And Hans was too old for me. Too old to meet again, anyway. He reminded me of someone, I don’t remember who, but I swear it wasn’t my father. And I felt a bit sorry for him. He sat on the edge of the bed; his legs were very thin, his toenails cracked and yellow. And he had long white hair on his back. He asked me three times whether his white hair bothered me, and the third time I said yes.

The most beautiful of all was Frederik. He was so beautiful I could hardly believe it the first time I saw him. He had big, dark eyes, but when he looked at you it was as if he was just looking in a mirror. I never once saw him laugh. His heart was poisoned, and so was his liver, later on. I don’t think it was the alcohol that killed him. He died of his own poison.

With Ralph it lasted almost two years. He wasn’t a real man – that is, not what people usually think of as one. I liked that. His lack of manliness gave me a strange kind of security. Yet he was a lawyer. The most feared lawyer in town, in fact. At home he lay beside me and buried his thin, mouse-­like face in my arms and was overwhelmed with shame. He said he was ashamed of everything he did and was, ashamed of his very existence. Shame had crept inside him long ago like a fog and had been slowly and steadily corroding his heart ever since. That’s what he said. Out in the world, though, he was different. He took hundreds of people to court, regardless of whether or not they deserved it. In the courtroom they all danced to his tune and he stood there, grinning, and was as tall as the ceiling.

Sigmund would have liked to be a painter. He went through unbelievable quantities of paint, but never sold a single painting. He gave me a watercolour once but you couldn’t make anything out. It was propped against the wardrobe in my entrance hall for ages, then at some point it was gone.

Klaus smelled bad. I think he had stomach problems. He sometimes read to me in the evening from one of his books. If he sat in the armchair by the fire and I stayed at the table, it was bearable.

I wanted to get engaged to Hilmar. Seriously. But he refused to buy rings, so I ended it. He went and picked up one of the dolled-­up waitresses from the Pastry Cook café and married her three weeks later. The two of them pottered around town for years, side by side, like a pair of sad birds. I think he died before her.

Kurt was a dreamer. He had muscles like a bull and his fingernails were always dirty. But his eyes seemed to reflect the sky, presumably even when he was lying under one of his cars (which he usually was).