Nobody listening responded, or seemed to understand (Krüger could tell by their eyes; he’d had this before and in other places). Disappointed, he cleared his throat and again willed brightness into his voice. It was particularly noisy at Otto’s on Taubenstraße that Wednesday night.

‘Déjà vu,’ Krüger said. ‘Déjà, it means already: the sense that something has already happened before, though it’s also happening now. Who hasn’t felt it?’

Again, nothing.

His brightness dimmed. Krüger preferred to bounce off people when he spoke, draw up quickly against their arguments, derive an intuitive direction and logic from the to-and-fro. Otherwise, in the lagging silence, he had a tendency to grow flustered and confuse himself, lose confidence, his arguments then clattering around in his mind like a shod horse spooked on cobblestones. Which was exactly what had happened to him the previous year, during his disastrous oral presentation at the University of Jena, when he’d been denied a degree.

He took a deep breath, composed himself.

‘Time isn’t a straight line and it doesn’t travel a distance,’ Krüger said. ‘Our lives are merely remaindered embodiments of this false notion, anxious and afflicted because time is imposed. For truly, and we all know it, there is no timeline. Our lives don’t actually go anywhere. We are always here, wherever we are.’ He held out his arms. ‘Where is there to go?’

Somebody called out, ‘Home!’

Laughter.

Another voice: ‘But haven’t I been there before?’

They were gathered around a couple of tables in a corner of the coffee house. Otto’s on Taubenstraße was full of students, young men, older men, lonely men, wounded soldiers, philosophers without formal qualification, cold street dwellers clutching a few begged pfennigs, poets. They smiled. They were enjoying this fellow.

‘The truth is that we churn in a state of circular intertwining,’ Krüger said, persisting, nothing to lose now, ‘caught in a ceaseless and immutable folding, like . . . like cards shuffled by the gods. There are only so many combinations.’

Johannes Meyer leaned forward on his elbows, tried to listen, but the man’s arguments were difficult to follow with the growing chatter. Still, something had caught like a hook into his feelings. This man called Krüger was awkward and Johannes could sense how he’d alienated himself from the crowd there at Otto’s, and maybe that was all it was, the hook: that Johannes knew how the man felt and could hear the truth in his voice. He believed him.

‘The rigid retrospectives of age,’ Krüger said, ‘the prison of numbered years, those most tenacious and insinuating agents of measurement, are an illusion. They draw a single straight line through life, but cannot by nature contain the whole of the movement encompassed. Life is not unfurling in a line, but rather being spun, constantly, around and around our voluptuous Mother Earth, who is herself simultaneously turning, turning!’