She was with her aunt’s secretary, Günther Jagelman, who was old and deaf and so didn’t hear the breathless sounds of lovemaking through the window as they passed. But Elisabeth von Hoffmann heard, and she turned in her stride and saw, disbelieving, the couple on the couch. She forgot about the running man and his chicken wings. All the downy blonde hairs on her arms and scalp lifted, and she felt something like a surge of cold well-water from her head to her toes.

Elisabeth was seventeen years old and locked inside the heated tumult of a young body. Her skin was sensitive to even the thought of a touch; her nights were long and sleepless in her transforming. She was overwhelmed by love and longing, could hardly wait to enter the world and be found by this love, a dream of such exquisite possibility that it seemed inevitable. Instead, she found herself in a constant state of anticipation, disappointment and, ultimately, boredom.

It was torture. It was all she could do to endure another day at her aunt’s home, endure another day in Berlin, caught inside her life like a bird in a cage. With the news of Bonaparte’s victories and impending arrival in the city, she’d felt neither fear nor loss but, rather, hope; this was the glorious upheaval she’d been praying for. There is no greater freedom than things being taken out of our hands.

The messengers had come and gone all morning with news of Bonaparte’s progress towards the capital until at last, unbelievably, he was there. Aunt Margaretha had forbidden it at first, but Elisabeth had convinced Günther to take her, and so they’d gone together to see the Corsican ogre. The crowd, unfortunately, was enormous and impossible to penetrate; they’d arrived too late. Like Johannes Meyer, they left without even a glimpse.

Behind them now, Elisabeth felt the silence and the hush that pressed down on the crowd when Napoleon appeared in their midst. And it was just then that she heard the strains of passion, too, and looked over her shoulder through the window and saw the couple on the couch. The moment came to bear upon her exactly like that, with that great hush, with a surprising, silent force.

In that same instant, Johannes Meyer looked up from the couch and their eyes met, and it was as though she could see everything that was inside the boy. And he saw her too (she knew it!) and together they confirmed something they’d always known but only now remembered.

AT OTTO KESSLER’S COFFEE HOUSE IN TAUBENSTRAßE

A portly young man came one evening and proposed that each one of us was a living premonition and proof (in the ever-present) of the past and the future fused together.

‘We are a weld,’ this man named Krüger said, ‘of every event and eventuality.’