Kaspar, who didn’t have a job but always did have nice things, was always producing expensive bottles of alcohol found at various girlfriends’ apartments. Irmi, too, salvaged treats from her job at the Kaiserhof. Living like this felt familiar to us: we who had lived through the antic strangeness of the Weimar years when we’d all been useless millionaires. Now that money meant something, nobody had any.

Ever since we’d left the Bauhaus I had ceased thinking much about Jenö. Indeed, I would not have thought of him at all were it not for his letter that arrived during November’s transport strike. Usually from our apartment we could hear the horns or the grinding of the streetcars rounding the corners hazardously fast. But not a bus or a tram had left the depot these last few days, and the city’s quietness made the sky bigger; the tram wires idle in the windless days. As Irmi and I had walked to the Kaiserhof we’d seen buses abandoned in the streets, and the sleepers ripped up. No gusts of warm air from the U-Bahn vents, either; only footfall and bicycles on the Möckernstrasse.

Irmi was cheerful this morning. This was a ritual we kept. I’d pick up a new tube of paint, and we’d stop for coffee or even go to a museum, if Irmi’s shift allowed it, and while Charlotte had the studio.

‘I’ve met someone,’ Irmi said, as we walked past stalled buses.

‘That’s great,’ I said, though my words had an odd emphasis.

‘You’ll never guess what he does,’ and before I had a chance to offer a suggestion, ‘He’s an insurance clerk!’

‘But that’s so glamorous!’

‘That’s what I said. Money’s so attractive these days.’ She smiled ironically. Her hair was pulled into a low pony-tail.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Teddy. His mother was American. It’s from Edward. Somehow.’

A light rain came. As we strolled down Wilhelmstrasse under a shared umbrella, Irmi explained how they’d met at Aschinger’s, through a mutual friend who had introduced her, rather embarrassingly, with her full name: Irmgard Annabel Schüpfer, and he’d said ‘Teddy’, and that despite a number of dates, she’d still yet to learn his last name, whereas he went around using her full name as much as he could. ‘He thinks I’ll stick around until I know his surname. He might be right.’

Soon we reached the Kaiserhof. Very near the Reich Chancellery, the hotel was a newish building designed to look old. (A hotel shouldn’t be the Alhambra! A train station shouldn’t be a Scottish castle!) Irmi said she had met almost every politician under the sun drinking there at the end of a long day (bar the Communists, who would only come in to make deals). With the dirt she had, she’d make a good source for any journalist.