . . . something . . . Something here . . . eh?’ He just said it, pronouncing the consonants sharply, and just thickening the vowels a bit, as they tend to do in Hanover. It had been exactly like that in the war, when we had wandered down the banks of the Danube, and thought there must be something there . . . But there never was.

I trotted along beside the other two, who were deep in animated conversation about Sweden and the countryside, about flying and Stockholm.

We had the Princess between us; sometimes we spoke over her head. I wallowed in their friendship.

To have someone to trust! To be with someone for a change who doesn’t eye you suspiciously when you use a phrase that might perhaps offend his vanity, someone who isn’t prepared at any moment to lower his visor and do battle with you to the death. Oh, people don’t even argue like that – they squabble over one Mark fifty . . . over an old hat . . . over a bit of gossip . . . I know only two people in the whole world who would help me if I knocked on their doors at night and said: Gentlemen, this is my problem . . . I have to go to America – what shall I do? Two – Karlchen was one of them. Friendship is like one’s homeland. We never talked about it, and whenever there was any slight surge of emotion unless it happened in a serious late-night talk – it would be quenched in a bucketful of colourful abuse. It was marvellous.

We had put him up at the hotel, because there were no rooms left where we were. He looked at his room, alleged that it stank like the bedroom of Louis the Smelly, and that it all seemed ‘a bit thin’ . . . but he said that about everything, and I had already picked up the habit from him; he washed, and then we sat and drank coffee under the trees.

‘Well, Fritzchen . . .?’ he said to me. No one will ever discover why he called me Fritzchen. ‘Can you swim here? How’s the lake?’

‘It’s generally about sixteen degrees Celsius or twenty Remius,’ I said, ‘depending on the currency fluctuations.’

He understood. ‘And what are we doing tonight?’

‘Well . . .’ said the Princess, ‘we’re planning to have a very quiet evening . . .’

‘Can you get red wine here?’

I reported on the depressing situation regarding red wine, and how at the Sprit-Zentrale a young man had looked for chablis among the red wines. Karlchen closed his eyes in sorrow. ‘But you can get the wine, Karlchen – as the so-called down-payment for foreigners.’ Unfortunately he didn’t hear that. A girl went by – not even a particularly pretty one.