‘You come to Wittenbergplatz,’ he instructed me.

•

‘Where are you?’ I said on the phone.

He was in front of a self-service tea shop.

‘Will you have tea first, or later?’

‘Later is fine. I’m a bit hungry now, but tea can wait.’

He gestured to me to pause and went in. He came out after five minutes with a doughnut.

‘Hold this,’ he said, handing me the paper bag.

Then he jumped back in at the entrance and said something to a man sitting on a stool, looking out on the street. ‘Bitte, bitte,’ he said, cigarette pointed. What I could overhear – ‘schön’, ‘ach so’, ‘danke’, other words I couldn’t follow – sounded exactly like Bengali.

‘I forgot the lighter at home,’ he chuckled, exhaling smoke.

‘Where’s the place?’ I asked him. I’d eaten half the doughnut.

‘Oh, nearby. Two minutes.’

Two evenings later he took me where, if you walked further up, the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag were visible. The road was bright with lights. Everywhere were flat stones, like rockery on an abandoned shore.

‘These,’ said Faqrul, ‘are to remember the Jews.’ He spoke in an offhand way, puffed up with a sense of accomplishment. In and out we went through the shadows of what was part graveyard, part playground.

‘I was beaten up here,’ he said – again, exuding satisfaction.

‘What? When?’

We paused at a stone.

‘1992. I was wandering around when a bunch of thugs came by. Oi – neo-Nazi . . .’

‘Where did neo-Nazis come from?’ I laughed in dis-belief. ‘Here of all places?’

‘Oi je,’ he said, turning his head towards Brandenburg Gate. ‘They lived not far away. The East was full of neo-Nazis.’

‘What happened?’

A couple walked past, politely looking away.

‘Oi aar ki. One of them said, “Was machst du hier?”’ He let a heavy Bengali cadence embrace the words. ‘Maaney, what are you doing here?’

He bowed and lit a cigarette.

‘I said, “Was geht’s dich an?”’ He mangled the syllables with relish. ‘Maaney, tor ki hoyechhe re? What’s it to you?’

‘What? Faqrul, don’t you know you should ignore people like that? You don’t make eye contact with Nazis, let alone respond to them!’

He ducked, incorrigible, in repentance. His body rocked. Because he was a smoker, the laughter was like a kettle’s hiss. It filled the dark space.

‘They beat me up,’ he said. ‘I remember nothing. When I woke up I was in a police station.’

‘At least they didn’t kill you.’

‘I lost all my teeth.’

‘Your teeth? What are those, then?’ I said, peering at his mouth.

We began to proceed from that faux-cemetery towards Tiergarten.

‘Dentures.’

‘Those teeth aren’t yours?’

‘No.’ Once more, a surge of self-satisfaction. ‘I lost mine in 1992.’

That jacket! A pale green that shone. When I say ‘shone’ I mean a subdued resplendence. Not quite tweedy, but textured, like a surface.

‘What do you think?’ I’d said, admiring my likeness.