We ate pasta. Once the sightless avenues around Brandenburg Gate shrink, you’re suddenly in a small town. This is the East.

•

I recounted the anguish of my arrival to Michael.

‘The bathroom got wet when you had a shower! Why didn’t they put me up in the flat I was supposed to get if it was available?’

Michael was eating schnitzel.

‘They think you live in a hut,’ he said, sectioning, ‘where you come from.’ Done, like a surgeon washing his hands, he became aware of me. ‘They think: This is good enough for him!’ He shrugged, resumed poking at the pieces.

•

Back in the car, Geeta said of me to Michael:

‘He has a question.’

I was confused for a moment. Then I took her cue.

‘Ah yes. The toilets with the flat base. I find them intriguing. Are they peculiar to Berlin or the whole of Germany?’

Michael stared at the windshield. He could grow absorbed quickly.

‘All of Germany, I think.’

‘But that shape? I haven’t seen it elsewhere.’

‘Don’t you know,’ sang Geeta, triumphant, ‘that Germans like to inspect their poo?’

‘Inspect?’ I was startled.

Michael shrugged.

‘Yes – to see for themselves what they’ve done.’

We plunged into that avenue again, as one might into an ocean.

‘Do you see those women on the sides?’

I hadn’t noticed. Now they were brought to my attention they seemed like torches, tall, shifting from foot to foot, each one at an interval from the other.

‘They’re from Russia,’ said Geeta. ‘They come here and are straightaway on the streets, charging two hundred euros by the hour.’

Peter Simons’s paths and mine crossed less and less. I’d spot him in the distance: purposeful, modest. He appeared quite contented – as you might when you begin to understand your place in the world.

‘We grew up in the free world,’ I’d said to him, a bit presumptuous. ‘But there was an alternative, wasn’t there? And the fact that the “free world” had an alternative made it an alternative itself.’ We’d turned this over in our heads, like an equation. ‘When freedom is the only reality, you’re no longer free.’

•

But when I saw him on the street, there was a spring in his step. It was as if being here, and coming into contact again with history – when the East was the West’s alternative, and the West (Schöneberg; the town square) the East’s – had released him from some constraint.

•

When we stopped to talk, it was about domestic arrangements. We were neighbours, after all.

Sometimes Dahlem was so quiet that I could hear the silence in the way I could see sunlight in the room. I wasn’t miserable. But my need for home made itself present to me – I wasn’t conscious of it – through Gerta’s arrivals on Friday mornings.

‘Dieses Handtuch ist schmutzig,’ she called to me from the entrance of the bathroom, holding up a large white towel. ‘Ich lege es in die Wäsche.’