After the Bauhaus, we lived in a small apartment in Kreuzberg, on the eastern side of Berlin. Minus rent, we only had about fifty marks between us, and our life was simple. When we stayed at home and economised, fifty marks was ample; most of the time we scraped through the month with very little. But for all the frigid winters with hardly a lump of coal to see us through the days, I remember these years as ones of joy. To wake in a warm bed with Charlotte Feldekova, happy and naked in my arms, our breath parachutes in the cold air, this was enough to make me think I was one of the uncommon few tipped for happiness.

Our flat was cold in the winters, and the wind came in through the floorboards, and in the mornings the leaves of the spider plant would be frozen stiff. In the summers noise bled from one apartment to the next, so you could hear the flap of Mrs Müller’s washing hanging from the windows, or her yelling at her kids, or the mass stampede of shoes down the staircase as the working day began. The noise of others’ lives always made me think of the stacked balconies of the Bauhaus, but our old school was a palace compared to this. I counted twelve families at least over the four floors of our tenement, and that wasn’t including the lodgers brought in for extra rent.

Next to our building there was a dubious hotel where twig-legged women brought men back from Kurfürsten damm. We could hear the taxis dropping them off, and the lamplighters, cupping the flame, would call out to the girls they knew in a friendly sort of way, and from behind the headboards, if I was still awake, I could hear the whirr of the lift as it dropped off the couple on the floor next to ours, and the laughter from the street transferred to the corridor; and I wondered what had been done in the mirrored space of the accelerating box. Then the lock clicked, the couple were gone, and I’d hold on to Charlotte in the deep feathered bed, warm, drowsy, her loveliness plain on the pillow, thinking: how lucky I am; how lucky, lucky, lucky.

Berlin was so grown-up. It was a hatched city of swaying telegraph wires and buildings, newspaper kiosks and rattling trams, omnibuses creeping along the Invalidenstrasse, neon signs for the cabaret, and everyone dressed very fashionably. We went to the Romanisches Cafe with the Russian intellectuals who’d fled the revolution. When we could afford it, we went to the Scala Casino, where tall men in garish make-up and sequinned ball-gowns provoked the audience, and we’d finish the night with beer and hot rolls at Aschinger’s. Aside from money, we were rich in everything.