We rang the bell on their apartment. We listened. It was empty – they must have been out photographing the TV tower or taking rides in the tourist-rental Trabants. We went upstairs to our studio and shinned down from the studio balcony to theirs. We quickly made through the place. We found eight hundred dollars in the drawer of a vanity and two passports – Becky Cobb and Corey Mutz, in chunky retro eyewear both – and we took these also. There was a price to be had for American passports from the Ukrainians who drank at Dieter’s. We left the way we had come – Silvija climbed like a jungle cat; I laboured. But we made it, and we went and had us a royal day on the town.

In a vast Old German-type trough, we stuffed ourselves with many potato-based dishes and many enormous sausages. We drank exquisite Burgundy and Bavarian whisky. And pils. We touched each other beneath the tablecloth. What Silvija could do with her toes was extraordinary. She taught me, phonetically, the choruses of some enchanting childhood songs of the steppe.

‘But what are these songs about?’ I asked.

‘Mostly they are about oxen and death,’ she said.

We left the restaurant and went to Dieter’s. It was a low bar on Schönhauser Allee, and there we had more pils and a rendezvous with the scarred and mysterious Hoods of Kiev. These were among the characters lately populating my stories but I could get them only palely. There was no way to render with a still-callow pen the force of intrigue stored in the black heat of Victor’s eyes, nor the sexual languidity in the way that Xcess (as she styled herself) drained her glass, nor the … I just couldn’t get it down right. We made another two hundred euro from the passports. We left the bar and walked down the street – the plan was to buy some new and impractical shoes. There was the rumble above us of the elevated trains. I complained at the lack of true lustre in my stories. Silvija sighed and stopped up on the pavement and she took hold of my elbow. She gave me one of her statements or manifestos, then, one of her great orations on the Nature of Art: