‘Take it,’ Faqrul said. ‘It suits you.’

So I bought it. I didn’t know then it would be indestructible. Styles might change, but German things don’t spoil. We went down to the escalator.

At Peek and Cloppenburg that day I was billed on the third floor and went down to the second to pay. There was a small queue before me; women waiting to finish their purchases. The coat had descended a floor. The parcel was handed over by the cashier.

‘This is like India,’ I said to Faqrul as we departed via the main foyer. Parcels would be left by an emissary, or lowered down by a string in plain view.

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I came to Wittenbergplatz every other day and ate with Faqrul – at the buffet in the Europa Center’s basement. Faqrul sought out basements, or we had tea on a stool on the first floor of a department store from where you could survey the street.

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The food was cheap because the city was bankrupt. The Americans had waited for an invasion: it never happened. As a result, there had been no accumulation of capital.

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You could buy bits of the wall. Faqrul knew those who manned the kiosks between Uhlandstrasse and Wittenbergplatz. The kiosks were like bunkers. Self-sufficient. They displayed key rings, bottles, magazines, cigarettes. Faqrul brandished me to the vendors, as he had in Kreuzberg. The men received me with shy approval; the way bridegrooms are. They were Iranians, Afghans, Bangladeshis. Faqrul always bought, or was gifted, a bottle of mineral water. He would have been well known to them as the poet who’d been thrown out of his homeland. It didn’t look like they minded. In my first month, I pored the fragments of the wall in the kiosks for genuineness. It was fifteen years since the wall had fallen but it seemed there was an inexhaustible supply.

Sometimes we stood near Wittenbergplatz station and had bratwurst or würstchen. It was Faqrul who’d broached the matter. ‘Würstchen,’ he’d said. ‘Chalo, we’ll meet at Wittenbergplatz at 12.30.’ We stood in the sun, our mouths full. I said, ‘This is pork, right?’ – concerned whether he knew. ‘Oh yes!’ He combined a brief laugh with the serious business of chewing. Eating bratwurst was an extension of insulting Allah. He found it delicious on many levels – like a Christian placing the host on his tongue. Blasphemy is a religious experience.

I went to Peek and Cloppenburg again with Faqrul to buy a sweater. ‘Chalo, kadiway jabe,’ he muttered. ‘What?’ ‘Maaney, ka – di – way,’ he said, tilting his head. KaDeWe was next door, looming like a cinema. Faqrul took me straight to the food hall at the top. Sausages hung here, and people served themselves helpings of white or green asparagus. We didn’t eat – we moved and stared.

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