The last one was a retired policeman who was staying in Paulstadt to wind up his late sister’s affairs. He used to sit in Lehmkuhl’s café in the afternoon and order open-­faced sandwiches. He had a white walrus moustache that caught the crumbs. Our love story lasted less than a week, then his sister’s business was sorted. After he left, we wrote to each other a few times. The last letter I got was from his daughter: I wanted to let you know that our beloved father . . . I’m sure he would have wanted . . . After all, you were . . . etc. There were no more after that.

I’d had a fling with another walrus moustache twenty years earlier. He was staying at the Black Buck for a few days, then he had to go overseas. That’s what he said, anyway. Every morning he would spend half an hour in front of the mirror stroking and tweaking his moustache, which was prodigious and waggled up and down when he spoke. It looked as if a living creature were squatting under his nose. But I would really have liked to see him again. He had nice legs.

Then there was the drawing teacher who suddenly turned weird in the middle of a class, drew a stripe across his forehead in oils and then jumped out of the window. The classroom was on the first floor and he broke both his legs, but there was clearly something wrong with his head, and he left Paulstadt as a screaming king in a white carriage.

And Lennard – he was a romantic. Scattered rose petals on the bed, said nice things about my eyes and forehead and so on. He had a bald head that he shaved every day, dabbing on scented cream and polishing it with a little sponge till it gleamed like a pink balloon.

With Hermann I used to go into the fields. He said he loved the rustling of the corn, but I think there was another reason. He always hummed the same tune on the way back into town. I never found out what it was. I often asked him, but he said he didn’t know, either.

Roland I met in winter. He almost knocked me over on the street. Then he stood there looking down at the ground. Snowflakes clung to his eyebrows. I’m not sure he ever looked me in the eye. I can’t remember what colour his were, anyway. In fact, I can’t remember anything about him except his name and those big, trembling flakes above his eyes. I believe I wiped them away with my fingertips, and that was his undoing.

Most of them, though, I had in summer. I liked it when they sweated, and I liked to smell them. Sometimes, on those warm summer evenings, everything seemed so easy. You could open the windows wide and do it surrounded by the noises of the town.

I don’t like cold feet. Henri’s were very cold. He really made an effort, more than most of the others, but nothing he did could make up for the coldness of his feet. The touch of his toe was an Arctic blast that caught you unawares and instantly turned your body and the bed and the room and the birch tree and the birds and the clouds outside your window to brittle, splintering ice.