Even in early summer, the studio was cold as the steppe, and I would put extra layers on to sleep. Silvija was born in the teeth of the wind of an actual steppe and she did not feel the cold. She put aside the laptop, and she stood and eyed me derisively as I approached. With a thumb and forefinger she massaged a nipple. She had small tits but enormous nipples.

‘If you do okay, I will kiss you,’ she said. ‘But only once.’

She turned out to be as good as her word on this, and the kiss was not the least of her gifts to me.

ii

By her own reckoning, Silvija was at this time the most brilliant fashion photographer in all of Berlin. This didn’t mean that she got paid. The magazines she worked for tended to fold after an issue or two. And Vogue wasn’t going to come calling anytime soon. Asked to photograph, say, a vampy spike-heeled ankle boot, Silvija would commit to print only the leather of its sole, and that blurrily, as some meth-thinned model, wearing latex knickers and a sneer, aimed a high kick at the camera, down some malevolent alleyway with gemstones of broken glass – Berlin diamonds – scattered to sparkle all around.

‘But you don’t really see the boot, Silvija?’

‘I do not photograph the motherfucking boot, Patrick. I photograph the motherfucking life!’

Money was always tight, and we supplemented the magazine work by shoplifting, breaking and entering, and hiring out to the younger designers as they compiled their portfolios. The designers were routinely troublesome – I remember the schizophrenic Croat with his pioneering cutting technique, the polyamorous Frenchman who weighed about as much as a bag of feathers and was reinventing the frock coat, and the epileptic Tasmanian allegedly wanted in Australia for setting fire to a model during Melbourne Fashion Week.

We descended the eerie stairwell from the studio. We emerged onto Arkonaplatz in the morning. The nicotine burn of her kiss was on my lips still. The sun had come strongly through; already the tables were full outside the cafés. We stopped for tiny smoking thimbles of black coffee at Niko’s, and I felt some prose coming on. Silvija shook her head in amusement at my lovelorn state.

‘There will be no honeymoon, Patrick,’ she said. ‘You did fine. And there will be further business between us. There will be instruction. But do you know how much it means to me?’

She snapped her fingers to indicate the sheer nothingness of what had that morning occurred, and I nodded glumly in understanding.

‘Got it?’

‘Yes.’