We broke journey at a panel on the rise and fall of the KaDeWe. It seemed that the museum itself was more like KaDeWe and Peek and Cloppenburg than other museums. I mean it showcases banalities. Where else would you see that except in department stores? Most visitors at KaDeWe are anyway window shoppers. They walk inside and around to look at; not to buy but, marvelling, reconstruct their lives. What else were we doing? I mean no disrespect. But we were in a daydream, going where recognition took us.

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Later, we collected our jackets (no point delaying the inevitable) and went to the café to recover. We sat, exhausted, like tramps. We had overcoats on our laps, coffee and slices of cheesecake on the tray.

‘I’ll get this,’ I’d said to Jonas at the till. He’d nodded grimly, still sulking because of my near no-show. Usually he’d say, ‘Let me invite you,’ German translatorese for ‘It’s on me.’

I then went to Kreuzberg for dinner – not for the Bangladeshi restaurant, though it was half on my mind, but speculating if the Mercedes-Benz was in the same place.

There were Turkish men standing around. I nodded at those who had nothing to do. I’d grown used to the Turks in the city. Most settled in Kreuzberg when it was a poor area. It used to be poor because it was on the margins of the East and would be among the first to be overrun in case of an invasion. This is what I’d noticed from the top floor in Hohenzollernplatz, looking to the far end of Tiergarten: the idea that the horizon was to be left alone, but it might close in unawares.

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I entered a restaurant that looked like a cottage. It reminded me – of what, I wasn’t sure. Most things you ‘recognise’ you’ve never seen before.

On the same principle, two old Turkish men (possibly related) ‘recognised’ me. They showed me to a table. On the other hand, they may not have been related except by pallor, stature, and moustache. I sat down and studied – as you might what’s on television – a couple two tables away.

The food was in a buffet. I had to get up and point. I hadn’t wanted Indian food, but let myself be guided by resemblances. I settled for something akin to chicken curry, except the gravy had vegetables in it.

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The faux cottage gave out an inkling of timelessness and fragility. I couldn’t think that the Turkish had been anxious about a possible invasion. They appeared equally unaffected by the possibility’s disappearance.

‘The Turkish don’t integrate. They keep to themselves,’ said a lecturer at the comparative literature department when I’d asked him why there were so few Turkish students or faculty at the university. While eating the chicken, I thought about the reluctance to let one experience of displacement and relocation be displaced by another.

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