I was finding out how carelessly life might be lived. The people I met through Silvija were all addictions and stylish madness. Every other hour, there was a crack-up, or an arrest, or an abortion, or somebody jumped out a window, or fucked an Austrian heiress, and every deranged turn of events was so gladly met and swirled with. They were attuned to the wild moment, while I was yet nervous, careful, locked to the past. It seemed to me that they had all grown up godless and without foul repressions. They had not grown up sitting on three-piece suites of floral design in the beige suburbs. They had not come to adulthood in rooms laid with unpleasantly diamond-patterned carpets bought off the travellers at the markets of drab Irish towns. How can I begin to explain? Does it suffice to say that the olive oil in my childhood home was kept in the bathroom? It was bought at the chemist shop and drizzled mournfully onto my father’s problem scalp. Hair was never good for our people, generally, perhaps on account of the remorseless wind that assaults the sides of west Limerick mountains. It is no exaggeration to say that the male forebears of my clan – my father and his brothers – were scarred by wind. They all had the permanently startled look that comes from working outside in hard gusts, and something of it had been passed onto me, this look; even though I had never myself stood in the teeth of a force six gale wrestling a stuck cow from the boggy sump of a ditch; even though I spent my time writing lurid short stories and (increasingly perceptive and subtle) essays about the emergence of Italian Neo-Realism in the 40s, and the troubled legacy of the Nouvelle Vague.

Silvija, of course, was fanatically well read. She read everything and in six languages. She had informed me quietly that I was a genius. She told me that I was the culmination of Irish literature. (She said it ‘litra-chure’.) It had all been leading up to me.

She had such faith.

vi

The shoot broke down into the usual chaos. There were taunts and ultimatums. Silvija and I walked. We decided to go instead and rob some Americans. There was a roost of them in our building. They were on the floor directly beneath the studio. We could hear the insect trilling of their talk down there.

‘When the Americans appear,’ Silvija said, ‘it means that Berlin is officially over. May it rest in peace. Amen.’

Daily, the gauche and Conversed hordes priced out of San Francisco and Brooklyn were arriving, with their positivity, their excellent teeth and their MFAs. They could be spotted a mile off in the clubs – their clothes were wrong, their hair was appalling and their dancing was just terrible.