‘They’re good,’ he said, narrowing his eyes like he was assessing weaponry.

Then he disappeared for two weeks. Unavailable on the phone.

But, prior to the shoes-purchase, we met up at Friedrichstrasse.

‘Chalo, chalo,’ he said. ‘Just change at Hallesches Tor for Oranien-boorger Tor.’

He was already there. A sunlit Sunday. We walked up in the heat and waited for a tram. We hopped on and he told me not to pay. He had no ticket either. Sometimes he’d carry a sheaf of them, like a proselytiser. We hopped off after five minutes.

We crossed the road. I felt a deep sense of home-coming. I didn’t know where we were. I wanted to go deeper. We stood in front of a building, fugitive; Faqrul blurted out, ‘Eta aar ki, Neu synagogue.’ He said ‘Neu’ like the Bangla nine. ‘The men, aar ki, came and burnt it.’ He sounded disbelieving despite himself. I was gripped by foreboding. ‘What am I doing here?’ Yet there was nowhere I’d rather have been. ‘Kristallnacht . . . They smashed the glass on 9th November.’ We were standing under branches; the trees are expansive here. I grew so absorbed for an instant I didn’t know who I was. ‘9th November,’ he murmured. Then, bored, he turned left, facing the way we’d come.

We had würstchen and poached on the environs. From Oranienburger Strasse we progressed to Hackescher Markt. Faqrul maintained his furtiveness – the air of being prepared for everything. In one of the by-lanes – (was it that day or another one?) I think it was in Prenzlauer Berg – he pointed to the indentation in the stone on a balcony. ‘Bullet,’ he said. The English word was agitating; I peered, blind. Was he making it up? I had a feeling that, just as his idea of privacy was subjective, so was his truth. To access history in this way, you had to access him.

•

I’d come here before. When, I’m not sure. I knew the neighbourhoods: gates, doorways. I let Faqrul do the talking.

•

They go on about the rebarbative sound German makes, but individual words and names have greater beauty – more history – than English can carry. I entered Hackescher Markt in my mind’s eye five or ten minutes before reaching there. ‘Friedrichstrasse’ had come up in a dream recently, as a port of arrival. Kristallnacht was transparent, broken. I woke up to words and didn’t bother with the language.

‘See those.’

On the fringes of Hackescher Markt we slipped through a passage. I thought it was a shortcut. He was pointing to the stones. It was a bit of metal that concerned him, an ore where the stone had scraped off.

‘Their names,’ he said.

There was more than one. They were scattered but immovable. Each had a name and nickname and dates: everything in a life. You had to squint to see.

‘What . . .’