The summer deepened, and our days became toned with sadness, and other, unnameable things. I sat up in bed one morning, smoking. I tapped the ash into an empty pils bottle. Silvija squatted on her heels on the couch, in her underwear, battering the laptop – she had a wide circle of acquaintance, 80 per cent of which she was feuding with at any given time. The light poured in from the climbing sun, and caught her bare, brown muscles. The windfall from the Americans and the passports was long since consumed and we were again in the depths of poverty, but we looked pretty good poor. The Wedding scene was slow, due to the season and the usual inclemence of luck that afflicted the fashion people: the arrests, the random plagues, the near-death experiences. This particular morning, there was something like shyness between us. Briefly, in the night, Silvija’s strict no-penetration dictat had been lifted. I knew even at the moment it was a mistake, despite the luxuriousness of the sensation. I could feel the scaredness in her. I knew that it would never happen again. And I knew in my heart that I just wasn’t working out as a lesbian. I was too clumsy and knuckly.

Not that she didn’t walk with me the hot summer streets of noon, and not that she didn’t teach me, and not that she didn’t give me something, just a tiny sustaining something, of her great aura.

I believe it was that same day, in the beer garden on Kastanienallee, that she turned the camera on me, there beneath the chestnut trees in full leaf, and I was shy of the lens and awkward but she told me what to do.

‘You don’t look at it,’ she said. ‘You look through it.’

I have the photograph still and it is sacred to me. On the wooden bench between us, in the amber of a stein glass, she is reflected, with her camera raised. She is there, blurrily, and it’s just a shade, but it is all that I have left of her.

ix

The end came sharply. I woke one morning to find Silvija packing her stuff. That holdall of hers had seen plenty. I tried to sound casual but there was boy-fear in my tone.

‘So this is it?’ I croaked.

‘You knew it was coming,’ she said.

The studio had had its time, she said. She was going to stay with a girlfriend in Kreuzberg. It was time that I stood on my own two feet.

‘You need to go find your own life, Patrick,’ she said.

‘Yeah and you need to go to a fucking doctor!’