A native woman called Susanna had retrieved the shell for her husband, Georg Eberhard Rumpf, who collected plants and seashells and worked for the Dutch East India Company. This was in Ambon, in the Moluccan Archipelago, about a century ago. She’d dived expertly through twenty feet of water as clear as sky to pluck it from the sea-floor. Maybe it was already a thousand years old, maybe more. However old it was, hers were the first human hands ever to touch it. And Johannes Meyer’s the last! In between, it had traced an invisible route to Rolt’s mahogany side table (as had the mahogany).

On Unter den Linden, Bonaparte casually slipped a piece of liquorice into his mouth; and here, three men walked in to surprise Johannes, holding Susanna’s rare shell in his hands. Shocked, frightened, he dropped it and watched open-mouthed as it shattered into pieces across the floor.

HOW GREAT IT IS TO RUN

Mr Hendrik didn’t try to stop the boy. In fact, he moved a little to the left, out of the way of the door, and let the boy run past.

Claus von Rolt lunged, cried, ‘Stop!’ but couldn’t get hold of him. The boy burst outside and into the street.

‘Why didn’t you grab him?’ Wesley Lewis Jr said with disgust. He quickly ran off after the boy and Rolt followed.

Mr Hendrik stood in the doorway and watched. His face was inscrutable, but inside he urged the boy on.

Run.

He felt the flutter of nerves in his own legs, even the useless one. The dull ache there sharpened, a memory triggered, a twitch from the past.

Run, boy.

A CHILDHOOD

Mr Hendrik was twelve years old, thin and long-legged.

His own uncle wielded the knife and four slaves held his limbs, splayed out over the ground, and there was another hand that pushed his face down, so that he thought they meant to drown him in the mud. His miserable uncle with the blade, given the task and no choice about it, the blade blunt and crude and purposely so, sawing the boy’s leg with gruesome imprecision, through skin and flesh and then at last the tendon above and at the back of the ankle, hacked and severed with a whip snap. The boy howled and thought he was going to die.

When he finished, the uncle wiped the blade on the grass. This wasn’t the first or last hamstrung Negro he’d midwife. And he’d told the boy too, warned him before and shaken him as he did so: Don’t run, you fool. There’s nowhere to run.

But Mr Hendrik hadn’t planned on a destination. It was enough just to run, in any direction. It was at the core of him and thoughtless, like life.

POET