You opened the window. Your figure in silhouette. The curtain, billowing for a moment in the draught. The light. It must still have been day. Or had day come round again? When you got up to go to the window, you set my hand down. You didn’t just let go, you placed it on the pillow beside my head, and I breathed my life’s last breaths into my small, deformed hand.

You didn’t like coffee. Coffee doesn’t just blacken teeth but hearts as well, you said in the staffroom. Look around – black-­hearted colleagues, every one of them, creatures of the devil! Some laughed. Most pretended they hadn’t heard. Only Juchtinger, the old maths genius, took you at your word. He threw open the windows and let in the warm air. Enlighten us companions of the dark, he cried, blinking his inflamed eyes at the summer sun.

I lay in bed, listening to the muffled gurgle of the heating pipes in the wall. (So it was winter?) The pain that had clawed at me for so long was now just a faint memory I carried inside. A moment had come when suddenly it was gone, but I knew that this relief only signalled the beginning of the final farewell. There was still a little time, though. And you sat on the edge of the bed and held my hand. And we talked . . .

Come with me, miss! I didn’t catch the irony in your words at first. This form of address seemed perfectly natural to me. I followed you as we walked across the latticed shadow on the asphalt. I could hear our footsteps; the echo bounced back off walls that were reddened by the sun. We walked in silence. Now it occurs to me, though: we did speak again, just before we plunged into the shadow of the entrance hall. Careful, you said. And I said: yes. But what were you warning me about?

Your shape at the window. The slightly slumped shoulders. Your narrow, narrow back. Behind it, even now, your clasped hands. How often have I seen you stand like that? From the day we moved into the apartment, you loved looking down at the street. Sometimes, coming back from afternoon classes or doing the shopping, I could already see you from afar, up there at the window. If I was carrying heavy shopping bags, I would put them down to wave to you. Weichselstrasse 11, second floor. Who would have thought that our first apartment together would also be our last?

We entered the school building, and suddenly you vanished. It must have been my blood pressure; I’d hardly slept the previous night, and I hadn’t eaten anything that morning, and for a few moments I stood in lurching darkness. When I resurfaced, you were already on the big staircase. Without turning to look at me, you ran swiftly up it, two steps at a time. And I followed you. Our footsteps clattered and echoed in the cool silence.