The bathroom was almost miraculous. It was wide but long, with a bath and shower. As in a golf course, you felt there was always more to come.

The toilet was a conundrum. I’d never seen anything like it, except in the studio flat. It was mostly a slab, like a dissection table. I decided to acclimatise myself. But I couldn’t bear to sit on it for very long. It stained easily because of the shape, and I started cleaning it as soon as I began using it. I wondered if it was part of an industrial heritage.

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Using that toilet, my first thought was, ‘Oe must have sat here.’ He couldn’t have escaped it. And I felt a kind of empathy and embarrassment thinking of Kenzaburo Oe in this bathroom, seated where I was, of him then going out to the drawing room. Oe had won the Nobel Prize, but this is what it comes back to: our relief at amenities.

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Jonas had told me that Oe had occupied the flat in the late nineties before it began to be assigned to Böll Visiting Professors. He’d spent six months in Berlin at the invitation of the German Academic Exchange Service. I had read one Oe novel – by chance, recently. It was about a man and his brain-damaged son, a seemingly insentient being who’s also a living conscience. It had been mentioned by a relative who himself was terribly bereaved: his son had killed himself. Oe’s novel was, I heard, drawn from life. All this – the relative; Oe’s suffering; my bum touching the seat that Oe’s had rested on – was on my mind in my first days in the flat.

The cell phone rang late in the morning. ‘Hello!’ said the voice. ‘Hello!’ I said. It was like an old-fashioned trunk call. ‘Hello kemon achho!’ I was rapt for a second. ‘Faqrul, aar ki.’ I’d forgotten our conversation. I’d forgotten about the talk last night. ‘We said we’d meet today?’ The reluctance in my silence may have been audible. He was a man who expected reluctance. He had a bridegroom’s thick skin. ‘I was thinking of getting some work done. What is it that you’d like to do?’ ‘Oh, nothing at all! An interview for Deutsche Welle, what else. We will have lunch. I will introduce you to a fantastic place. I will show you two or three fantastic places, but we can start today.’ My suspicion increased. ‘Fantastic place meaning . . . ?’ He brushed me off. ‘You wait and see! I’ll tell you how to get there.’

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He said I should walk to Oskar-Helene-Heim and take the U-Bahn to Görlitzer Bahnhof. I made him spell the name, because the way he said it – ‘gollitza banhoff’ – had me guessing. He was clearly a local. A Bengali local.

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